Transcript
Jennifer Berglund 00:04
Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. My name is Jennifer Berglund, part of the exhibits team here at the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, and I’ll be your host. Today, I’m speaking with Annewies Van Den Hoek, a retired Greek language professor at the Harvard Divinity School, who has been spending her retirement photographing and cataloging an assortment of objects housed in the collections of the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East. I wanted to explore the connections between her work at the Divinity School and the museum, and how her curiosity about religion in the ancient world led her to its material culture. Here she is. Annewies Van Den Hoek, welcome to the show!
Annewies Van Den Hoek 01:14
Thank you for having me.
Jennifer Berglund 01:24
You grew up in Holland in and after World War II, and developed an interest in ancient languages, history and the ancient world as a young woman, but went on to study theology. That led you into the clergy, but before and after completing your PhD. So describe how your work in the clergy and your classical studies overlap. And also, how do they diverge?
Annewies Van Den Hoek 01:50
Honestly, they don’t overlap. So, at the university, one learns a lot of things. And I was always interested in history and languages. And that’s why the theology actually is a broad field. So when I became a Minister, I was a part time minister because I also had a family and I could not work full-time. I ended up in a small village. It was Dutch Reformed – Calvinist. It’s actually the most common church in Holland. So after this liberation from the Spanish, the Dutch didn’t want to be Catholic, per se, so they became Protestant, officially. So that’s why everyone north of the rivers was more or less Dutch Reformed. But there also were other churches like Lutheran, Mennonite, and Catholics, of course, there were also Catholics. But South of the rivers, it’s mostly Catholic, or was. I think at the moment, only 30% of the Dutch are Christian at all. But at any rate, when you end up in a small village of 1200 inhabitants, then Greek and Latin doesn’t do very much for you. Moreover, there were three churches in that town and three schools, so it was very much segregated. And so the Dutch Reformed minister was for all the rest, so to speak. Of course, for preparing the sermons, I always would look at the Greek text of New Testament, and at the Hebrew Bible and Hebrew for the Hebrew Bible. And I would do that religiously, actually, for the first two years. But otherwise there is very little of correspondence between studies and reality.
Jennifer Berglund 03:42
So tell me a little bit more about your classical studies, then.
Annewies Van Den Hoek 03:46
Yeah, I was interested in ancient church history and what we call patristic studies, studies of the church father, so the text, it’s a little bit of a misnomer, because there were also church mothers. So now you speak about late antiquity or so. And so I was interested in particularly how Christianity came into this so called pagan world. Pagan is not, is also not a good name, but in this Roman world, how could it develop in the Roman and Greek world? And so my main field became the authors of Alexandria, Clement and Origen of Alexandria, second and third century Christian authors. And Clement was a Greek. We don’t know where he came from, probably from Athens, but it’s not sure. And he spent, let’s say, about 10-15 years in Alexandria, and he wrote a lot. He was a philosopher, but very much also indebted to the Greek literature. So he has 1000s of quotations from everywhere, but one of the main things also that he had was quotations from his Jewish writers of Alexandria of an earlier date about 150 years before his time. He lived from 150 to 220. And so he quoted a lot from Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish author who also wrote a lot and we have almost 75% of his works now. So, I did study it and did my dissertation on the correspondence between Philo and Clement and how Clement quoted him, how he changed the quotations, what his intentions were. I learned that Clement quoted find out a lot, but what his purpose was, was not so clear. So I was not the first one who had sort of this sort of where people have said, well, Clement is mostly indebted because of the theory of the Logos, the word of God who created the world, etc. And then another scholar who would speak about these relations as well, that he was very indebted to Philo except for the Logos. So they were really contrasting ideas about that relationship. So what I tried to do was very simply to make a simple comparison between the texts. So to see what kind of text Clement had quoted, how he had quoted it, what he had cut out, what he had changed. And then I made a numerical sort of statistical comparison. And that was actually quite revealing. So it turned out, in my opinion, that Clement of Alexandria knew enough Greek philosophy, from his own education, to learn that from Philo. Philo was also in very indebted to platonic philosophy. But he [Clement] did not have a Christian education, so he learned a lot about Philo’s interpretation of the Bible and storytelling, so those were the actually pieces that he needed himself. Plus, other thoughts as well, Philo had brought ancient philosophy together with biblical interpretation. And that was the other segment that was very important.
