East Gone West

(See front cover)

Three hundred cheerful, sociable, well-dressed Chicagoans of the class which, well-off mentally as well as financially, is out to make Chicago a great cultural centre as well as the country's biggest railroad junction, assembled last week in a new million-dollar building on the citified "campus" of the University of Chicago. Henry and Stanley Field, Rufus Cutler Dawes, Thomas Elliott Donnelley, Harold Higgins Swift, et ul., mingled with a learned collection of archaeologists and other scientists. Neatly bespatted, with waxed mustache almost as shiny as his horn-rimmed spectacles, the Egyptian Minister to the U. S., Sesostris Sidarouss Pasha was there, beaming at one & all, and especially at the rosy little man with fluffy white hair and bright blue eyes whose day and party it was, Dr. James Henry Breasted, foremost Egyptologist of the U. S.

The new building is John Davison Rockefeller Jr.'s latest munificence to the University of Chicago. The Oriental Institute is its name and behind it lies an endowment of between twelve and 14 million dollars, the entire income of which is at Dr. Breasted's disposal to pursue and make permanent his life work: the study of the birth of civilization in the eastern end of the Mediterranean Basin.

Happy, beaming Dr. Breasted, congratulated on all sides as the party and speech-making got under way, beamed more brightly when the Rockefeller Foundation's Dr. Raymond Elaine Fosdick paid him this compliment: "If there had been no Breasted there would have been no Oriental Institute, and without an Oriental Institute the story of the rise of man would today be far less vivid and far less complete."

In his own speech Dr. Breasted interrupted an account of the Institute's work to take a rap at "old school theologians" whom he blamed for claiming that man's character was produced by divine inspiration. Bright eyes flashing earnestly behind his spectacles, he declared: "It was the outgrowth of man's own social experience. It sprang out of his own soul, and no outworn theological doctrine of inspiration, no conception of a spotlight of Divine Providence shining exclusively on Palestine, shall despoil man of this crowning glory of his life on earth, the discovery of Character."

Dr. Breasted's Province. From the Persian Gulf up the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, then along the coast of the Mediterranean to Jerusalem lies a great "fertile crescent," skirting the Arabian Desert. By continuing the western tip of this crescent into Egypt to the equally fertile Nile basin, a 3,500-mi. semicircle can be drawn from the Persian Gulf to the upper reaches of the Nile. It is this semicircle that Dr. Breasted has chosen for his field. All along it his expeditions are camped. They include: Luxor, up the Nile, headquarters for all Egyptian explorations; Abydos, lower down; Sakkara and Cairo, at the delta; in Asia Minor, Megiddo, on the Jordan; Calneh, at the Eastern tip of the Mediterranean. Leaving the crescent, an offshoot expedition has settled in Alishar, halfway between the Mediterranean and Black Seas. Inland on the Tigris is the Khorsabad expedition, near the site of Nineveh; down the Tigris in ancient Babylonia, the neighboring expeditions at Tell Asmar and Khafaji. From these strategic points the Oriental Institute can send out small parties to other sites. Thus it has at its finger tips the whole of Asia Minor, the entire Valley of the Nile. From them it has drawn a rich store of knowledge of the civilizations of Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, and of prehistoric man back to the Stone Age.

Sargon's Bull. No great number of Chicagoans, even of the select 300 who attended the Oriental Institute's opening, could begin to comprehend the myriad minute implications of the million-&-one mummies, skeletons, sculptures, potteries, cuneiform tablets and other miscellaneous objects with which the new building was nearly packed. Yet even an early Swift or Cudahy would have understood and taken solid satisfaction from Dr. Breasted's prize exhibit -- a monster, 40-ton stone bull, set up in the main (Egyptian) hall facing the big bronze gates. No U. S. bull was ever like this one, with magnificent wings, a beard, three sets of horns and five legs. But an unmistakable bull it is. Even as U. S. tycoons of a past generation put cast-iron animals on their lawns as symbols of wealth and security, so King Sargon II of Assyria had this stone bull--and another one just like it--placed at the gates of his palace 2,600 years ago to celebrate his conquests and, superstitiously, to ward off evil spirits. Dr. Breasted's sharp-bearded little colleague, Dr. Edward Chiera, dug up both bulls two years ago at Khorsabad on the upper Tigris. The Iraq Government kept one but after much sweating & swearing, an expensive ocean carry, a perilous rail trip, Dr. Chiera got his bull to Chicago. He kept it out on a football field under tarpaulins until the new building was ready. Now, until Chicago decays and disappears and future diggers wonder if Sargon's Bull is a monument to the prehistoric Chicago stockyards, it will stand as a most tangible piece of archaeological evidence, an irrefutable argument for digging into humanity's past.

Rising Line. Dr. Breasted's basic theory, the keynote of all his work, he has stated succinctly: "Man's course is a rising line." Since his student days at Yale he had believed the beginning of man's upward course was in Egypt. The results of his diggings have given him abundant evidence with which to support this thesis, now generally accepted. Along the dry bed of the oldtime First Nile his Prehistoric Survey has found stone implements, first evidence of the appearance of man in Egypt, possibly a million years ago. Before that, Paleolithic man lived in the well-watered area that is now the Sahara Desert. When that region dried up (in the middle of the Old Stone Age) he tied to the Nile Valley.

