Untangling the Many Faces of Edgar James Banks: Archaeologist, Lecturer, and Film Producer

Introduction

In 1945, Edgar James Banks died in Eustis, Florida surrounded by 350 acres of orange groves and stories of courageous deeds and exotic travel. Labeled as both “one of the foremost authorities in the United States on archaeology”¹ and an “incautious and tireless self-promoter,”² he is perhaps best known in the American archaeological world for the sale of tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets to colleges, museums, libraries, and individual collectors around the USA. While views of him in the twenty-first century certainly differ, it is likely because Banks was a master manipulator of his image, just as capable of selling himself as he was ancient artifacts. The role of the popular academic seemed more appealing to him than that of the traditional academic, seeking out people or things to which to attach himself in an effort to raise his profile.

The digital project Where is the Cuneiform?, which traces cuneiform items in college and university collections in the United States, includes 242 college and university collections, of which Banks is attached to 46.³ He frequently bought collections of cuneiform tablets on the market in the Ottoman Empire and resold them in small batches upon his return to the USA. For example, he is known as the person who sold the famous Plimpton 322 tablet to American publisher and philanthropist George Arthur Plimpton (1855–1936) before it was donated to Columbia University. Plimpton 322 is an Old Babylonian tablet that shows the mathematical relationship between the sides of right triangles, proving the formula was known in Mesopotamia long before Pythagoras came along. With his name attached to such tablets and such a large number of collections, his life, his work, and his motivations are worth examining more closely.

To read about Banks today is to read at once about a skilled excavator, a shameless self-promoter, a prolific speaker, and a conman and grifter. Banks’s story has been featured in local news stories, academic articles, and college magazines, and each paints its own picture of who he was. Nancy Freudenthal for Harvard Magazine notes that “one gets the impression that at heart he was more of a popularizer than a scholar.”⁴ She describes a skilled salesman hawking his cuneiform tablets in a tried and true formula in which he outlined his credentials, dangled a morsel of temptation in front of the potential buyer, and then created a sense of urgency through the illusion of heavy interest from another party.⁵ Craig Crossen takes a more cynical approach, suggesting that Banks did not know much of what he was doing and stumbled his way through his archaeological work.⁶ He closes his article with even harsher words, frankly stating, “Basically, Banks was a high-class grifter who ‘conned’ the University of Chicago (and thus, indirectly, John D. Rockefeller) into financing his private-enterprise venture into black market Babylonian antiquities.”⁷ Though more measured than Crossen, the Assyriologist Benjamin Foster called Banks “incautious and a tireless self-promoter.”⁸ Despite the generally negative attention Banks has received in the past couple of decades, one voice remains steadfast in shining a positive light on the archaeologist: Ewa Wasilewska.

Wasilewska is an instructor in the department of Anthropology at the University of Utah and has been interested in Banks for years. According to her faculty page⁹ and her personal website,¹⁰ she has been working on a biography of Banks for some time now and has become the go-to scholar on Banks. For Wasilewska, Banks wasn’t a grifter, con man, or tireless self-promoter; he was a dreamer and adventurer looking to rescue cuneiform tablets from those who would not care for them, and who was wrongly accused of stealing antiquities for his own benefit. In a 2007 article for the Village Daily Sun, Wasilewska is quoted as adamant that Banks was never involved in any wrongdoing, is the victim of baseless claims on the Internet, and “was one of the most honest men in the whole world.”¹¹ Similar defenses of Banks can be found in the work of Samuel Redman¹² and Crystal J. Gamradt, who both reached out to Wasilewska in the course of their research. In emails to Gamradt, Wasilewska repeatedly asserts that when Banks imported cuneiform tablets into the United States, no laws were broken, he simply wanted to make sure the tablets were in good hands, and was never in it for the money.¹³ These claims are repeated in Gamradt’s essay on the cuneiform tablet collection held at South Dakota State University.¹⁴

While this article seeks to make some sense of the muddled image we now have of Banks on his own, understanding him is but one piece of a much larger puzzle surrounding European and American presences in Ottoman Iraq. Banks would not arrive in Ottoman-ruled territory until 1898, making him a latecomer in a long line of missionaries, travelers, and archaeologists who had profited from the Western enthusiasm for Oriental tropes of derring-do and thirst for validation for the stories they knew from the Bible. By the time the first American explorers were making their way to the Middle East, European travelers had been sharing their narratives with the world for centuries. However, readers in the United States felt those stories were lacking something distinctly American and sought to write their own.¹⁵ For many Americans in the 19th century, there was a kind of mythic bond between the foundations of the United States and the stories of the Bible.¹⁶ The travel narratives that would influence people like Banks fed into this belief and made it feel more concrete.

