Edith Porada, 1912-1994 HOLLY PITTMAN Edith Porada was born on 22 August 1912 in Vienna and died at the age of 81 after a brief illness on 24 March 1994 in the home of her sister, Hildegard Randolph, in Honolulu, Hawaii. A renowned scholar of the art of the ancient Near East, she received in 1977 the 12th annual Gold Medal Award of the Archaeological Institute of America for distinguished archaeological achievement. In awarding the medal, the Institute recorded "its gratitude to a generous scholar to whom all of us, laymen, students and scholars, are indebted for making the world of archaeology more learned and more human" (AJA 82 [1978] 248). This tribute, along with the many others accumulated over a long and active life, captures the two traits that stood at the core of this great teacher, scholar, and friend: work and love. Porada's passion for the ancient world, for works of art, and more generally for the life of the mind was formed early under the guidance of tutors who taught both her and her sister in Vienna and at Hagengut, the family estate not far from the pilgrimage center of Mariazell in the mountains of central Austria. Drawn at first to the civilizations of the Minoans and Mycenaeans, she was encouraged by a relative to work in the ancient Near East where, he advised her, "there was still much work to be done." Her gifts and determination were fully manifest by the time she earned her Ph.D. at the age of 23, studying at the University of Vienna with Victor Christian and writing her dissertation on glyptic art of the Old Akkadian period. In 1937 she went to Paris and on the advice of A. Leo Oppenheim, then an Assyriologist at the Oriental Institute of the University of Vienna, she studied the seal impressions on the Old Assyrian tablets in the Louvre. Through those seal impressions she "discovered the fascinating forms of the various styles of seal engraving.... whole provinces of art revealed themselves in these seal impressions, which at the time were completely unknown."' In 1938, the political climate in Europe forced many to leave Austria. At the urging of friends on Long Island, she, together with her sister, left and came to the United States; they were followed a short time later by their beloved father. Like other intel-
lectual giants, she arrived in a world that welcomed her erudition, culture, and scholarship. As that generation, one by one, takes its leave, it becomes painfully clear that a golden age in intellectual achievement has passed. In the United States, Porada found unexplored treasures hidden in the basements of museums. She began her work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where she studied and published the bas-reliefs of Assurnasirpal II. With the support of the American Schools of Oriental Research, she accomplished a groundbreaking analysis of the more than 1,000 sealings impressed on tablets of five generations of merchants found at Nuzi. To that material she brought archaeological, historical, and philological, as well as art historical, knowledge. At the same time, Hetty Goldman, excavator of Tarsus, had encouraged her to study and to catalogue the superb collection of cylinder seals in the Pierpont Morgan Library. With the support of the American Philosophical Society and the Bollingen Foundation, she undertook the comprehensive publication of the Library's seals. The result was a magisterial two-volume study, the first of a projected series presenting the seals in North American collections. It stands as a signal contribution in the field of glyptic art, refining the classification laid down in the fundamental works of Anton Moortgat and Henri Frankfort and setting standards of presentation for all subsequent studies. By 1950, Porada's position as a leading scholar in the field of ancient Near Eastern art was apparent in her review of Anton Moortgat's Tammuzin which she firmly but graciously disagreed with his fundamental interpretation. In the winter of 1950, awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, she traveled from Istanbul to Baghdad where she joined Barbara Parker and together they went from Basra to Susa and Tehran. On her return she received an invitation to teach the history of art at Queens College of the City University of New York. At the age of 38, after a long and intense immersion with artifacts but with no formal art historical training, Edith Porada became a professor, beginning what would be a lifelong commitment. She was ready to
1 Excerpt from the transcript of an interview that took place in New York City on 25 February 1987: "Austrian Oral History Project: The Reminiscence of Edith Porada," filed
in the Oral History Research Office, Columbia University, 1988.
