What Archaeology Can Achieve in US-Iran Relations

This article is the fifth in a five-part series.

• Read Part 1 here

• Read Part 2 here

• Read Part 3 here

• Read Part 4 here

In the 1920s, relations between the United States and Iran had reached a low point, marked by the failure of Arthur Millspaugh’s financial mission (1922-27), the murder of Vice Consul Robert Imbrie (1924), and the withdrawal of American financiers from a railroad syndicate (1928-29), among other imbroglios. According to historian James F. Goode, the American chargé d’affairs at the time, Hugh Millard, wrote to the US State Department’s Near East Bureau Chief, Wallace Murray, stating that there had been “one flub after another in American efforts in Persia” but that ‘‘archaeology is about the only thing [the United States] are likely to be interested in which stands much chance of bringing results.” Perhaps the situation today is not so unlike that of the early 1930s, when—despite the accumulated ill will of the previous decade—American interest in Iran’s heritage brought the two countries into more sustained diplomatic engagement with each other.

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Clearly, the past four decades have seen much more acrimonious relations between the US and Iran than the 1920s, with much higher stakes. As historian John Ghazvinian writes in America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present, for the past forty years, the United States and Iran have had few official relations at all. Between America’s support for the Shah, its arms sales to Saddam Hussein, and its policy of isolating Iran on the world stage since the Israel-Palestine Madrid Conference of 1991, a gulf in mutual understanding has opened that appears insurmountable. Decision makers on both sides operate in a context of severe and deleterious ignorance of each other’s motivations and aspirations. Indeed, bilateral relations between the two countries are so strained that they must be mediated indirectly by third parties: Switzerland (American affairs in Iran) and Pakistan (Iranian affairs in America). As Ghazvinian points out, even at the lowest depths of the Cold War, the chasm between American and Soviet leadership was not as wide as that between the US and Iran today.

More concerning still, according to Ambassador John Limbert—who was one of the diplomatic staffers held in the Embassy Seizure of 1979-81—is the fact that, since the 1980s, the American government has lost its cadre of diplomats with Iran expertise. In the past four decades, the US has trained few Persian speakers, and those it has trained have had almost no opportunity to use the language in an immersion setting. As Limbert writes, “those with both language and country expertise have aged and retired, leaving a gap that, with the best will in the world, will take at least a decade to fill.” Even prior to the embassy seizure, however, American foreign policymaking vis-à-vis Iran was sclerotic and ineffective. According to James A. Bill, a professor of international relations and government at William and Mary and an expert on US-Iran relations, the ineptitude of American diplomacy towards Iran in the late 1970s, leading to the deterioration of US-Iranian relations, was due to an institutionalized system of organizational conflict within the State Department. This allowed America’s Iran policy to be captured by special interests, and to be unduly influenced in equal measure by both ideology and ignorance.

William J. Burns—one of the diplomats who ran the Oman backchannel that led to the negotiation of the JCPOA—argues that the Trump administration has repeated and exacerbated many of these mistakes. For Burns, however, Trump’s Iran policy is a bellwether of a broader and more concerning trend. In his view, American diplomacy has slid adrift at a moment in history when American leadership is needed more than ever.

How might America regain its position of moral authority and respect on the world stage in the post-Trump era? Burns argues that American diplomacy will need to be reconstructed, from the individual on upward, requiring years of investment in the fundamentals of the craft: “smart policy judgement, language skills, and a sure feel for the foreign landscapes in which they serve and the domestic priorities they represent.” Wendy Sherman—the chief American negotiator in the P5+1 process that led to the signing of JCPOA—concurs. Sherman contends that diplomacy is most likely to succeed when its agents are not only deeply experienced, but also deployed in positions where they can draw on and that experience and put it to work. For Sherman, negotiation is not a set of stratagems, but rather comprises authentic person-to-person engagement. Unfortunately, as made clear by Limbert and Bill, for too long, the United States government has neglected to honor this principle in its dealings with Iran.