Jennifer Berglund 07:29
So this is really interesting because these are the early days of Christianity. I mean, is it fair to ask, what kind of impact did that have on early Christianity? Like, did it change something? Or did it just influence Christian views of that period?
Annewies Van Den Hoek 07:45
I think so. I think it made it easier also for, let’s say, the educated classes to accept some of the strange things that were said, let’s say either in the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament, and the Bible was primarily the Hebrew Bible for those early Christians. The New Testament was there, but they really based their stories and a lot of the interpretation on the Hebrew Bible, I think it was very important to make that bridge between the culture of the day and the philosophy of the day, and to explain that in that day’s language. So something in Christianity that has gone on since then, ever actually, in our times as well, we have festivities that are totally not Christian in origin.
Jennifer Berglund 08:43
Such as what?
Annewies Van Den Hoek 08:45
Christmas. The Christmas tree.
Jennifer Berglund 08:48
What’s the origin of the Christmas tree?
Annewies Van Den Hoek 08:51
I don’t know, actually. It’s probably more northern European. But I also want to say, so, all the stories that are hard to explain, they allegorized. And that was another big part of the Alexandrian tradition. The story of Sarah and Hagar. So Sarah is the wife of Abraham, and Hagar is a female servant, and Sarah cannot get children, so he gets a child with Hagar, and then Sarah becomes jealous. So Philo says, well, that’s the story. If we only take the story, it’s just about two women arguing and being jealous in the backyard. You have to allegorize. So Sarah becomes wisdom, and Hagar is the preparation to wisdom. So preparatory studies, schooling, etc. And then finally, you come to the real thing, wisdom. So that kind of thing. There are a lot of stories in the Bible that are very hard to explain, and that could belong to the culture of that time, over various times also, I mean, it’s, I don’t know, 1000 year history anyway. And the interesting thing is already in antiquity, the Greeks also had that problem, or the philosophers, because you had all these stories of Homer, and in the Iliad and Odyssey. So, already in Roman times philosophers tried to allegorize those stories also in those terms. So I think that the Jewish, Greeks and Christians got it from there, or were influenced by this. But then there was another stream. So in Alexandria, they did a lot of that [allegorization] and, but in Antioch, another capital of the ancient world, they wanted to have a more literal interpretation of the Bible. And that’s basically a problem of what we call hermeneutics that is still going on. You have people who are very literal-minded and want to have every letter explained at face value.
Jennifer Berglund 11:04
It’s interesting. I mean, we’re still contending with those kinds of issues with our Constitution, for instance. Yeah, it’s interesting to look back in our history and see that this has been a part of the human condition for a long time.
Annewies Van Den Hoek 11:18
Times change. Social situations change. People do not change that often.
Jennifer Berglund 11:26
No, they don’t.
Annewies Van Den Hoek 11:27
To come back to that that village experience. So, I was 25 or so. When I started, 26. And, a woman in that position. So you learn a lot. And it was very important for the rest of my life, I think, to see people as they are. They were farmers and they had their problems. And so I mean, you learn a lot of other situations, I think it’s important in life, to adapt, and also to see a little bit behind the status of people.
Jennifer Berglund 12:02
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, and I would imagine, as a, as a faith leader in that community, you have, you’re exposed to lots of different kinds.
Annewies Van Den Hoek 12:13
Right. And they basically were areligious for centuries. We had to sort of get through that and bring more spirituality in the situation. But it was not so easy. I remember that. So, I had spent the whole night on my sermon, and I would come at 10 o’clock, and the organ would play the main farmer of the board would sit in the first row. As soon as I opened my mouth, they all fell asleep. They had been up since three o’clock with cows and calves and whatnot.
Jennifer Berglund 13:02
Tell me more about getting your PhD throughout all of this.
