GEORGE FINLAY: GENTLEMAN AND TRAVELLER
To those who have spent time at the British School at Athens (BSA), George Finlay (fig 1) – a nineteenth-century gentleman, scholar and philhellene – is a household name. Since its very early days, the institution has held the ‘Finlay collection’, a rich archive of letters, journals, sketches, antiquities, books and furniture gifted from Finlay’s estate, and very few pass through the BSA without encountering this rich archive in some form or another. Negotiations to take Finlay’s collection began as early as 1896, co-ordinated by Finlay’s nephew and executor, Mr W H Cooke.Footnote 1 The asking price was too great, but after further negotiations, Cooke finally donated it in 1899,Footnote 2 forming the core of the BSA’s first library collection.Footnote 3 Although he died eleven years before the BSA’s foundation, Finlay’s was a story of a British mind enamoured by Greek history and culture, mirroring to a large extent the values of the institution as it still exists today.
Portrait of George Finlay, 1840s. Lithograph: British School at Athens. Reproduced with permission.
The first aim of this paper is to present for the first time two of the best documented episodes from Finlay’s travels as they survive in his archive: a journey to Egypt and Jerusalem in 1845/1846, and two journeys to Switzerland in 1859 and 1868/1869. The broader aim is to compare and to contrast Finlay’s engagements with the Near East and with Northern Europe, in an attempt to understand, through travel, more about Finlay’s intellectual formation, his methodology for exploring the history, archaeology and ethnography of these different places, and the wider context of his social circle.
The life and travels of George Finlay
Finlay was born in 1799 to Scottish parents in Kent.Footnote 4 After studying law at the University of Glasgow and then intermitting further studies at the University of Göttingen, Finlay left for Greece in 1823, where he observed and documented the War of Independence,Footnote 5 and where he became acquainted with Byron, Hastings, Gordon, Cochrane and others. He moved to Greece more permanently in 1825, purchasing property in rural Attica; he would also later buy property in the city of Athens and on Aegina.
Finlay’s intellectual interest in Greece was eclectic and has been described as a ‘magpie mentality’.Footnote 6 That is, first, Finlay had a deep interest in contemporary politics and in the processes of state formation through which Greece was seeing itself in the nineteenth century. He was particularly interested in comparative geopolitical perspectives on the Greek state, offering commentary on early Greece both informally to friends via letter writing and also more formally through regular correspondence with The Times newspaper. Second, Finlay had an interest in the material and cultural history of his adopted home, both in collecting and interpreting objects and bibliography – he amassed a mighty antiquities collection and library, on which see further below – and he spent a large part of his time in Athens learning and researching all manner of ancient and medieval history, inscriptions and numismatics: his commonplace books are a wonderful mosaic of newspaper clippings, quotations, sketches and memoranda to follow-up. Third, and more immediately relevant to the present enquiry, Finlay and his contemporaries were travellers, exploring and documenting their time in and around Greece, northern Europe and the shores of Asia Minor. As an historian, he is known as the author of a number of volumes covering the history of Greece from antiquity to his present day: The Hellenic Kingdom and the Greek Nation (1836), Greece Under the Romans (1844), History of the Byzantine and Greek Empires and History of the Greek Revolution (1861). After his death in 1875, many of these works were re-issued in 1877 as A History of Greece from the Roman Conquest to the Present Time.
Finlay spent his days after the Revolution travelling around and beyond Greece (fig 2), and here are noted the major trips undertaken over fifty years. In the late 1820s Finlay was in Rome and Sicily, taking in some of the sites of the trail of the Grand Tour. Around the same time, and closer to his home in Greece, some of his earliest travels around Attica are recorded in letters to Colonel Leake, with whom Finlay shared an interest in ancient topography and a desire to locate points of interests known then only through the ancient authors, such as the Temple of Artemis at Brauron.Footnote 7 It was during these travels around Attica that Finlay discovered a scientifically significant fossil bed at Pikermi.Footnote 8 The late 1830s were spent travelling around the Cyclades and other islands,Footnote 9 a time when many of the objects in his antiquities collection were purchased. One of Finlay’s first major international trips outside Greece was between 1845 and 1846, to Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. Subsequently, he visited Thessaloniki, Constantinople, Nicaea, Nicomedia and Sinope in 1850, and also a return trip back to England that same year.Footnote 10 In 1853 he went to Rhodes, Kos, Samos and Chios, and in 1854 back to England again (primarily concerning some business of a lost passport). In 1858 Finlay went to Andros, then on a tour around Stelidha, Amaliapolis, Volos, Skiathos and Skopelos. And, finally, in 1859 he made his first trip to Switzerland, somewhere he would return to frequently between 1868 and 1874. This is not an exhaustive list of his travels: his papers, although remarkably rich, are incomplete, and some episodes of his later life are less thoroughly documented than others. Many of the 1850s travels, for instance, are indicated only through simple itineraries, where we lack full narrative accounts.