143 AmericanJournal of Archaeology99 (1995) 143-46
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Edith Porada at Hagengut, Austria around 1950 turn her inexhaustible energies from the tasks of classification and organization to the creation and transmission of knowledge. She began as an assistant professor of art history at Queens College, where she taught Western art, while at the same time continuing to publish on ancient Near Eastern subjects, reaching now out from Mesopotamia, west to Cyprus, and east to Iran. This breadth and depth continued to accumulate to the end of her days, driven through her insatiable curiosity, her prodigious memory, and her gifted intuition. In 1958, at the urging of Rudolph Wittkower, the mastermind behind what became a leading department of art history and archaeology in the United States, shejoined the faculty at Columbia University. There, for the first time, she was able to concentrate her teaching solely in her area of expertise. She often spoke of the great intellectual debt
[AJA 99
she owed to Evelyn Harrison who was her colleague during those early years at Columbia. Having been appointed honorary curator of the seals and tablets in the collection of the Morgan Library in 1955, she used a basement storeroom as a classroom. In that small room, packed with file boxes full of plasticine impressions taken from every seal she had ever seen, books, offprints, slides, and photographic equipment, four generations of students flourished. She used the collection as a springboard to teach her students about every aspect of the art and society of the ancient Near Eastern civilizations. She demanded that they be responsible, as she was, for a vast range of knowledge, not as an end in itself, but because she believed that when trying to reconstruct human behavior from fragmentary remains, a clue from any quarter could provide the key. Thus we began in the Upper Palaeolithic and we ended with the Sasanians; and while Mesopotamia was always the heartland, we reached in every direction, from the Aegean and the Hittites to the Elamites and ancient Bactria. She had a complex teaching style that included humor, terror, narrative, and brilliant visual analysis, depending on a visual memory that was until the end enormous and virtually infallible. She also taught by example, setting standards that only the most gifted and talented dared to emulate. It was in those seminars that she forged the intellectual character of scholars who now carry on the discipline. Becoming the Arthur Lehman Professor of Art History and Archaeology in 1973, she retired as professor emerita in 1984. But of course, this change in status in no way diminished her contribution or her engagement with the students or the field. In 1983 the Edith Porada Professorship in Ancient Near Eastern Art History and Archaeology was established, ensuring the continuity of her legacy at Columbia. She continued to teach through the fall semester of 1993, when she held what she described as "the very best seminar of her career" During her tenure at Columbia, Edith Porada was the center through which everyone involved in the ancient Near East had to pass. Only the most oblivious came away unaffected. Through her, the small community of scholars was intensely alive. A continual stream of scholars passed through Morningside Heights from other parts of the United States, Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Middle East. One forum through which they shared their knowledge was the Columbia University Seminar on Chronologies in the Archaeology of the Eastern Mediterranean, Eastern Europe, and the Near East, whose membership drew scholars from the entire eastern seaboard. Between its founding in 1966 and her re-
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EDITH PORADA, 1912-1994
tirement, Porada edited more than 80 scholarly papers as part of the annual report of the Seminar that appeared in the pages of this journal. The impetus for the Seminar was the frustration felt at the compartmentalization of ancient fields at the completion of the second edition of the Chronologies. Twenty years later, in 1985, when the manuscript for the third edition had been submitted, she was able to say that the initial goal of the Seminar, to bridge the gap between scholars in contiguous fields of antiquity, had been reached. Dialogue had made a difference. Edith Porada lived the life of the mind. It had no intrinsic limits, bounded for her only by the hours in a day, and the days in a lifetime. It was a life that was complete, was full to overflowing and included all of the passions, emotions, strengths, and weaknesses of any other life. It seemed that everything in her life was somehow implicated in her work. And she gave to everything the same energy, intensely focused concentration, and dedication. She often would remark that she considered herself incredibly lucky to be able to do what she loved to do, and even to be paid for doing it. That passion was infectious. Her students and colleagues, her family and her lifelong friends, especially Happy Wieks Scully, understood, supported, and indeed shared in her passion, traveling with her to the wilds of Azerbaijan and to the shores of beautiful Cyprus. Her scholarship was prodigious. In her long career, she wrote nine monographs, 130 articles, and at least as many book reviews. She had several distinct approaches to her written legacy. On the one hand, she understood the fundamental value of