For some observers, renewed engagement with Iran is in fact key to the revival of American diplomacy. As Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett write in “Going to Tehran,” American strategic recovery must start with a thoroughgoing revision of the US Government’s Iran policy. Similarly, Ghazvinian writes there is no problem that the US faces in the Middle East that cannot be tied one way or another to its haphazard and ineffective Iran policy. He argues that the only way that the US and Iran can resolve their differences once and for all is through an unconditional, sustained, and high-level set of negotiations. Like the Leveretts, he believes that what is most needed is an historic summit meeting between the two countries’ leaders, an international peace conference of the same magnitude as Reagan and Gorbachev’s meeting in Reykjavik or Nixon and Mao’s in Beijing. As the Leveretts argue, if America does not do this, it runs the risk of condemning itself to a future as an “increasingly flailing—and failing—superpower.”

While I am sympathetic to these calls for rapprochement through a grand bargain, an October 2019 white paper by Chatham House researchers Sanam Vakil and Neil Quilliam found that foreign policy experts from the US, Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and China were highly skeptical of the possibility of such an agreement under present conditions. A year later, however, with the coming administration of Joe Biden, it appears that good-faith engagement is back on the table.

In this series, I have shown how heritage management—in the form of cultural tourism, museum exchanges, and international scientific cooperation—have suffered under American sanctions. Clearly, renewed diplomacy and sanctions relief would benefit those whose livelihoods have been impacted by these policies. I would like to suggest here that American diplomats attempting to reestablish cordial exchanges with Iran have something to learn from the experiences of archaeologists and cultural heritage professionals. The precedents set by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago—in keeping positive relations between the US and Iran alive even during dark times—should be followed and honored.

Cultural heritage is one of the only fields in which person-to-person contacts between Americans and Iranians have been sustained through these four decades of hostility. For this reason alone, the Biden administration should create space for and leverage cultural exchanges as part of its reengagement strategy. More broadly, however, as all of the experts quoted above make clear: when those with deep knowledge of and investment in each other’s culture and history are involved in diplomatic negotiations, all stand to benefit. On whatever time-scale, no matter the form that renewed engagement between the US and Iran takes—whether a grand bargain, a direct meeting between heads of state, or some other expression of goodwill toward repairing broken ties—it can only be for the good of the people of our two countries.

My hope is that no matter the forum, American leadership chooses to call on envoys who speak Persian, or at the very least have some degree of appreciation for Iranian culture, rather than under-qualified appointees with an axe to grind. May our two governments recognize—as Hugh Millard so presciently did in the 1930s—the special role that archaeologists have played and can continue to play in improving ties between America and Iran and follow our lead in delving into a shared past to bring about a better future.

 Click here to read Part 5 of this five-part series.

Photo: Wikicommons

Museum Diplomacy Falters in the Face of Iran Sanctions

This article is the third in a five-part series.

• Read Part 1 here

• Read Part 2 here

In 1926, Alexander Upham Pope, an art historian, collector, and dealer who specialized in Iranian art, was contracted by the Iranian government to design the Persian Pavilion at the Sesquicentennial International Exposition in Philadelphia. The centerpiece of the exhibition was a replica of the magnificent Safavid-era mosque Masjid-e Shah from Naqsh-e Jahan square in Isfahan, which sat in what is now the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park and the Sports Complex in South Philadelphia. The interest generated by Persian Pavilion and the precious objects displayed within it led to the convening of the First International Congress for Persian Art and Archaeology. The success of this congress in turn paved the way for an exhibition of Iranian art and antiquities sponsored by the British Royal Academy of Art, held at Burlington House in London several years later.