Map of some of the travels of George Finlay, as documented in FIN/GF/A/14. Map: author.
In some ways Finlay was not dissimilar to the number of British travellers and scholars passing through Greece during the course of the nineteenth century,Footnote 11 but in many other ways he was quite different from this group. Others moving through the Aegean travelled for pilgrimage, as envoys, or for political or military purposes,Footnote 12 and their encounters with antiquity were far more incidental than fully intended. Finlay, as a financially independent scholar and historian, on the other hand, had a more personal interest in travelling and in growing his collections, a closer base too from which he could make for smaller or less-frequented areas more ‘off the beaten track’. And, although participant in the wave of ‘gentleman scholars’ taking to Greece with Pausanias and Strabo in hand to find the ruins of what had once stood in the heyday of antiquity,Footnote 13 Finlay was not afraid to chart new territory. Furthermore, while British travellers of the nineteenth century had been dispatched (or sponsored by learned societies) with some view to report back to those at home and to publish their findings, their routes and their travel advice,Footnote 14 Finlay was his own immediate audience; his travel jottings were written up as itineraries, consolidated notes and draft tracts in his own papers, but very seldom published. Observations that Finlay made during his travels would eventually filter through into his published works on the ancient and contemporary societies of Greece and adjacent lands, but this was a much longer term project than to immediately publish narratives of the travels themselves.
Exploring Finlay’s travels is important for uncovering more about his character and motivations, a lifetime of which there is not yet a complete biography. This article, then, aims to bring Finlay further into focus by looking from an angle not yet considered. From what has been written previously on his life and times, Finlay offers a few autobiographical notes in A History of Greece from the Roman Conquest to the Present Time, which, to a large extent, cover only his revolutionary activities.Footnote 15 Finlay’s papers as they came to the BSA were catalogued by Joan Hussey from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s and later published as the Finlay Papers: a catalogue in 1973, with a narrative of Finlay’s life written by the same author two years later on the hundredth anniversary of his death, and providing the most full account of his life to date;Footnote 16 this work expanded on briefer commentaries written by Alan Wace and by William Miller.Footnote 17 Among his contemporaries, Finlay’s impact in publication was limited, his collection consulted by only a few scholars during his lifetime,Footnote 18 and a tract that he wrote on the nature of Greek prehistory (on which, see further below) followed into obscurity until its republication in the early 2000s.Footnote 19 Groups of material have been published on Finlay’s collection, both soon after his death and more recently.Footnote 20 Work in the past few years on the cataloguing, study and exhibiting of his objects has aimed to bring to attention his interests in prehistory that are less obvious from his published works,Footnote 21 while the intellectual and revolutionary contexts of his work have also found recent attention,Footnote 22 particularly in light of the biennial celebrations of Greek Independence.Footnote 23 Finlay’s travel, by contrast, have not yet been subject to separate enquiry, even though reference to his journeying and observations (mainly fairly locally around Attica) has been made as part of broader site-level or thematic studies.Footnote 24
FINLAY IN CAIRO AND JERUSALEM: TOURISM AND SOCIAL COMMENTARY
Finlay arrived in Cairo on 24 October 1845, having travelled by steamer with the Egyptian Transit Company from Smyrna together with a group of ‘English travellers destined for Alexandria and Suez’ (fig 3). On their first night in Cairo, they were in company at the presentation of a portrait of Queen Victoria to Mohammed Ali, after which Finlay and the others present were invited to a dinner hosted by the Pasha on 27 October. He departed on 10 November for a thirty-three-day tour of Upper Egypt, returning to Cairo just in time to witness the marriage of Ali’s daughter to Riamil Pasha, with festivities beginning on 18 December. These events are recorded in Finlay’s journal ‘Account of a visit to Egypt, 1845’.Footnote 25
Sketch of some of the routes taken by Finlay during his time passing through Cairo and Jerusalem. Image: author.
Finlay left Cairo on 22 January 1846 for tours along the Nile and to Wadi Tumilat, the Suez Canal, Fayoum and Lake Moeris, before returning to Cairo on 11 February and subsequently departing Egypt altogether on 24 February 1846. He arrived in Jerusalem sixteen days later, on 12 March.Footnote 26 Finlay completed most of his site-seeing within the first five days or so in Jerusalem, and the rest of his time was taken up with old and new friends. He took a brief visit to the Dead Sea and Jordan on 18 March (also stopping at Bethlehem, and returning to Jerusalem on 21 March), before departing a few days later for Beirut via Mount Carmel; he then travelled onwards to Damascus. He was back at Beirut by 16 April, and then onwards to Alexandria. The first part of his journey is well documented in two journals,Footnote 27 but the journey from Jerusalem onwards was documented in a much more cursory fashion (hence the decision to focus on the first part of the tour for the present paper).