Some American travelers in particular, who not only set the stage for Banks but for American exploration of the Middle East for the rest of the 19th century, were John Lloyd Stephens (1805–1852) and Edward G. Robinson (1794–1863). Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land and Robinson’s Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai and Arabia Petraea set the stage for not only the distinctly American voice of exploration of the region, but for the scientific tone of such exploration that would lend credence to the study of the Bible as an academic text.¹⁷ In the second half of the 19th century, American university departments began to embrace Biblical archaeology more fully, which gave these travelers–and now, archaeologists–more prestige, and even, a sense of heroism. Explorers would return from the Middle East with a kind of “male aggressiveness” and scholarly bravado that was constructed through the idea of a lengthy and dangerous journey overseas in the service of understanding “a mysterious yet scientific past.”¹⁸

Continuing in the tradition of those who came before him, Banks like other scholar-collectors problematizes the idea of what it means to be an antiquities dealer and de facto views on what made the trade in artifacts legitimate or illegitimate. It was not uncommon for curators and scholars in the 19th and early 20th centuries to build their collections through relationships with antiquities dealers, who approached these scholars knowing they would be willing to purchase from them.¹⁹ These relationships were not always out in the open, but in being kept secret allowed for scholars and museum professionals to keep their hands clean from the actual act of looting, benefiting financially, socially, and politically from those willing to more explicitly break the law.²⁰ Stories of Banks and his activities appear to have him playing both the role of looter and of scholarly buyer.

Banks was certainly not an original character in the story of American scholarly engagement with the history and objects of the Ottoman Empire. And yet, the story surrounding him can be described as a series of tangled threads that each show an ability to manipulate his personal image in the tradition of those who came before him and in a way that takes advantage of American interest in travels to the Middle East. This article attempts to make sense of these tangled threads and their wider implications through a historiographical analysis of past secondary scholarship, and an exploration of public media, newspaper advertisements, and Banks’s own writings.

Banks as Archaeologist and Academic

It is hardly a surprise that Banks has both his defenders and his detractors. The story that has been told about that path is full of lacunae. The most we know of his early life is that Banks was born in 1866 in Vermont. He would go on to study at Harvard, where he earned his BA in 1893 and his MA in 1894.²¹ It appears that his intention was to remain at Harvard for his PhD, but a falling out with eminent American Assyriologist David Lyon (1852–1935) would send him abroad to earn his PhD from the University of Breslau.²² In 1898 Banks took up the post of American consul to Baghdad, a post from which he would make his first attempt at establishing a dig site in Mesopotamia.²³ Initially, Banks approached Harvard as a sponsor of a potential Mesopotamian excavation, as Banks was a Harvard man after all and this had played a role in securing him the consular position.

In taking up the position as consul, Banks was expected to help the process of obtaining a firman on behalf of Harvard, which was not uncommon at the time, but was a practice that Ottoman authorities were serious about preventing.²⁴ A firman, a formal authorization from the Ottoman government, was the legal instrument that allowed any kind of archaeological work to go forward. Firmans are still at the center of provenance debates today, as important now as they were in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A notable example is the firman that Lord Elgin claimed to have received to remove the Parthenon Marbles that are now in the British Museum from their original location.²⁵ From the earliest excavations in the Ottoman Empire, ambassadors and consuls played a role not only in securing firmans, but directing everyone from archaeologists to travelers as to where they might find ancient artifacts, sometimes using the cover of their diplomatic positions to avoid punishment for aiding in the illegal export of antiquities. Some notable examples of ambassador and consul positions playing a role in the archaeology of the area include Frenchman Paul Émile Botta (1802–1870) excavating at Nineveh in 1842 and at Khorsabad in 1843 as the French consul at Mosul and English archaeologist Austen Henry Layard’s (1817–1894) excavations at Nimrud being sponsored by the British ambassador at Istanbul.²⁶

The process of securing a firman for the Banks-Harvard team dragged on longer than Harvard was willing to wait, eventually abandoning the project.²⁷ It was then that Banks turned to the University of Chicago–at the time still a young university–and benefactor John D. Rockefeller, as a potential sponsor for his dreams of leading an archaeological investigation. While he waited for what he hoped was good news, Banks took up teaching at Roberts College in Istanbul starting in 1902.²⁸ This time, the firman process was successful, and in 1903, digging at the southern Mesopotamian site of Bismaya began. It would be the second Babylonian site explored by US archaeologists, after Nippur, and digging would end in early 1904.²⁹

