Presentation Date:
While busy founding Harvard’s Semitic Museum, organizing several archeological expeditions to the Near East, establishing the Division of Semitic Languages and History, holding a sequence of prestigious professorships, and playing an outsized part in the life of the university, David Gordon Lyon (1852–1935) also found the time to write over 38 volumes of diaries. These journals not only shed light on his activities, but also offer unprecedented detail about the internal life of the university during those years in which it was emerging as one of the greatest research universities in the world. Professor Peter Der Manuelian, the current director of the Harvard Semitic Museum, realized the significance of these diaries and is leading a project, called “Harvard and the Ancient Near East: The David Gordon Lyon Diaries,” to digitize and transcribe them into human- and machine-readable form. For more information, and an interview in four short segments with Manuelian, click here.