The beginnings of (Biblical) tourism
Finlay’s trip coincided with the beginning of a nineteenth-century fashion for travel in the Near East, a ‘“Voyage en Orient” [that] progressively replaced the Grand Tour in the minds of some European travellers, writers, and artists’.Footnote 28 In some senses, this was the beginning of tourism proper in the region, travel not undertaken to document or discover hitherto unwritten lands,Footnote 29 but – as the rapid production of numerous handbooks advising travellers in this region testifiesFootnote 30 – for recreation.
Mass tourism was, in fact, something that Finlay detested. First and foremost, it was the tourists themselves he disliked. Finlay’s journey into Egypt began on board a steamer run by the Egyptian Transit Company that was bringing casual tourists all the way from England; ‘locusts’, as Finlay described them, and ignorant of the intellectual pursuits of travel. Second, although passions to travel to the region were inspired by the efflorescence of travel writing published at that time,Footnote 31 Finlay took direct issue with some of these accounts.Footnote 32 A letter written to Colonel Leake on 26 August 1846 (from Syria, part of the journey not otherwise recorded in Finlay’s notebooks) indicates that Finlay took with him the guidebook of ‘Sir G W’,Footnote 33 Sir John Gardner Wilkinson’s Modern Egypt and Thebes,Footnote 34 the ‘Murray handbook’ for Egypt. Finlay, in his letter to Leake, was scathing of the guide’s inaccuracies: the copy that he took to Egypt survives in the library collection of the BSA,Footnote 35 variously annotated correcting Wilkinson’s distances as measured between different sites and improving on his descriptions of where precisely various inscriptions were located upon monuments. Finlay also likely had in hand Leake’s own Journal of a Tour in Asia Minor, a volume that was sent to Finlay by Leake in February 1843.Footnote 36 This he lightly annotated, too, but in a far less aggressive fashion.
With the florescence of travel writing concerned with the Near East taking off more significantly from the end of the 1840s, what did these texts encourage their readers to visit? One attraction of the area was certainly for biblical tourism. European travellers had long visited Jerusalem and its environs since the medieval and early modern periods,Footnote 37 but to do so was most usual as part of a pilgrimage. Secular travel began to take the place of pilgrimage as the major vehicle for European travel to Jerusalem in the nineteenth century,Footnote 38 in large part thanks to the weakening of the Ottoman Empire and to an increasing influence of Western powers.Footnote 39
Finlay’s travels, although undertaken just before these manuals appeared in the market en masse, appear to have taken some interest in this new fad, as his itinerary around both Cairo and Jerusalem was punctuated by churches and sites of Old Testament history. He lists, for instance, that on his first day in the city (after taking a Turkish bath to refresh himself after the journey – ‘neither the service nor the linen was any good’) he visited the Port of Bethesda, Shepherd Gate, Golden gate, Tomb of the Virgin Mary, the Garden of Gethsemane, the Mt of Olives and, finally, the tomb of St James and church of the Holy Sepulchre. Read fairly literally, though, Finlay’s papers might indicate some level of disengagement with these biblical points of interest, or with other monuments of cultural intrigue. That is, he merely lists or ‘checks off’ many places that he visits without a jot of description or reflection, almost as if he was going through the motions to see the places that were fashionable to see, rather than to deeply experience and document. Finlay was hardly a romantic, not in the breed of other contemporary travel writers who would wax lyrical on monuments that they saw or sketch idealised visions of ruins perched within pastoral landscapes.Footnote 40 He did not even consider himself a traveller, drawing comparison in his notes between those who undertook more scientific investigations and his more casual ventures.Footnote 41 But this is too harsh an assessment, and there is evidence that Finlay did, in fact, set out with the goal of writing a full travel journal, but that his plans changed. The front of the notebook kept throughout his travel in Egypt is entitled ‘Personal notes and general reflections’ [of an account of a visit to Egypt, 1845], but where the original title of the notebook would have been ‘Personal narrative’, the word ‘narrative’ has been struck through (fig 4).Footnote 42 That is, although he maybe did set out with the goal of writing a full travel journal, ultimately he could not keep up with the level of documentation, and his notes became a brief (and perhaps disconnected) series of thoughts rather than a continuous story. In addition, we have evidence from outside his travel journals. There is a notebook in Finlay’s collection entitled ‘Topography of Jerusalem’, possibly compiled before Finlay undertook his trip.Footnote 43 This document is the result of book research, presumably from his own library in Athens: an illustrated and coloured map of Jerusalem and its points of historical interest (fig 5) is followed by a set of relevant historical primary sources relating to the city’s topography, collated first by author and then rearranged chronologically. As just one illustrative example, Finlay’s text begins with the itinerary of the ‘Bordeaux pilgrim’ (ad 333), with cross references in the margin to Josephus, the gospel of Matthew and the book of Psalms, guiding the reader through the first baths and churches encountered in the city. By preparing these and other such notes, Finlay was preparing intellectually for his visit, mapping out where he needed to go; so, in some respects, he did not need to record what he saw as he went, as it was more important to experience than to replicate in his own notes what he had already found in the library.