the comprehensive systematic study. Seven such studies accomplished by her stand as classics in the field, among them The Collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library (Corpus of Ancient Near Eastern Seals in North American Collections I, Washington, D.C. 1948); Seal Impressionsfrom Nuzi (AASOR 24, New Haven 1947); The Art of Ancient Iran (New York 1965); the various versions of Chronologiesin Old WorldArchaeology;and "The Cylinder Seals Found at Thebes in Boeotia," AfO 28 (1981-1982) 1-70, 77-78. She also knew how much sustained effort such works took. So to remain productive in shorter spurts, she offered two other kinds of studies. One was the review article, in which she brought us all up to date. Since she commanded the bibliography, every seven years or so she would write an update of developments in the field of glyptic studies. She also wrote reviews of her own works, because she knew that she would be more critical than others, and she knew the mistakes. The other kind of article of which she was the master was the
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Edith Porada in New Yorkat the opening of the new wing of the Pierpont Morgan Library,1991 remark, or the short note. These were often found in festschrifts honoring her colleagues and would be directed toward a problem that she knew would engage them. While Porada's greatest strength lay in the analysis of the style and iconography of works of art, she knew the fundamental importance of archaeology to that effort. She therefore insisted that her students gain exposure to fieldwork. She had developed a strong interest in Cyprus through her work on the cylinder seals in the Cesnola collection in the Metropolitan Museum, and with the help of her friends Happy Scully and Vassos Karageorghis, then the Director of Antiquities in Cyprus, she established a field school on the north coast of Cyprus with a breathtaking view of the Mediterranean. There, a number of her students had their first, and probably most beautiful, field experience. She traveled to other parts of the Near East as well. She was particularly fond of Iran, to which she returned in 1960, the year after the stupendous find of the gold bowl was made at Hasanlu. Porada stayed there for some months to travel and to study the seals of Tchoga Zanbil. In 1976, she made a final visit as a guest of
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the Shah at the 2,500-year anniversary of the Pahlavi dynasty. She would laugh when she told the story of how on the trip home on the Concorde she sat next to Elizabeth Taylor and told her all about cylinder seals. She believed strongly in tradition and in close human ties. For many years she lived on 38th Street in Chelsea with her father. She ministered to him in his last days in Hagengut where she wrote the German edition of The Art of Ancient Iran. She often described how the pilgrims who came to the reliquary church at Mariazell and took away souvenirs were just like the visitors to the Old Babylonian temples who bought terracotta plaques. During the precious summer months, together with family and friends, she would take long walks in the wooded hills. During the day informal seminars were held on cylinder seals, and at night, after an elegant dinner, cutthroat Scrabble games went on late into the night. It was there that she gained her understanding and empathy toward animals of all kinds, especially horned quadrupeds, and toward the rituals that humankind constructs in order to live in harmony with nature. The multiple levels on which Edith Porada engaged the field were bonded together through the humanistic goal of enlivening the past. She was not interested in universal laws of cultures or human behavior; rather she preferred to focus on the specific level of human beings, individuals if possible, and their communities, their habits, their histories. Through the work of art, the visual expression, she would strive to piece together what they believed, what they
feared, what they thought, how they saw. Many of her conclusions were based on intuition built over decades of close and intense involvement with the material and verbal cultures of the ancient civilizations. In accepting the AIA award, she observed that her "main function has been, and is, to be an intermediary between knowledge and students, colleagues and friends." Although it was in the realm of the ancient Near East that she was most directly engaged, she took all intellectual endeavor seriously. While Edith Porada understood the complexities of modern life, she had a strong moral character and appreciated it in others. She believed in personal responsibility and free choice and she was singleminded in her priorities. People were the most important aspect of life, and her work was an integral part of her relations with them. Because of her forthrightness she was acutely perceptive and able to make clear and accurate judgments about people on her own terms. And to those whom she had made a commitment, she was tenaciously loyal, even in the face of betrayal. Until the very end she was passionately engaged in life. The last time that I saw her, she looked at me intensely and instructed me that there were to be "no sad eyes" Her brilliant, witty, forceful presence is sorely missed.
DEPARTMENT OF THE HISTORY OF ART UNIVERSITY
3405
OF PENNSYLVANIA
WOODLAND
PHILADELPHIA,
WALK
PENNSYLVANIA
[email protected]
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19104-6208