Annewies Van Den Hoek 13:05
Yeah, I did my PhD, and I got actually a job as a research professor at a Catholic University in Holland. They had a position for a couple of years, so I got that. I didn’t have to teach, I just had to show up once a week, and in the east of the country, so I did that. And then came back. And then I wrote my dissertation, which was published. And in Holland, you have to publish your dissertation. It has to be accepted for a commercial edition, also. I got some money, I wrote some foundations, and at that time, I was divorced and needed some money to pay the publisher. And I got so much money that I had too much.
Jennifer Berglund 13:54
That’s a nice problem to have.
Annewies Van Den Hoek 13:55
My children’s said, well, you just give a big party, but I didn’t want to do that. I was very lucky that Brill published my dissertation. So that gave me a sort of a head start. And then I remarried but not right away. I met my American husband to 1982, and we dated for six years, back and forth to Boston and where I lived, but when I was here in United States, I wanted to study, and so I wrote the Librarian of the Divinity School of the labor at Harvard, Maria Grossman, and she granted me access and I had a great time. I really loved the library. I still do. I think it’s the best part of Harvard.
Jennifer Berglund 14:44
Not biased at all. Where did you meet your husband?
Annewies Van Den Hoek 14:49
We met in Rome. I was there for a postdoc in Rome for a semester. He also had a research break, I think, and yeah, we met there. He is an art historian, an archaeologist, and he worked at the Museum of Fine Arts where he has worked also for 29 years or so. He is retired now. He was head of the Classical Department, Greek and Roman. And then we figured out how to manage our relationship and came in 1987. We married in 1988. Of course, I came here, as we call in Dutch, “op de bonnefooi,” in good faith. There was a New Testament Professor, Helmut Koester, here at Harvard Divinity School who liked my dissertation, and he offered me a part time job for teaching advanced Greek. And that went on and off. And in the end, I taught four courses.
Jennifer Berglund 15:48
And this was through the Divinity School and explain the significance of Greek.
Annewies Van Den Hoek 15:53
We have people who study church history, so they have to read texts. Mostly Latin but also Greek. And then we have New Testament students who need to learn much more than the New Testament, so they really need to read fairly difficult Greek like Philo and Origen, and Eusebius. And so I’m very impressed with their success, actually, because most of them didn’t have any Greek before, so in three years, we had a program of three years. And they’d come to the upper levels then, if they study of course. I had a lot of Korean students who had even a harder time because also, English is not easy and they worked very hard, and they were very good at it. Not just Greek, it’s not the only language. We have a lot of Semitic languages–Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, itself. Also, we teach that, plus the fact that at Harvard, you can also do Armenian. There are lots of texts, early Christian and Jewish texts in Armenian. And, and then Coptic, which is an Egyptian and African languages.
Jennifer Berglund 17:12
You and your husband have many common interests. And so you’ve have worked together on some projects, but your husband, he specializes in Greek and Roman art history and archaeology. And as you said, he was the curator of the Art and Ancient World at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Tell me a little bit about your collaborations with him and the work you’ve produced together.
Annewies Van Den Hoek 17:34
He drew me into some of his work at an early stage when they had an inscription, they wanted to have some knowledge. Not that I knew too much about Greek inscriptions, but at least I knew the language. So one year, I didn’t teach at Harvard, but in Paris. I was invited to teach at École Pratique des Hautes Études (at the Sorbonne) in Paris in 1991. And I met a lot of people, and one was an epigraphist. And so whenever I could not figure it out, or I was uncertain, or I couldn’t figure it out at all, I asked him, and he taught me a lot. And in the end, we did publications together. So that’s how I started with a little bit of epigraphy. And I’ve done other things in epigraphy since. And then my husband also in our free time, and our holidays, basically, did a big project on marble research. He had done his dissertation on capitals, those things that you see on columns, and the special kinds of capitals.
Jennifer Berglund 18:42
Sort of the ornate parts of the column,
Annewies Van Den Hoek 18:46
Doric, Corinthian, Tuscan whatnot. If you need to know any detail, ask him.