Title page of ‘Personal notes and general reflections’, indicating a change of title by Finlay. Image: British School at Athens, FIN/GF/A/12/005. Reproduced with permission.
Annotated plan of Jerusalem, with points of interest to be visited marked. ‘Topography of Jerusalem’. Image: British School at Athens, FIN/GF/A/11/005. Reproduced with permission.
Social tourism and ethnography
Finlay’s real interest was in documenting the people that he saw, and so much he noted in a memorandum written in his ‘Topography of Jerusalem’:
Ancient history resembles biography, it is the record of the work of individual men; medieval of government corporations and classes; modern of the public opinion of a homogeneous society.
He clearly conceptualised his role while travelling as that of the modern historian, charged with an ethnographic interest for recording social history and the people he met; and nowhere is this clearer in Finlay’s narrative than in his extended passages observing what happens at the meeting of Mohammed Ali, at the marriage of the Pasha’s daughter. Finlay’s description of the Pasha’s reception is detailed, setting the scene of the reception chamber abuzz with the chatter of diplomats and travellers and then zooming in on slow-motion to give a careful description of Ali himself: ‘clad in the simplest manner with his insignia as Pasha there was something patriarchal of this powerful prince entering nearly alone with open doors ready to receive every one of his subjects.’ His descriptions of the wedding processions of the end of December are equally vivid, focusing on the fabrics of the ladies as they danced and the light and the spectacular light-show in illuminating the citadel with innumerate lamps. There are flashes here of Orientalism and a fascination at a world so unlike his own.Footnote 44 Similarly, in undertaking his thirty-three-day tour to Upper Egypt, Finlay, even though he admits that ‘a volume may be written by any man who ascends the Nile, for every step in Egypt is amidst wonders in every branch of human knowledge’, offers only very basic visual description or opinion on monuments and places seen, but he writes more extensively on society and people:Footnote 45 on the problems of Mohammed Ali’s administration for destroying antiquities, and on how tempting it is to build unwieldy private collections.
These thoughts stayed with Finlay even after this travel in Egypt was over. Upon returning home, he compiled a draft tract to synthesise his thoughts called ‘Egypt. The social and political condition of its inhabitants’,Footnote 46 writing up the sociological observations of his trip and linking them to a wider historical framework. Notably, Finlay’s narrative begins with Alexander the Great and traces a line between what he calls ‘the principles of humanity and philanthropy’ with which Alexander ruled straight to formation of the modern state in the Near East.
Finlay’s programme in Cairo and Jerusalem was just as punctuated with social connections. In Egypt, he was variously in the company of a Mr Paton and a Mr Edmett. Travelling as a group, there was certainly some safety in numbers, and particularly for members of this unworldly upper class: Finlay appears to have been aware of the dangers of travelling in the Near East, and his packing list ominously listed the requirement of spears and pistols as precaution against thieves and bandits on the road.Footnote 47 With Mr Paton, during Finlay’s tour to Fayoum he had in his employment one Achmet, whose job was the protection of the group, staying awake most nights at the camp to guard the tent. Pitching camp on 24 January during their journey along the Nile, Achmet passed off Mr Paton to the locals as ‘a man looking for coal, and Finlay as his Doctor’, as he feared for their safety that night. On another occasion, Mr Edmett relayed information from the Consul: ‘by no means to think of crossing the desert from Cairo as he was sure to be robbed.’ If it were not for these dangers of the region, though, it is perfectly possible that Finlay would rather have travelled alone, as he often expressed frustration at his travelling companions. On 23 March, from Jerusalem he was fed up and parted ways with his then travelling companions Mr Beldam and Captain Wells because ‘they see nothing and Mr Beldam deafens one with the excruciating nonsense he talks and the absurdly ignorant conjectures he makes …’. And not just on the road, but off the road, too, Finlay’s days were filled with people, with friends and with social engagements. Again, a fairly literal reading of his journals would indicate that he spent more times enthralled by these social circles and perhaps doing more in the way of networking than of sight-seeing. Once he arrived in Jerusalem in March 1846, Finlay saw most of the major tourist spots in the first days with Mr Edmett, these briefly documented but the schedule of teas and lunches that they took together more fully recorded; the same with Mr Beldam and Mr Vane on 14 March, an elaborate dinner with Mr Newbold and Mr Edmett on 19 March after bathing in the Dead Sea, and on 21 March Finlay took coffee and talked of old acquaintances with Revd Mr Douglas Veitch, the late Bishop’s chaplain, with whom he had studied together at Glasgow College. This social networking was certainly an important aspect of Finlay’s travelling, both in finding safe passage between his points of interest and more generally too in charting a suitable route through a region not yet fully covered in the guidebooks and trails of the day. People were at the centre of Finlay’s world, and they were the key to how he navigated the world at large. It is thus unsurprising that the pages of his travel notes are filled with the exploits of people, both those familiar to him and new acquaintances.
