year, the first museum of its kind in the Near East. As director of the service Mariette was in charge of all the excavations in Egypt, preventing the wholesale pillaging and plundering of sites, and ensuring that the museum began collecting, conserving, and preserving antiquities.

Mariette himself excavated more than thirty-five sites in Egypt over the next thirty years, which included 300 tombs at Saqqara and the clearance of the temples of Luxor, Medinet Habu, Dendera, and Edfu. Despite later criticism by william matthew flinders petrie and george reisner for his unscientific excavation techniques, Mariette’s contributions to Egyptian archaeology were enormous. He published five volumes on Dendera (1875), and a catalogue of finds from Abydos (1880). He helped with the libretto for Verdi’s great Egyptian opera Aida, which celebrated the opening of the Suez Canal. He was succeeded by Gaston Maspero.

Tim Murray

See also

Egypt, Dynastic; French Archaeology in Egypt and the Middle East

References

France P. 1991. The Rape of Egypt: How the Europeans Stripped Egypt of Its Heritage. London: Barrie and Jenkins.

Marr, Nikolay

See Russia

Marshall, John Hubert

(1876–1951)

John Hubert Marshall became director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1902 and relinquished the position in 1928, although he continued to work for the survey in nonadministrative positions until 1934. When the English viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, arrived in India in 1900, he felt it necessary to formulate an integrated archaeological policy on the part of the government of India rather than depending on a few “surveyors” in the provinces for archaeological investigations and the Public Works Department for monument conservation. Curzon chose Marshall as the director-general for the formulation and execution of this policy.

Conservation policy was laid down in an official resolution in 1903 and subsequently incorporated in a manual (Marshall 1923), which still remains the bible of conservators in India. The main emphasis was on the preservation of the originality of the monument. The Ancient Monuments Preservation Act of 1904 empowered the government to acquire nonliving monuments (i.e., monuments not being used for current religious worship) for conservation, to prohibit traffic in antiquities both to and from British India, to provide for keeping antiquities in situ or in site museums, and, finally, to prohibit the excavation of ancient sites by irresponsible persons.

In 1906, the Archaeological Survey of India became a permanent central government department with an elaborate and well-controlled hierarchy of officials, various administrative circles, and a “branch” of epigraphy. What has happened since then is an increase in the number of “circles” and “branches” with consequent changes in territorial jurisdictions and responsibilities. However, the basic pattern laid down by Marshall has remained intact. The work of excavation and exploration was divided among circles, and reports appeared in the survey’s Annual Reports, the publication of which—for the year 1902–1903—began in 1904. There was a well-defined policy regarding the basic research based on the exigencies of Indian conditions and best expressed by Marshall himself:

From the time of its reorganization in 1902 it has been the design of the Department to take in hand the excavation of the great buried cities of antiquity; but, before this design could be carried out, it was deemed advisable to re-examine some of the Buddhist sites which had already been partially uncovered, in order to co-ordinate the results obtained by earlier excavators and to check the often unreliable conclusions which they had drawn. For all practical purposes this part of the program was completed in 1910, by which time much solid work had been done at Charsada, Rajgir, Saheth-Maheth, Kasia, Sarnath, and other spots, and secure foundations laid for operations in another and more difficult field. Then followed the exploration of the town of Bhita, a small and well-defined site near Allahabad. Here, for the first