Jennifer Berglund 18:57
I’ll keep that in mind,
Annewies Van Den Hoek 18:59
But also the work in museum was a lot about marble. They had some problems about the identification of marble. So he started to collaborate with a group of scientists, chemists, biologists, geologists. This group is called ASMOSIA (Association for the Study of Marble & Other Stones in Antiquity), the study of ancient marbles and other stones. In Roman times, particularly, a lot of marble was imported into Rome. And these were big projects. The Emperor owned some of those quarries where they wanted to have the marble come from for their projects in Rome. And so now to know where the marble came from, that’s it’s really interesting question and how those trade routes were going and which places in Asia Minor and modern day Turkey, and there are scientific methods with isotopes and all kinds of other methods to define that, to map that out. For example, in Rome, you have a lot of statues. If you have ever been to a museum in Rome, and they are all white. And of course in Italy, you have the Quarries of Carrara, which are very famous, and already used for a long time also in Roman times. But a couple of friends from this group of ours found out recently, actually, a couple of years ago only, that a lot of the white marble did not come from Carrara, but from an unknown place in Turkey.
Jennifer Berglund 20:25
Wow.
Annewies Van Den Hoek 20:26
And so they went together with a Turkish archaeologist and a geologist also, Professor in Izmir. And they discovered this totally new quarry, so they can scientifically prove that a marble came from because they can discriminate the elements. So now it has a big uproar in the archaeological world in Rome because people don’t want to believe that. Yes, for centuries, they have thought it was Carrara fine grain, and it has a special features, which actually is corresponding with the fine grain marble of this new place. Versus called Göktepe (cf.https://www.jstor.org/stable/41725317). Nobody ever heard of that. And then there are minor discoveries. My husband was interested in marble from the island of Thasos in the northern island near Thessaloniki and Kavala, there are quarries there with very white marble. And one of those marbles is from Thassos, Cape Vathy. It is a dolomitic marble. All the other marbles are basically calcitic. And so so he did a whole study all over the Mediterranean, even in North Africa to figure out what the trade routes were and where these capitals were and other sculptures were they came from. Yeah, it’s just so interesting how that kind of archaeology teaches you so much about ancient commerce and now cultures were overlapping and exchanging culture during that time period. But if you go to Ostia, there’s a whole outside display of marbles that were dragged up from the Tiber River because that’s where the shipments came in. Or one of the places. So there you can see all the colored marbles. Colored marbles, of course, are easier to distinguish, because you can just do it by sight. You can do it by sight, also of white marbles. In the 30 years that I have helped him, or maybe 42 years now, we would go to a museum, let’s say in Munich, and we would look by eye what we thought was Thasian marble and later on, have it tested being 95% correct.
Jennifer Berglund 22:46
Wow.
Annewies Van Den Hoek 22:46
So you can train your eyes and Greek art historians also knew how to do that by eye, but it’s better to be certain and do the tests.
Jennifer Berglund 22:57
One of the other projects you and your husband worked on was to create a pottery exhibit at the Divinity School Library. So tell me about that, and what did you hope to convey through the exhibit.
Annewies Van Den Hoek 23:08
My husband had one lamp when we met that he bought in the 60s or 70s, an early Christian lamp with a chalice and two birds on the side. And that’s called an African red slip lamp.
Jennifer Berglund 23:24
It kind of looks like flat kettles almost, right?