FINLAY IN SWITZERLAND: THE BEGINNINGS OF PREHISTORY
In contrast to the pre-planned tour of Cairo and Jerusalem, Finlay appears to have travelled to Switzerland quite by accident. The story begins, as far as is reconstructable, in 1859, with a mysterious illness that was never fully diagnosed but which would recur throughout the final fifteen years of his life.Footnote 48 Complaining of ‘general lassitude, heaviness of the head, oppression of the stomach and kidneys, retention and frequency of urine which makes a yellow deposite’,Footnote 49 Finlay had taken to Vichy in southern France to visit the thermal baths.Footnote 50 What exactly happened next is not entirely clear, and there appear to be gaps in his notes throughout most of the 1860s. This is probably because of the illness itself, and that his papers had contained personal information relating to the illness that he was experiencing: it is suspected that Finlay’s papers were ‘cleansed’ after his death, possibly first by his wife and, second, by the governess of the house, removing much personal information since none has ever been found in his collection.Footnote 51
What is known, though, is that after a month and a half at Vichy, Finlay began to return to Messina in Italy to catch the steamer back to Athens, stopping at Switzerland on the way. He spent the latter part of August and September riding on the trains around Switzerland, commenting on the natural landscape and the lakes. He was introduced to various persons of the College of Geneva, making connections with the learned society there. As reported in his journal on 1 September, he was spending these days copying up his history of the Revolution, and he finished the section on Navarino while in Switzerland. On 15 September Finlay visited Unterseen, and he simply wrote that he ‘[w]alked about and visited Dr Uhlmann’s collection of antiquities of the ancient people who lived in the period before the discovery of the arts of employing metal’.Footnote 52 This is a somewhat poignant line that refers to Finlay’s first engagement with Swiss prehistory, a subject that would capture his attention for much of the final decade of his life.
Almost ten years later, in 1868, Finlay returned to Switzerland.Footnote 53 His health was failing, and it appears that he was by this stage making an almost annual pilgrimage to the baths at Vichy. On 15 July he stopped at Lausanne, where, when crossing the street, he was recognised by a Mr Wuest, with whom he had become acquainted on a previous visit.Footnote 54 Wuest, knowing of Finlay’s interests in history, introduced him three days later to Ferdinand Keller, ‘whose work on the prehistoric remains found in the Swiss Lakes is well known and [he] visited the Museum of Antiquities’. Keller had discovered the first evidence of Neolithic material culture at Ober Meilen on Lake Zürich in 1854, quickly publishing a reconstruction of a house on wooden stilts that captured the local and international imagination (fig 6). He continued to work on excavations there and began a series of new projects along the various Swiss lakes in search for similar sites of antiquarian interest.Footnote 55 Finlay, Wuest and Keller met up almost every day between mid-July and mid-September, sometimes to discuss the findings from the Swiss lakes, sometimes just socially. Keller introduced Finlay to other contemporary scholars, including Jacob Messikommer (land owner and director of excavations at Robenhausen), who showed him his collection of stone tools. On 7 August Keller and Finlay went together to the lakes to ‘fish’ for antiquities,Footnote 56 and a month later Finlay was invited to the Society of Antiquaries in Zurich, where he listened to Keller, the president, deliver memoirs on his recent finds. On 13 September Finlay purchased from Messikommer antiquarian objects from the recent excavations at Robenhausen, ‘a fine serpentine axe, a hafted chisel, a large bodkin with hole, a stag horn honer and a scraper’.Footnote 57 Two days later, Messikommer raised the prices on all his antiquities, probably because of Finlay’s ‘liberality or gullibility’. The irritated Finlay bought nothing else from Messikommer for his collection.
Interpretative reconstruction of the Lake Dwellings, by Keller. Image: Keller Reference Keller1854, pl 1, fig 4.
Maps of Switzerland from Finlay’s map collection are annotated with various routes around Switzerland (fig 7), and presumably these sketches fill the gap of where text is more silent regarding Finlay’s journeys.
Annotated map of Switzerland, from Finlay’s rare maps collection. Image: British School at Athens, D 20. Reproduced with permission.
