Archaeological Corpus Project

James Henry Breasted conceived the Archaeological Corpus Project in the early 1930s as an encyclopedic index to the material evidence of the ancient world. Drawing on methods already used by libraries and the great dictionary projects of the period, the Corpus aimed to organize archaeological evidence so that objects, architecture, iconography, and other categories of material culture could be studied comparatively across regions and civilizations. As Breasted explained, “What the (Chicago Assyrian) Dictionary is doing for a language should likewise be done for the whole range of evidence surviving from the ancient oriental civilizations as a whole.” He regarded such an undertaking as one of the most important projects in humanistic research: the surviving evidence had become too extensive for any individual scholar to master, making a systematic means of organizing and comparing it indispensable.

The project took physical form as an enormous card catalog, using the information technology then employed by libraries, dictionaries, and other ambitious knowledge-organizing projects such as Paul Otlet’s Universal Bibliographic Repertory. Its classification system was designed to group evidence by region while applying comparable categories across the ancient Middle East, allowing similar forms and functions to be brought together for study. Supported in part through the Works Progress Administration during the New Deal, the Archaeological Corpus eventually grew to nearly 400,000 cards and photographs. Although the project was never completed, the surviving catalog preserves an extensive hierarchy of archaeological concepts and decades of scholarly effort.

To carry out this ambitious undertaking, Breasted assembled a committee representing the principal ancient civilizations studied by the Institute. Its members included A. T. Olmstead, T. George Allen, Watson Boyes, Edward Chiera, William F. Edgerton, and Arno Poebel, assisted by Institute fellow George G. Cameron as secretary. Later supervisors included Homer L. Thomas (1939–1941), Ann Louise Perkins (1943–1949), and Miriam Lichtheim (1949–1951). Perkins left the project in 1949 for a position at Yale University, after which Lichtheim was invited back to Chicago to succeed her. Both women had earned doctorates from the University of Chicago and went on to distinguished scholarly careers in archaeology and Egyptology, respectively.

The project came to an end in 1951. Miriam Lichtheim later recalled that the Institute’s new director, Karl Kraeling, regarded the Corpus as expendable at a time of continuing financial difficulty and renewed interest in archaeological fieldwork. Funding for the project was cut and resources were redirected toward excavations at Ptolemais in Libya. The decision also eliminated the financial basis of Lichtheim’s research position at the Institute.

Today, the nearly 400,000 cards of the Archaeological Corpus are preserved in archival boxes in ISAC’s Research Archives Library within the Data Research Center. The collection is now being digitized, with images and associated data being incorporated into the Institute’s Integrated Database. This work will preserve a remarkable product of twentieth-century scholarship while making a research tool conceived for the age of the card catalog accessible in a digital environment.