half of the early cuneiform texts brought back by sir austen henry layard from nimrud. From this work he published Inscriptions of Assyria and Babylonia (1850) and Outline of the History of Assyria as Collected from the Inscriptions by A.H. Layard (1852). He remained involved with Layard’s collection and oversaw the publication of six volumes of inscriptions between 1861 and 1880.

In 1856, Rawlinson resigned his diplomatic position and returned to England for good to become a member of Parliament. He became a trustee of the British Museum in 1876 and remained one until his death. He continued to be involved in the Royal Asiatic Society and was its president from 1878 to 1881, and he was president of the Royal Geographic Society 1871– 1872 and 1874–1875. Rawlinson helped with the state visits of the shah of Persia in 1873 and 1889 and was a royal commissioner for the Paris Exposition of 1878 and the India and Colonial Exhibition of 1886. He was made a baronet in 1891.

Tim Murray

See also

Mesopotamia

References

Lloyd, S. 1980. Foundations in the Dust: The Story of Mesopotamian Exploration. 2d ed. London: Thames and Hudson

Reinecke, Paul

(1872–1959)

A German pre- and proto-historian and chief curator at the museum in Munich, Paul Reinecke contributed to European archaeology for over fifty years while remaining independent of the influential archaeologist gustaf kossinna and the German cultural-historical school under friedrich ratzel and fritz graebner.

Reinecke’s interests ranged from the Neolithic to Roman provincial archaeology, but he is best known for his studies of and interest in categories of objects, such as metal helmets and fibulae from the late Bronze and early Iron Ages. It was Reinecke who named the later Bronze/early Iron Age period “Halstatt” after the cemetery and mining site excavated in austria on Lake Halstatt. The later Iron Age was named “la tène” after a site in switzerland. Detailed typological analyses of these objects and of funeral rites and rituals of this period enabled him to differentiate between northwestern German and Scandinavian developments and to propose his own southern German Iron Age regional variations.

Tim Murray

See also

Celts; Germany

Reisner, George Andrew

(1867–1942)

George Andrew Reisner was an eminent Egyptologist, a pioneer in the archaeology of nubia and the Sudan, and the organizer of the world’s first archaeological salvage project. He was born in 1867 into a German-American family in Indianapolis, Indiana. A youthful interest in the ancient Near East led him to study Assyriology and Semitic languages at Harvard, where he graduated in 1889 and took a Ph.D. in 1893. He then went abroad for further study in germany, at that time the world center for Near Eastern research. While in Berlin, however, he fell under the spell of the great Egyptologists Adolf Erman and Ludwig Borchardt, who diverted the young American’s interests from the Near East to Egypt. In 1897, he accompanied Borchardt to Egypt and assisted him for two years in the enormous task of cataloging the collections in the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities.

Reisner began fieldwork in 1899 when he led a University of California expedition excavating at Naqa el-Derr in Middle Egypt. In 1903, the expedition transferred its activities to the enormous necropolis of Giza, in the shadow of the Great Pyramids, the area that was the major focus of Reisner’s activities for the rest of his life. When funding from the University of California was discontinued in 1905, Reisner organized the Harvard-Boston Expedition, a joint enterprise of Harvard University and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and remained its director for nearly forty years.

The Harvard-Boston Expedition was originally designed to work only in Egypt, but a development in 1907 resulted in a major enlargement of its focus. The first Aswan Dam (now often called the Low Dam) was then under construction