‘Lake-dwelling fever’ and collecting prehistory
Once again, Finlay’s travels took him to places that were in fashion with high society and in the contemporary scholarly interest. In the mid-nineteenth century, news of the discoveries from the Swiss lake villages (‘lake-dwelling fever’) started to reach the international community,Footnote 58 and Finlay’s time spent in Switzerland put him front and centre of those new discoveries, one of the first people to be toured around the sites and shown new artefacts. The news had certainly reached the Athens scholarly community, where it is possible that Finlay would have heard exchanges about the happenings in Switzerland. Christos Tsountas was well aware of the findings from northern Europe, and a generation later would make extensive comparison between the prehistory of the Mediterranean and of northern Europe.Footnote 59 It is possible that these conversations were already beginning to circulate in Finlay’s own day.Footnote 60 That is to say, Finlay’s interest in travelling and returning to Switzerland should not be surprising if we consider, once again, that he was liable to follow the trends of the day.Footnote 61
In 1869, though, Finlay’s engagement with Switzerland evolved from just ‘following the trend’ to a more serious and scholarly one. That year, he visited Switzerland once again on the way back from the baths, but was taken ill in mid-September: ‘[he] was attacked on [his] return to the Hotel at 12 with violent pains in the chest. [He] lay down for a doctor and in two hours vomited a great deal of bile. The pains then descended to the stomach.’Footnote 62 Finlay took to bed and, to pass the time, read tracts from John Evans,Footnote 63 who had recently published extensive thoughts on stone tools.Footnote 64 Towards the end of 1869, Finlay published his own limited-run tract on ‘Observations on Prehistoric Archaeology’, presenting stone finds from Switzerland and Greece and arguing that they shared a common history.Footnote 65 Finlay acknowledged in the opening lines of his manuscript that the real development of prehistoric archaeology had taken place in Denmark, Switzerland and France ‘in the most recent years’. His collecting of stone pieces all around Greece, he noted, provided strong evidence for a stone age in Greece itself, something that he hypothesised could be found through excavation of lake contexts similar to those of Switzerland; Finlay’s suspicions have, of course, been proved correct in the discovery and excavation of similar sites in northern Greece, notably at Dispilio. This was an interest of Finlay’s that really took root properly through his travels in Switzerland. Although these ideas did not circulate very widely at all, Curtis Runnels, in his comments on this tract, considers awarding Finlay the honour of ‘Greece’s first prehistorian’, based on some of the serious thinking indicated within the tract.Footnote 66
The social network that Finlay developed in Switzerland and the mentorship of people such as Evans and Keller certainly helped to steer Finlay’s thoughts, but this was not entirely new. Finlay had always had a deep interest in prehistory, and his time in Switzerland simply permitted him to develop this interest further, rather than to take up a whole new academic field. The best evidence for this concerns the above-mentioned episode from much earlier in Finlay’s life, back in November 1836 when he had discovered the fossil bed at Pikermi. Among the finds was the remarkable specimen of a Miocene hipparion mandible (fig 8) and the partial maxilla of a rhinosauros.Footnote 67 Finlay began to raise funds for further explorations at Pikermi, but he never returned to work at the site, and it was in 1853 under the direction of Herakles Mitsopoulos that the University of Athens began their own campaigns on the fossil bed. Finlay was clearly excited by the prospect of discovering a site of deep history: he presented his finds almost immediately to the Natural History Society of Athens, and thereafter wrote in February 1837 to Charles Lyell of the Geological Society in London, effusive with excitement.Footnote 68 He remarked in particular on the extraordinary size and preservation of the fossils, and also commented on the nature of the red clay beds in which the specimens were found.Footnote 69 There was, in Finlay’s writing, a real excitement at what had been found, and a particular interest that the specimens unearthed dated from a time before literate history.
‘Hipparion mandible with teeth’, found by Finlay at Pikermi, 1836. British School at Athens, MUS.V001. Photograph: author.
The experiences in Switzerland then spurred Finlay to re-engage with the subject of (Greek) prehistory more seriously. Not only in the observations that he made in his limited-run tract, but also in the habits of his collecting. Among the various antiquities collected throughout his life, Finlay had begun a collection of prehistoric stone tools and chipped stone, a collection which, according to his ledgers, grew almost exponentially in the years following 1868 and the first big visit to Switzerland. Of 730 specimens in his collection, around 150 come from the last few years of his life: the latest acquisition date recorded is 1874, a year before Finlay’s death.Footnote 70 He was purchasing stone tools at this time from Greece and also much more widely, as his interests in European and even global prehistory were growing. These objects included a splayed axe from the Tajo river at Toledo, purchased by Finlay’s cousin, Alexander Struthers Finlay, in a jeweller’s shop shortly after it had been unearthed in 1872 and sent to Finlay in Athens in 1873. Another piece, from Bethanga, Australia, was sent by his cousin Campbell Finlay in 1873; and there were other items sent by John Lubbock from Norfolk and Suffolk in 1872.Footnote 71 Finlay had begun to synthesise some of these thoughts by assembling comparative material in his collection (fig 9), attempting to illustrate some of the ideas that he had put forward in his tract about comparative material culture from Greece and from elsewhere. He died before many of those thoughts matured, though, or before he had published on them to any great degree.
