Online Photographs: Breasted's 1919-1920 Expedition to the Near East

 [First posted in AWOL 26 May 2010, updated 23 March 2014]

Breasted's 1919-1920 Expedition to the Near East

These 1,875 photographs chronicle Illinois native James Henry Breasted's daring travels through Egypt and Mesopotamia in the unstable aftermath of World War I. Breasted, a leading Egyptologist, was the founder of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, and this journey was the first Oriental Institute project. The goals of his ambitious expedition were to acquire artifacts for the new Institute and to select sites for later excavation.
Our Museum's companion exhibit, Pioneers to the Past: American Archaeologists in the Middle East 1919-20, is open to the public from January 12 through August 29, 2010.
This photographic exhibit is the third major installment of the Oriental Institute's on-line Photographic Archives. It joins PERSEPOLIS AND ANCIENT IRAN: CATALOG OF EXPEDITION PHOTOGRAPHS (967 Photographs from the Oriental Institute's expedition to Iran in the 1930s) and THE 1905-1907 BREASTED EXPEDITIONS TO EGYPT AND THE SUDAN: A PHOTOGRAPHIC STUDY (1055 Photographs from Breasted's travels in Nubia during the years 1905-1907.

And for an up to date list of all Oriental Institute publications available online see

The Oriental Institute Open Access Publications