Into Asia Minor Dr. Breasted has followed his upward-struggling human animal, to uncover layer upon layer of successive towns--"layer cakes of civilization"--over a range of 5,000 years. By this time man had learned to write in cuneiforms, and in cuneiform tablets at Alishar Dr. Breasted brought to light the last remnants of Hittite speech. Meanwhile the Egyptians were going forward, had learned to write on the sides of their cedar coffins. Texts of these writings which the Institute has been translating for nine years, reveal, says Dr. Breasted, "the dawn of conscience." In Sakkara man was learning to paint pictures, facsimiles of which Dr. Breasted considers good enough to hang in his new office. Architecture flourished in Thebes; Dr. Breasted has uncovered a royal palace. In Luxor he found records of the migration of the Etruscans to Italy--Europe's first immigrants. In Asia Minor the Assyrians had built their civilization, Sargon II had raised his great palace, put the two giant bulls to guard it; the Hebrews had made history, Solomon had left his stables for the Institute's diggers to uncover. From Solomon on man's course was rising faster. At his party last week Dr. Breasted read a communication from a man who was known by name to everybody--Xerxes. The Persian expedition had just cabled that it had discovered a marble slab on which Xerxes had written:

"A great god is Ahuramazda, who created this earth . . . that heaven . . . man . . . peace for mankind, who made Xerxes king. . . . My father is Darius. ... He wrought many excellent things. . . . When my father Darius went away from the throne, by the grace of Ahuramazda I became king. ... I wrought many excellent things. . . ."

Happy Hunter. Many excellent things has Dr. Breasted wrought, and his course, too, has been a rising line. In 1894 the University of Berlin had just given him his Ph.D. and he was on pins & needles to get to Egypt. He had just been married, owed his wife a honeymoon. He got the University of Chicago to give him $500 to collect relics and set out full of enthusiasm, no whit deterred by his light purse. With his own money he bought a donkey on which his bride could ride if she grew tired, and set out from Cairo. The more relics he collected the more his wife had to walk, but Bridegroom Breasted tramped all the way and enjoyed it. He had been a runner at school. When he took his relics back to Chicago, President William Rainey Harper made him Assistant in Egyptology--the first chair of Egyptology in any U. S. university.

He was well trained for the job. At the Chicago College of Pharmacy he had got his pharmaceutical degree while trying to decide what to make of himself. After being graduated from Northwestern College he had attended Chicago Theological Seminary. That showed him where his interest lay. He neglected his theology, pored over Hebrew history, learned the language, decided to learn all there was to know about Egypt and the Hebrews. At Yale he got his M.A., would have got a Ph.D. if he had not been so impatient to learn more. It was Professor Harper, then at Yale, who sent him off to Berlin to study under famed Egyptologist Adolph Erman.

By 1905 he was Chicago's Professor of Egyptology and Oriental History, had written several books, ranging from an academic New Chapter in the Life of Thutmose III to the lively Ancient Times and a History of Egypt, which was translated into many languages, including Braille. His hair was growing a little thin above his forehead, but he was ambitious and enthusiastic as ever. He got the University to stake him to another trip to Egypt--this time at the head of a small party. They went 1,000 miles up the Nile through the dangerous rapids of the Fourth Cataract, stayed in Egypt until money ran out. When Dr. Breasted returned he had the seed idea for his Oriental Institute which did not begin to materialize until 1919.

That year he wrote a letter to John Davison Rockefeller Jr., who was director of the General Education Board. Enthusiasm brightened his ink. "The career of early man . . . can now be written out in a much fuller form. The materials out of which we can recover and put together its lost chapters lie scattered among the buried cities of the Near East. This whole region is about to come for the first time under western rule, and for the first time in history the birth lands of religion and civilization lie open to unobstructed study and research. In the entire history of knowledge this is the greatest opportunity . . . for the study of man and his career. . . . The noblest task in the study of man is to recover the story of the human career, which culminated in the emergence of a religion of divine fatherhood and human brotherhood. ..."

Mr. Rockefeller was impressed. Here was a man worth giving a trial. Out of his own pocket he gave $10,000 a year for five years. Dr. Breasted went to Asia Minor. The trip was hazardous. Arabs were in revolt. The first party of white men to cross the Syrian Desert after the War was Dr. Breasted's. When he returned to the U. S., both the General and International Education Boards gave him money. Mr. Rockefeller gave more. Five years ago came endowment by the International Education Board Foundation, and the Institute had come to stay.

Small, neat, at 66 Dr. Breasted is nearly as full of vigor as he was when he bought his donkey. His smile still sends the ends of his silky white mustache curling up wards. He has the unusual faculty of making casual listeners as enthusiastic about digging as he is, has been known to excite even blase newsmen. Ancient kings he has disinterred he refers to as "my friends," jokes about his duty to intro duce them to modern civilization. The shrewdness of his Colonial van Breestede ancestors undoubtedly had been of service to him in raising money for his projects, but he does it unostentatiously, without selfishness--for Science. In his long career he has written 21 books, many papers, is still writing, compiling. He now has seven degrees. In 1929 he was awarded the Rosenberg Medal for his contribution to civilization. He has three children: Charles, 34, executive secretary of the Institute; James Henry Jr., 22, a Princeton senior; Astrid, 17, in boarding school. Son Charles, as energetic as his father, goes to visit all the expeditions every year, traveling mostly by air.

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