Gods, Graves, and Scholars by C. W. Ceram

First published:Götter, Gräber, unde Gelehrte: Roman der Archäologie, 1949; illustrated (English translation, 1951)

Subjects: Science and travel

Type of work: History

Time of work: 4000 b.c.e. to 1949

Recommended Ages: 13-18

Locale: Italy, Greece, Egypt, Iraq, and Mesoamerica

Principal Personages:

• Heinrich Schliemann, an archaeologist who discovered Homer’s Troy
• Arthur Evans, a professor of prehistoric archaeology at Oxford University, the excavator of Crete
• Jean-François Champollion, the decoder of the Rosetta Stone
• Howard Carter, an archaeologist who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen
• Paul Emile Botta, the discoverer of the eighth century b.c.e. palace of the Assyrian King Sargon
• Austen Henry Layard, the excavator of Nimrud
• Robert Koldewey, an archaeologist who discovered and restored Babylon
• Leonard Woolley, an explorer of Ur
• John Lloyd Stephens, an archaeologist who recovered the Mayan civilization
• Edward Herbert Thompson, an archaeologist who explored the Yucatan

Form and Content

C. W. Ceram relates the story of archaeology by focusing on the people who made major contributions to the field. He divides his volume into five books: “The Book of the Statues” deals with classical Italy and Greece; “The Book of the Pyramids” treats Egypt; “The Book of the Towers” considers Assyria, Babylon, and Sumeria; “The Book of the Temples” recounts the exploration of Mesoamerica; and the brief “Books That Cannot Yet Be Written” touches on discoveries that were then recent (such as the Dead Sea scrolls, found in 1947) and mysteries still unsolved (such as the Easter Island script).

Johann Wincklemann, whose writings did much to popularize the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum, begins Ceram’s procession of contributors to the study of archaeology. The hero of the first part of this study, however, is Heinrich Schliemann. When Schliemann’s father gave him a book with a picture of Aeneas carrying Anchises out of the burning city of Troy, Schliemann remarked that someday he himself would find that lost city. Thirty-nine years later, he did. Schliemann learned languages easily; he taught himself all the major languages of Europe and then, in 1856, Homeric Greek. In 1869, Schliemann retired from the grocery business a rich man and began his excavations.

Homer’s epics were regarded as myths that were not based on historical fact, but Schliemann believed otherwise. In 1870, accompanied by his twenty-year-old wife, he began digging at Hissarlik, Asia Minor, with a hundred workers, and there he found the ruins of nine cities stacked one on top of another. While his choice for Homer’s Troy—the third city from the bottom—proved wrong, archaeologists have identified the third from the top (labeled VIIa) as the most likely candidate. Schliemann had proved Homer right and the experts wrong.

In 1876, Schliemann turned his attention to Mycenae on the Greek mainland. No one questioned the existence of Agamemnon’s city, but authorities maintained that the king’s grave was located outside the walls of the citadel. Relying on another classical text, by Pausanius (second century a.d.), Schliemann excavated within the citadel and found five graves with fifteen bodies, which he claimed were those of Agamemnon, Cassandra, Eurymedon, and the others killed by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus upon the king’s return from Troy. Again Schliemann erred—the royal tombs that he found predate the Trojan War by about four hundred years—but he was right to claim, “It is an entirely new and unsuspected world that I am discovering for archaeology.”

Ceram tells equally fascinating stories about other great explorers of the ancient world. Like Schliemann, Jean-François Champollion learned languages easily, studying Latin, Greek, Syriac, Chaldean, Coptic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, and Persian. At the age of nineteen, he was named professor of history at the university of Grenoble. In 1822, he published Lettre à M. Dacier relative à l’alphabet des hiéroglyphes phonétiques, indicating how hieroglyphics were to be decoded. Champollion rejected the idea that hieroglyphics were pictographs; he understood that they were phonetic without being strictly alphabetic.

As he tells the stories of the great archaeological discoverers and discoveries of past centuries, Ceram offers capsule histories of the cultures that he discusses. One learns, for example, that the pharaohs built pyramids to protect their bodies after death, so that the protective spirit (ka) and soul (ba) would have a bodily home. The grandiose tombs in fact had precisely the opposite effect. By the beginning of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty in antiquity, most of the pyramids had already been robbed. Even the tomb of Tutankhamen had been entered in antiquity but had been resealed to be discovered by Howard Carter in 1922.

Critical Context

With Gods, Graves, and Scholars, Ceram hoped to do for archaeology what Paul de Kruif’s The Microbe Hunters (1926) had done for microbiology. In this attempt, Ceram was immensely successful: His book was a best-seller. By the time of Ceram’s death in 1972, the work had been translated into twenty-five languages, had become a standard textbook for young adults, and had sold more than four million copies. Ceram also inspired others to offer popular accounts of archaeology, such as Karl E. Meyer’s The Pleasures of Archaeology and Henri-Paul Eydoux’s In Search of Lost Worlds, both published in 1971.

Ceram himself also continued to write about the subject, following up the critical and popular success of Gods, Graves, and Scholars with seven other volumes. Among the most important of these was his second book, The Secret of the Hittites (1956). Ceram had touched briefly on the Hittites in Gods, Graves, and Scholars, placing them in “Books That Cannot Yet Be Written.” As his volume on the subject indicates, by 1947 much already had been discovered about this ancient empire, the rival of Egypt and Syria. As early as 1834, remains of the Hittite culture had been discovered, although not until 1879 did the English Orientalist Archibald Henry Sayce identify the discoveries as Hittite. As in Gods, Graves, and Scholars, Ceram focused on the personalities of the major contributors, telling his story through biography. Ceram did, however, actually visit an excavation, and he writes feelingly of the discomforts that archaeologists endure.

Ceram’s Hands on the Past (1966; published in England under the title The World of Archaeology) allowed archaeologists to tell their own stories. Ceram excerpted seventy-five works, again beginning with Wincklemann, but including Bingham and others who had not been represented in his first book. Because some of the writing is dense, this book has less appeal for young adults, but it is nevertheless an important resource.

The First American (1971) turned to an area that Ceram had previously ignored—the archaeology of his adopted United States. His main concern was with the American Indians of the Southwest, but he also treated the mound builders of the Midwest. As in his earlier accounts, Ceram neatly synthesized the work of others and presented his material in an exciting and accessible form. What C. A. Robinson observed in the Saturday Review of Literature for January 28, 1956, in discussing The Secret of the Hittites, is true for all of Ceram’s writing: Ceram “is an almost ideal popularizer, for he is able to make every page interesting by intimate knowledge of the subject and skill of presentation.”