‘Jade stones from Switzerland and Greece’, comparative material assembled by Finlay. The stones from Switzerland were purchased at Robenhausen from Jacob Messikommer. British School at Athens, MUS.L516–521. Photograph: author.
TRAVEL, SCHOLARSHIP AND SOCIAL NETWORKS
What can we learn of Finlay based on these two separate episodes, for travels undertaken at different stages of life for different reasons? Finlay had a clear intellectual engagement with the worlds that he encountered, but these were both different types of encounters and his thoughts recorded and preserved in different ways. For Cairo and Jerusalem in 1845 and 1846, Finlay was historian and ethnographer, a social commentator on the world that he saw so different from his own. This particular journey Finlay did not keep systematically in a journal, but glimpses of his travels can be gleaned from his letters, his library notes and some of his later publications. Papers from the latter part of this journey either are not preserved or Finlay did not take as continuous notes when he moved onwards from Jerusalem. For Switzerland of the 1860s, Finlay was a culture historian, involving himself in contemporary debates on the nature of prehistory. The irony is that Finlay almost came to this topic by accident: it was through a series of chance encounters that his world became entangled with that of Keller, Messikommer and others. These trips to Switzerland rekindled an intellectual interest that stretched back to his earliest days in Athens, and Finlay began to devote more of his time to the study of prehistory, on connecting what he saw in Switzerland back to Greece. Unfortunately, though, the full story of this decade is obfuscated by the looming shadow of Finlay’s mysterious illness, and any weeding of his papers from this particular episode.
Two common patterns are particularly interesting of these travels, and they help to shed light on his character. The first is that Finlay was moving with the times. His trip to Egypt and to the Holy Lands was likely motivated by the publication of guidebooks such as those of Leake and Wilkinson, the latter of which was published just two years before Finlay travelled in this area. Finlay was just ahead of the curve of the first organised tours to this part of the world and of the florescence of travel publication that followed, but he was still very much swept up in a trend of the days as it developed. In Switzerland, too, Finlay was moving with the times. Keller had already published his first images from the lake excavations five years previous when Finlay first arrived from Vichy in 1859 and, once he returned in 1868 on more regular trips, ‘lake-dwelling fever’ had well and truly hit the international press. This was the background for Finlay to re-acquaint himself with ideas that he had been turning over in the late 1830s, and his was one of the first English-language publications to deal with a three-age system of Greece, and of considering shared prehistory of northern and southern Europe. The ideas themselves were a step ahead of their times and would take another generation to reach the mainstream of scholarship. One wonders how far Finlay’s thoughts would have developed had he lived just one more year and seen the announcement of the excavations at Mycenae by Heinrich Schliemann.
The second pattern is about people. For both of the extended travels discussed, it was the personal networks of Finlay that were of paramount importance. It was social engagements, old friends and introductions to learned societies that guided Finlay through his travels in both the 1840s and 1860s. In the case of Cairo and Jerusalem this might have been something of a necessity in navigating an unfamiliar and potentially dangerous land, and at times the need to network and to take on unfamiliar travel companions irritated Finlay to breaking point. In Switzerland, however, social networking opened up a whole new intellectual world. In Switzerland Finlay found intellectual and academic mentors who guided him towards material and ideas, whereby his peers took him to visit sites and to visit private collections. Finlay had been something of an oddity back in 1838 in suggesting that the ‘Persian arrowheads’ he had found were somehow objects of prehistory that could be of similar antiquity to the fossils he had found two years previously, and much of his thinking on this matter appears to have paused at that time (no doubt his mind was full with other things, as he progressed to write his history of Greece in subsequent decades). The networks he found in Switzerland allowed him to return to, discuss and publish some of his further thoughts in a way that he had not for thirty years – and the connections that he had made were key to this.
