SUMMARY:

Best-known in history for his controversial theory of linguistics, Japhetology, Nikolai Marr was also an important archaeologist early in his career. Suggestively, he was a member of the new generation of scholars who engineered an epistemological shift away from the text to the physical artifact as the primary unit of analysis. In so doing, they were launching a critique of Western Humanism, which they disparaged for what they saw as an aristocratic elitism, based as it was in the aesthetics of classical Greek and Roman antiquities. They would replace this with a universalism that was fundamentally anti-individualistic and collectivist in its analysis. Next to Marr stands Austrian art historian Josef Strzygowski, another member of this school, but one whose differences are as sharp as the similarities between the two are striking.
This article explores Marr’s signature archaeological digs at Ani, the short-lived capital of Armenia in the tenth century, in order to illustrate how he came to imagine the efficacy of empires. In Ani, Marr found textual evidence of cooperation among the population, itself a mixture of ethnicities and confessions. Committed to keeping the remains of the city in situ, Marr reconstructed crucial parts of the city that allowed him to illustrate cross-cultural influences, such as architectural designs moving from secular to religious buildings. The turban worn by his most extraordinary find, a statue of King Gagik I, beheld for him a positive Muslim influence on a Christian monarch. A supreme antinationalist, Marr had a vision of an idealized imperial political entity, one that embraced the ethnoreligious equality of its subjects as it also lent support to the notion of a union of republics, the USSR. Strzygowski, in contrast, became a nationalist extraordinaire. That both scholars ultimately found some of their ideas expressed in noxious politics in the post–Great War world can also be read as a testament to the power of the epistemological shift that they orchestrated.