The Pavilion and subsequent congress captured the imaginations of two brothers-in-law, scions of established Philadelphia families: Fiske Kimball and Horace Howard Furness Jayne, the directors of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, respectively. Together, they sponsored Pope to travel to Iran to participate in the negotiation of a new Antiquities Law in Iran that would allow American archaeologists to conduct surveys and excavations in Iran for the first time. Pope had his own agenda, however, and his feuds with the era’s leading scholar of ancient Iran—Ernst E. Herzfeld—complicated proceedings. So Kimball and Jayne dispatched the explorer, diplomat, and amateur archaeologist Frederick R. Wulsin to Tehran to take Pope’s place. Within six months, an agreement had been reached, and the Law for the Protection of National Vestiges was ratified by the Iranian Parliament in November of 1930.

Wulsin, hailing from Cincinnati, Ohio and educated at Harvard, was one of the heirs of the Baldwin Piano Company fortune, which supported his early travels in China, Mongolia, Tibet, Vietnam, and Laos. In his capacity as the representative of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, Wulsin was the first American citizen to apply for a permit to conduct archaeological excavations in Iran, digging for two months with his wife Susanne (née Emery) at the site of Tureng Tepe (Hill of the Pheasants) near the modern city of Gorgan. It was through research on the artifacts and documents that resulted from this excavation that I first became involved in the archaeology of Iran, making him a figure of special significance for me.

This background is important because it demonstrates the meaningful role museums have historically played in the mediation of the relationship between the United States and Iran. These private institutions were among the primary American actors on the Iranian political scene and a key contributor to goodwill between the two countries during the interwar period. As I write in a forthcoming piece, museums and their representatives were in fact seen at the time by State Department officials as the United States’ best chance at improving relations with Iran at the time. Iran’s heritage has long been an important channel of cultural exchange with other countries, and despite current American policy, this has not changed today.

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Recent museum exchanges between Iran and the West, both high and low-profile, have shown the continuing importance of Iran’s heritage in its foreign affairs. These include the international tour of the Cyrus Cylinder (2013), the Louvre exhibition “The Rose Empire: Masterpieces of 19th-Century Persian Art” (2018), the Persepolis Fortification Tablet Archive Return (2019), and the planned show “Epic Iran” at the Victoria & Albert Museum (due to open in February 2021). In each case, sponsors and participants in these initiatives have had to navigate a tangle of sanctions and restrictive financial regulations, which are at least to a degree predictable. They have also had to weather less foreseeable storms, such as political fallout from skirmishes in the Persian Gulf and the assassination of Qassem Soleimani in January 2020.

In 2013, the Iran Heritage Foundation, working together with the British Museum and the Smithsonian institution, undertook an American tour of one of the most famous artifacts of ancient Iran: the Cyrus Cylinder. The Cyrus Cylinder is a 2600-year-old cuneiform document, written in the Babylonian variant of the Akkadian script in 539 BCE, which was excavated at the site of ancient Babylon in 1879 by the Assyrian-British archaeologist Hormuzd Rassam. The object has been in the possession of the British Museum since 1880.

Following Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s formulation, the Cyrus Cylinder is often referred to as the “first declaration of human rights,” a precursor to the modern Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Since 1971, a replica has been displayed at the UN headquarters in New York as a symbol of human liberty. This is in no small part because the text of the Cylinder is understood to have encouraged “freedom of worship” within the Persian Empire and allowed the return of peoples, such as the Israelites, deported from their homelands by the Assyrians. It has thus been taken up and promoted as a symbol of “multi-culturalism, tolerance, diversity, and human rights.”

The IHF exhibition, which traveled to five cities—Washington DC, Houston, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles—was marketed to American audiences on the basis that Cyrus’ principles of tolerance influenced the American founding fathers, particularly Thomas Jefferson, who owned not one but two copies of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia. The reception of the tour at the time is instructive. On the one hand, politicians speaking out of both sides of their mouths hailed the artifact and its message as a way to counter the media narrative of Iran’s nuclear program and regional ambitions. On the other, commentators such as noted religious scholar Karen Armstrong highlighted the power that cultural diplomacy can have where political diplomacy has failed.