Annewies Van Den Hoek 23:27
Yeah, this this particular kind, but there are all kinds of lamps. They look different from Roman lamps. But North Africa had a big explosion of pottery, almost on an industrial scale, in the third, fourth and fifth centuries, not only of lamps, but also of plates, bowls, and also of jugs, and so those were actually the most common, the, what we called the closed wares. So there are a number of other wares in North Africa that produce these things. Before telling you about the exhibition, we found out that the exportation of these wares was everywhere in the ancient world, from Roman Britain, to the Black Sea to in Odessa in the museum, we saw a plate that was excavated in that area. So it’s really interesting. So there were big landowners of really important Roman land owners, who owned these pottery farms, basically, kilns and then exported it. So there is one particular period that I like very much and that is fourth and fifth century in which the production of these lamps and the imagery changes. So in the earlier phase, you have all kinds of Greek gods–Zeus and Aphrodite or Venus, and Hercules and all these traditional images, and then at some time, you start to get Old Testament scenes, Hebrew Bible scenes, like the sacrifice of Isaac, or the three Hebrews in the fire, and they came from the same pottery atelier. Actually, that means that these are two years farmed out, so to speak to their clientele. Some were Christian and others were something else. They are also Jewish lamps with Menorahs at that time, so it’s really interesting. So the same kind of idea that I had with Clement of Alexandria, so how does this whole Greek philosophical, Jewish background come into early Christianity? So my idea is there with the pottery, and my husband pointed out this morning, actually, that we were the first ever ARS exhibit in history. In the Divinity School.
Jennifer Berglund 25:56
And when was this?
Annewies Van Den Hoek 25:58
This was in 2001. So the library just got renovated, and there’s a little display area, and we had it there. We wrote also a catalog, and then the show travel to the Johnson Library in Austin, Texas, and also to New Haven. And now we are sort of specialists in the imagery of this pottery, while we are amateurs, of course, then you become known.
Jennifer Berglund 26:25
It’s interesting, because this exhibition that you put together, am I correct in saying that this is kind of the way that you connected with what was then called the Semitic Museum, but it’s now known as the Harvard Museum of the ancient Near East. Tell me how that happened.
Annewies Van Den Hoek 26:41
Yes, because Larry Steger and Joe Green had done excavations in Carthage.
Jennifer Berglund 26:47
Joe Greene, by the way, we’ve done an episode with Joe Greene.
Annewies Van Den Hoek 26:51
I know that well. Wonderful actually episode with Joe. And unfortunately, he’s retired, we don’t see him that often anymore. But anyway, so Joe was immediately in for it. And so, for this exhibition, we had materials from the museum, but not from the MFA, just from the Semitic Museum, and from some private collections in the area, and some Harvard professors etc. And other people who liked the idea. It was a big organization for me. I had never done an exhibition. John, of course, had done many, but he always had a staff to write labels and do things and hammer things in, but here, we had to do it ourselves. I remember, before the exhibition opened, we were still going with hammers and nails. But it was fun, we had a reception, and it was really a wonderful occasion, actually, for everyone else. So I did a lot of publications, media together, and also alone, on the imagery and how it’s connected with text. So I was always interested to see if a certain interpretation on an image could be found in texts. So the exhibition was called “Light from the Age of Augustine”. But unfortunately, Augustine had very little interest in pottery. You can learn a lot from Augustine, but not about pottery.
Jennifer Berglund 28:27
These days, you work in the collections of the Harvard Museum of the ancient Near East, or HMANE, as we call it, and it’s a job that you’ve taken up in retirement. Tell me a bit about that work.
Annewies Van Den Hoek 28:39
After retirement, I said to Joe, so we had this connection, finally, in the show. And later on, Joe also came a couple of times into my classes to explain a little bit about objects and linguistic details, etc. So much fun. After we met each other at a parking lot, and Joe said, “Do you have a picture of that and that lamp. I need some pictures?” I said, “Sure. I’ll do that.” That was already before I retired. And then I thought, well, this would be wonderful to do after retirement to help the collection, study the collection. And so I told him, would you like me to come in for a certain project? And so he took that. And already while I was still working, I went one morning, or one afternoon a week, to help them out. So they’ve got this Nuzi collection from the excavation in Iraq, all the metals. I did two years of metal work. And then a couple of years of beads. So you take the pictures, you label it, and they’re going to put it online eventually, but it’s all now recorded. And so the last two or three years–I have been there for six or seven years now–I have worked with my colleague on the coins. It’s a work of love, I should say, because if you look at the coin collection at the MFA, it’s all glittering and beautiful and beautifully displayed and the best examples possible. Well, at the Semitic Museum, we have the worst examples possible. It’s interesting because some are excavated and it’s important for dating and all of that.