On this ‘people pattern’, it is worth reflecting further on Finlay’s world. That is, that the experiences of George Finlay are well situated within a broader pattern of nineteenth-century social and intellectual networks that were crucial to the formation and advancement of knowledge at that time. Networks of collaborating scholars and curious minds, some of them based around learned societies or other institutions, existed outside the formal settings of universities and across national boundaries, networks that were crucial to the free flow of ideas and information, for stimulating and transmitting research.Footnote 72 In some senses, Finlay played a particular role during the formative years of Greece’s post-revolutionary intellectual development by connecting local networks both back to the UK and to a wider international scene. This is, for instance, evident in the division of his stone tool collection to be sent to institutions in Greece, the UK and also across northern Europe.Footnote 73 In other ways, Finlay’s ‘magpie mentality’ is perfectly representative of how the knowledge these networks collected transcended disciplinary classification.Footnote 74 For Finlay, collecting fossils and prehistoric stone tools alongside coins and Greek fine vases was not at issue, as these were all ‘curiosities’ that could be curated. That is, Finlay and his correspondents were merely interested in learning more about the world around them in the most general sense and took less interest to pigeon-hole knowledge to specific specialisms. Quite characteristic of this mentality is that Finlay’s notes on the social and political character of Cairo and Jerusalem move so swiftly between ancient and medieval history to contemporary observation that it becomes apparent that for Finlay these matters, although to us the preserve of different disciplines, were to him all part of the same enquiry: there were not different classes of knowledge, but only knowledge itself.Footnote 75
Finlay’s story is not just representative of these networks, but illustrative too of how such groups formed and survived. In some senses, nineteenth-century intellectual networks reflected existing power structures of wealth and status,Footnote 76 requiring one to be the right person in the right place at the right time; but, in other ways, these networks relied on the mutual trust of their members and on visibility and active participation. A ‘gentleman’s code’ of truth-telling and honour was essential to the operation of informal knowledge exchange networks,Footnote 77 but Finlay’s story offers a rare glimpse into these rules breaking down. When Finlay suspected that Messikommer was raising the prices of his antiquities out of the former’s ‘gullibility’, we observe the consequence that Finlay stopped using Messikommer to build his collection. The network – robustly built over a number of years, over return visits to Switzerland and involving a number of key actors in the contemporary academic sphere – did not fall apart because of this distrust, but there were (at least short-term) consequences, expressed in Finlay’s notes as a frustration with and suspicion of Messikommer. Trust also underpinned the introduction of scholars;Footnote 78 that to enter this arena of scholarly networks one required either a personal introduction or a letter.Footnote 79 Finlay was part of that world, both receiving letters from correspondents such as Leake, who sought the introduction of his nephew to networks in the Near East, and relying in person on Wuest, Keller and others to help him make his way in Switzerland. That is, in playing by these rules and using connections to gain access to such social networks, Finlay and his contemporaries sought informal ways to verify who might become participant to the group, almost controlling the quality of information exchanged. One route to these introductions was, of course, visibility. In announcing his findings of the Pikermi fossils at the Society of Natural History, or merely making appearances alongside Keller at the Society of Antiquaries in Zurich, Finlay became a known and trustworthy character to participate in these august circles. This was a reputation that he could develop and maintain, too, not just in person but through his extensive letter writing and correspondence with key figures of the day such as Evans and Lubbock. That is to say, Finlay’s story is a neat textbook case study of the nineteenth-century gentleman navigating networks of scholarship, exchanging ideas and thoughts and seeking to make his own contributions.
In some senses Finlay was not remarkable. He travelled where others would go, he did not publish significant travel literature of his own and his contribution to the scholarship of prehistory was limited and short-lived. But while he himself might not have been exceptional, his archive is: what is remarkable is the state of preservation of the Finlay papers. The richness of the material and the vast nature of the collection permit one to peer into Finlay’s world and to understand what was important to gentlemen of this class, to the privileged access to certain social circles that they enjoyed. Travel, scholarship and social networking were all variously entangled, both more generally in the world of the late nineteenth-century travellers and here in the world of George Finlay.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my thanks to Elizabeth Key Fowden for the invitation to her workshop ‘Trans-Aegean migration, materiality and memory’, where a version of this paper was first presented, to all workshop participants for their kind and encouraging comments and to Elizabeth and to Tim Whitmarsh for the warm hospitality and congenial atmosphere during the event. Much of this material was studied during lockdown at the BSA during my tenure as assistant director. I am grateful to the BSA and to Amalia Kakissis, BSA archivist, for facilitating my further study of additional material on a return visit, for help in acquiring image permissions and for thoughts offered on a draft of this paper. The exhibition on which research for part of this paper was based was co-curated with Debi Harlan, to whom I express most sincere thanks for our smooth and productive collaboration and for many interesting chats on Finlay and his world. Other contributors and advisors to the exhibition included Jed Atkinson, Rebecca Bennion, Amy Bogaard, Christina Koureta and Esther Laver; the platform for viewing the virtual exhibition was built with Hallvard Indgjerd, developing the work of Chavdar Tzochev. Thanks are due, also, for further conversations on nineteenth-century travel with others, including Yannis Galanakis and Seb Marshall. This work was completed during a period of research funded by The Leverhulme Trust, ECF-2022-015.
ABBREVIATIONS AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abbreviations
- BMJ
-
British Medical Journal
- BSA
-
British School at Athens
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