W. J. Bankes and the Identification of the Nabataean Script - Khalili ...

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48 N.N. LEWIS and M.C.A. MACDONALD Syria 80 (2003) WILLIAM JOHN BANKES W. J. Bankes (1786-1855) was one of a number of gifted and scholarly Europeans who explored the Near East in the early nineteenth century (Fig. 1). He spent most of the years 1815-1819 in the visitine region, g Sinai, Egypt, Nubia, > (i.e. the area covered by modem Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Israel), Greece, Constantinople, the southern and western coastlands of Asia Minor, and Cyprus. As he travelled, he left , as two of his companions put it, 48 and wherever he went he copied inscriptions, made sketches, detailed drawings and plans of buildings, and painted occasional water-colours. Unfortunately, he seems to have kept journals only infrequently and the other notes he left vary greatly in quality. Bankes was a man of considerable exploring.49 He was also an excellent draughtsman and had an unusually acute and accurate eye in recording inscriptions, even when he could not read the script. However, he was not content simply to copy inscriptions and to make drawings or paint water-colours. Those of his letters, journals and notes which have survived show that he gave much thought to the questions suggested by what he sawwho constructed the buildings, who carved the inscriptions and what did they mean? He was ...· _ has7~ \~ the ~ ~ _e ~ ~.L thus able to take one of the first steps towards i"~ ~~ ~ ~~~..0' &. wasr~~ by:~~ farwhile tthe decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics, 50 the progress of his speculations on the 49.: Thus ....or istanc, authors of the inscriptions in an unknown script which he found in Sinai, possibly in .... %_ ":~~~ Nubia, ,' in the Hawrin and, at last, in Petra, are the deductions of an intelligent man using what material was at his disposal and arriving Fig. 1.- Portrait sketch of W.J Bankes ( 1786-1855) at the correct conclusion. by George Hayter, c. 1833 (courtesy of the National Trust) Bankes' travelling companions and many dontemporary scholars recognized his abilities, praised his achievements and confidently expected him to publish an account of his work. Irby and Mangles, who travelled with him to Petra, wrote that Bankes ... has the merit of being the first person travelling as a European, who ever thought of extending his researches in that direction [i.e. to Petra]; and from his profound knowledge of ancient history, as well as his skill in drawing, he was by far the best calculated to go on such an expedition 52 48. IRBY & MANGLES 1823: 293. 49. Thus, for instance, Irby and Mangles record that he visited the library of the Latin convent of Terra Sancta in Jerusalem to consult an edition of Vitruvius in order to explain features of the Roman theatre at Beth-Shean, (IRBY & MANGLES 1823: 302). 50. See below. 51. See below, under Bankes' journey to Petra, and note 232. 52. IRBY & MANGLES 1823: 336.
Syria 80 (2003) W.J. BANKES AND THE IDENTIFICATION OF THE NABATAEAN SCRIPT while W.M. Leake - himself an experienced and erudite traveller - wrote in his Editor's Preface to Burckhardt's Travels in Syria and the Holy Land that as a great part of the country visited by Burckhardt has since his time been explored by a gentleman better qualified to illustrate its antiquities by his learning; who travelled under more favourable circumstances, and who was particularly diligent in collecting those most faithful of all geographical evidences, ancient inscriptions, it may be left to Mr. W. Bankes, to illustrate more fully the ancient geography of the Decapolis and adjoining districts, and to remove some of the difficulties arising from the ambiguity of the ancient authorities. 53 Bankes himself had every intention of publishing his discoveries, and started work as soon as he returned to England in 1820. In the following years more than fifty lithographic stones were inscribed under his direction with copies of drawings, inscriptions and other material from Sinai, Egypt, Nubia, Syria and Asia Minor, and prints were made from some of the stones evidently to form the plates for a wide-ranging publication. The proofs of some of these prints survive. However, after this initial period of activity, he does not seem to have persevered with the work and apparently never wrote the letterpress to accompany the plates in the large and important work he had originally envisaged. As late as 1830, he was writing that he hoped to publish > of Jerash >, but after that nothing more was heard of the project. 54 Bankes did, however, distribute a few of the prints to friends, as well as to the British Museum and Cambridge University Library. 55 He also gave Thomas Young free access to the drawings and copies of inscriptions he had made in Egypt and allowed him and Henry Salt to publish one of the most important of them. 56 Furthermore, his suggestion that, on the obelisk from Philae, the signs in one of the cartouches in the hieroglyphic text spelled the name > materially assisted Champollion in his work on the decipherment of hieroglyphics. 57 These contributions to Egyptology were remembered after his death, but the lithographic stones and the papers which recorded his work in other parts of the Near East remained more or less forgotten at his family home, Kingston Lacy, in Dorset, until the middle of the twentieth century. In 1981, Kingston Lacy, together with its contents, was presented to the National Trust, which has made Bankes' drawings, water-colours, copies of inscriptions, lithographic stones and proofs of prints, notes, journals and personal correspondence available for study. The material on Egypt is at present being catalogued at the British Museum. The Syrian material, with the exception of the lithographic stones and prints, may now be seen at the Dorset Record Office at Dorchester. The lithographic stones have been cleaned and photographed and remain at Kingston Lacy. The proof prints from the stones are at present at the Department of Egyptian Antiquities of the British Museum. There are no plate numbers on the stones or the proofs and no continuous numbering of the inscriptions. Instead the texts are grouped under the regions and specific locations in which they were found and are individually numbered within the regional groups. Thus, of the eleven Aramaic inscriptions from the Hawran, nine are scattered over thirteen plates, among copies of some three hundred Greek and Latin and four Arabic texts from the area. 53. BURCKHARDT 1822: IV. 54. FINATI 1830, II: 147, footnote. 55. The British Museum received copies ofthree prints of the obelisk which Bankes brought back from Philae and set up in the grounds of his house at Kingston Lacy, Dorset. These prints are now in the British Library, bound as a book entitled Geometrical Elevation of an Obelisk, by W.J. Bankes, 1821. Cambridge University Library received the same, as well as four prints showing Bankes' transcription of the long > which he had copied at Stratonicea in Caria in 1817 (see Bankes' letter to his father, 29th October, 1821, D/BKL, no reference number; letter of Clarke to Bankes 2nd January, 1822, D/BKL HJ1/168; letters of Leake to Bankes, no date, D/BKL HJ1/268 and 365). 56. Bankes' is Plate 47 of Young's Hieroglyphics collected by the Egyptian Society (London, 1823) and the same print forms the frontispiece of Henry Salt's Essay on Dr. Young's and M. Champollion 's Phonetic System of Hieroglyphics (London, 1825). In Young's An Account of Some Recent Discoveries in Hieroglyphical Literature ... (London, 1830, i: 30), he thanks Bankes for allowing him free access to the latter's
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