Jennifer Berglund 30:25
Describe this coin project. I think one of the interesting things is you’re working with a retired radiologist who just happens to be an expert in ancient coinage.
Annewies Van Den Hoek 30:35
He also has a PhD in ancient coinage, numismatics, so he’s a real pro.
Jennifer Berglund 30:39
And what’s his name?
Annewies Van Den Hoek 30:40
Marvin Kushnet.
Jennifer Berglund 30:41
So he has a PhD in ancient coinage. What an impressive fellow, tell me a little bit about, what do ancient coins tell you?
Annewies Van Den Hoek 30:48
Well, they tell you the date, they tell you where they come from, they tell you the propaganda of the rulers
Jennifer Berglund 30:57
Because of the art on the coinage?
Annewies Van Den Hoek 30:59
I don’t know how much about coins. I’m not a specialist, per se. But I’ve seen many coins, so because some of the collections are of people who work there, and they’ve just bought them on the market probably. So they are not so interesting, in a way because they are not excavated. So it’s much more interesting if you have, and we’re working at the moment on excavated coins from Samaria in an excavation. So if you see a lot of, let’s say, coins from Alexandria of the Ptolemaic period, then you can also determine that that was an important period in the settlement where they were excavated. But there are also people who are interested in the beauty of a coin. And I can see also why. That gives you a little insight in the ancient world that you don’t find in literature. And also, the coins are very important as I understand, but this is totally not my field. They are very important for portraiture, so if you have an marble Portrait of an emperor or an empress, then you can go to the coins and see if that particular image also fits the coinage. And so that’s it’s very important, actually. So it’s a broad field of expertise. The British Museum has endless catalogs of these coins. And so they are sort of the basis to identify. But Marvin and I are sitting there, sometimes for hours, to see what it is. And he weighs them. Sometimes it’s very easy. And sometimes it’s very difficult. Yeah.
Jennifer Berglund 32:49
It’s very interesting how you’ve been able to combine your theoretical work with material culture. How do you connect your theoretical work with material culture? And why is it important to do that?
Annewies Van Den Hoek 33:03
Well, it’s very difficult question, actually. My theoretical work is basically literature. Literature reflects a reality, a historical reality, social reality. And I think that’s why it’s important to read and to be interested in what’s going on in your own life, but also in history. And I think I learn a lot from history. Of course, these times are very different, social structures are very different. But there are a number of things do not change. And I love to learn. I love I’m very inquisitive, also. So, I love to learn, and don’t take everything at face value, just try to sort of go a little bit farther.
Jennifer Berglund 33:53
Well, I would think that your theoretical work through literature, you know, someone writes literature, so it’s sort of a peek into their brains. But the material culture, the objects that are preserved from a time are a peek into the larger society, right? So being able to connect the two, I would imagine,
Annewies Van Den Hoek 34:13
I’ll have to look into that. you’re right, because the literature that we have, mostly, is of males, some females, and mostly a higher echelon of society, so you don’t learn. But another thing for example, inscriptions, also mostly from a higher part of society, but then there are inscriptions of, for example, in the catacombs, I will make a little pitch for the Catacombs Society. I have been president of the International Catacombs Society for many years. It has a beautiful website, the International Catacombs Society, founded by a Jewish lady from Boston. So catacombs have inscriptions of regular people. And so, indeed, that gives you another insight, although they couldn’t write themselves probably, so they have someone to do it. It’s very hard to connect the dots. I’m just very interested in all of it
Jennifer Berglund 35:21
Annewies Van Den Hoek, I really appreciate you being here. This has been so much fun.
Annewies Van Den Hoek 35:28
Thank you very much for having me.
Jennifer Berglund 35:35
Today’s HMSC Connects! podcast was produced by me, Jennifer Berglund and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. Special thanks to the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East and to Annewies Van Den Hoek for her wisdom and expertise. And thank you so much for listening. If you like today’s podcast, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you in a couple of weeks!