This has continued to be the case, though current American policy has made such efforts at cultural diplomacy more difficult. For example, following a French-Iranian cultural exchange agreement signed in 2016, and after two years of painstaking preparations, the 2018 Louvre exhibitions, “The Louvre in Tehran” and “The Rose Empire: Masterpieces of 19th-Century Persian Art,” faced major financial and logistical challenges due to American policy. As reported in The Art Newspaper, would-be exhibition sponsors were concerned about falling afoul of primary and secondary sanctions penalties. Ultimately, both shows went on as scheduled, but because of restrictions on cargo flights between Paris and Tehran, the number of items in the Tehran show had to be considerably reduced. Despite tensions in other domains, the exhibitions were seen, at least by the French foreign ministry, as symbols of a shared ambition to promote positive relations and bring Iran back into the fold of international affairs.

In contrast, the planned exhibition “Epic Iran,” scheduled to open in February 2021 at the V&A in London, hangs in the balance. Even prior to COVID-19, the planners of this exhibition commented publicly on the difficulties they faced due to the exit of the United States from the JCPOA, intensified sanctions, and the assassination of Qassem Soleimani. V&A Director Tristram Hunt believes that the geopolitical situation makes the show all the more significant. Under present conditions, however, there are legitimate concerns that Iran will choose not to lend approximately 40-50 promised objects, potentially compromising forthcoming sponsorship. Nevertheless, despite difficult conditions and difficulties in securing loans, Hunt maintains that, at a time of escalating tensions, the exhibition serves a vital and important purpose in educating British audiences about the art and culture of “one of the world’s greatest historic civilizations.”

The current policy environment and geopolitical standoff between the United States and Iran has also impacted the return of long-term loans of Iranian antiquities stored in the United States, most notably the Persepolis Fortification Archive at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. This collection of 30,000 Achaemenid administrative documents was exported to the United States on loan for conservation and decipherment following its excavation in the mid-1930s by representatives of the Oriental Institute. In keeping with the original agreement that the tablets would eventually be returned, three batches of objects had previously been sent to Tehran, first in 1948 and 1950, and then again in 2004.

The remaining tablets housed in Chicago could only be returned recently. The delay in the continuation of the return of the tablets in the 2000s was in no small part due to a decade-long lawsuit that attempted to wrest control over the objects away from the Oriental Institute, which eventually rose all the way to the Supreme Court. Victims of a terrorist attack in Jerusalem in 1997, carried out by Hamas, but blamed on Iran, were awarded $71.5 million dollars in restitution by an earlier lower-court ruling in 2006, which Iran refused to pay. The victims sought indemnification via repossession of this collection of artifacts in lieu of the awarded settlement, presumably to sell on the art market. In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously against this petition (Rubin v. Islamic Republic of Iran), opening the door to the return of the artifacts to Iran.

The reimposition of sanctions under the Trump administration in 2017-18 further complicated the return process, however. The shipment of the tablets and their hand-delivery by personnel from the Oriental Institute had to be thoroughly vetted by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which is a difficult and lengthy process even in the best of times. Despite the expensive legal battles and complicated licensing required to undertake the return, the first batch of tablets in this round were returned in October 2019, to be followed by additional shipments when conditions allow. There is great hope on both sides that despite the difficulties, the broadening of contacts that this project represents could mark a renewed era of scientific collaboration between American and Iranian scholars in the heritage sector.

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American foreign policy has complicated the ability of museums—whether University research museums, like the Oriental Institute and the University of Pennsylvania Museum, or major art museums such as the V&A and the Louvre—to conduct the exchanges of objects and personnel required put on exhibitions related to Iranian cultural heritage. Nevertheless, museum professionals in North America, Europe, and Iran recognize the importance of these events for educating the public and for establishing ties between nations. There is much more to be said about the conduct of Western museums in amassing their collections of Iranian antiquities, but that is the subject of a different essay. In the meantime, another domain where American policy has stymied efforts to engage in heritage diplomacy and intercultural dialogues is in international cooperative archaeological field research, which we will consider next week.

 Click here to read Part 4 of this five-part series.

Photo: Wikicommons