It was the German Assyriologist Hermann Hilprecht (1859–1925), American clergyman John Punnett Peters (1852–1921), and American archaeologist John Henry Haynes (1849–1910) digging at Nippur on behalf of the University of Pennsylvania that kickstarted American archaeology in the Middle East, the momentum of which Banks was riding. However, the Americans were late to the scene, following in the footsteps of European excavations like Botta’s in Nineveh and Khorsabad, Layard’s at Nimrud, and the German archaeologist Robert Koldewey’s (1855–1925) at Babylon in the late nineteenth century. Even these archaeologists were not the first to spark interest in the area. Travel memoirs from European explorers like the British antiquarian Claudius James Rich³⁰ (1787–1821) first ignited interest in the history and spectacle of the Middle East at the beginning of the nineteenth century. For the United States specifically, the major impetus for interest in the area came from biblical study. While travel memoirs certainly found their way into American hands, it was the increased printing of the Bible in the 19th century that often included illustrations of things like cuneiform tablets that fueled American zeal for these distant lands. Mesopotamia as part of the biblical world was much more a part of American interest than an academic interest in archaeology and history.³¹ Banks sought to capitalize on the increased interest at home through his archaeological efforts, but difficulties would arise almost immediately.

Tensions between Chicago and Banks were becoming apparent before the official end of the excavation. Chicago had sent Banks two assistants for his work, Jason Paige then V.S. Persons, both of whom Banks felt were too fragile for the hard work necessary in the field. He would hold this against Chicago, dedicating space to the complaints in his book on the excavations.³² The conflict between Banks and Chicago would come to a head over the statue that Banks would claim was the oldest in the world and a depiction of King David, an idea that was based on a mistranslation of the text on the statue. Chicago accused Banks of trying to steal the statue and other antiquities, shipping them back to Chicago in purposely mislabeled boxes.³³ Banks claimed that American Assyriologist Robert Francis Harper (1864–1914) of the University of Chicago had ordered him to smuggle antiquities into the US, before eventually turning on him and sabotaging Banks’s career.³⁴ It appears that Banks and Rudolf Herner, who served as vice-consul in Baghdad from 1897 to 1906, orchestrated the smuggling of the statue, but plans were complicated when knowledge of the find became public.³⁵

Wasilewska will tell you, as she did Redman and Crossen, that the accusations against Banks were false, and Chicago pursued the charges of theft against Banks to appropriate his finds and publish them without him. It was then that Banks voluntarily walked away from academia.³⁶ However, despite the claims to the contrary, Ottoman officials were paying attention to the Western archaeologists’ tendency to ignore Ottoman laws and export antiquities from the area. For the Ottomans, the American presence in Mesopotamia was yet another group joining the mission of Western imperialism in the Middle East, for which control of antiquities was a central part.³⁷ Originally, following the attempted smuggling, Chicago wanted Banks to return to Bismaya, but pressure from the Ottoman authorities prevented him from returning.³⁸ Chicago distanced itself from Banks and he was never able to fully reintegrate into the academic sphere. He held an academic position at the University of Toledo in Ohio, but was never fully welcomed back into the fold.³⁹

Banks and the Spread of Cuneiform Tablets in the United States

Forced from academia, Banks looked elsewhere to build the career and notoriety that he seemed to crave. Following his return to the United States, Banks turned his attention to lecturing, and selling cuneiform tablets that he had acquired while in the Middle East. Academics and journalists agree that Banks sold tens of thousands of tablets to museums, universities, and wealthy collectors across the country.⁴⁰ In an email to Gamradt, Wasilewska claims that Banks sold tablets whenever he could after 1912, with the collections becoming progressively smaller into the 1920s and 1930s.⁴¹ What Banks was doing–buying tablets in the Middle East and bringing them to the USA to sell–was a violation of the 1884 Ottoman antiquities law that established national ownership over all artifacts in the Ottoman Empire, mandating approval from the Imperial Museum of Constantinople for the export of any of these objects. The 1884 law was established to strengthen an 1874 law that regulated the movement of artifacts but still allowed for the right to division of artifacts between landowners, the government, and foreign archaeologists. Unfortunately, this law was incredibly difficult to enforce, and as excavations continued, so did looting and illegal buying and selling of artifacts. A 1906 law was passed in an attempt to close some of the loopholes that allowed this illegal activity to go unchecked, but artifacts continued to be trafficked and excavators continued to complain about lack of access to materials.⁴²

Collectors–individuals or institutions–have many reasons for forming collections of antiquities, including but not limited to displaying power over a conquered territory, displaying wealth as a form of social or political power, collecting as a form of investment, and collecting in relation to the collections of others. As American interest in the Middle East grew, the idea of owning a piece of that history became more enticing. Plimpton, who purchased a collection of tablets from Banks, was a highly successful New York publisher, looking for ways to spend some of his accumulated wealth. Knowing this, Banks targeted him as someone to sell his own objects to.⁴³ Colleges and universities at the time had increasingly come to see themselves as museums of knowledge in their ambition to “map and order the knowable world in order to create a microcosm within their chambers.”⁴⁴ Cuneiform became especially appealing in creating this narrative as many take these tablets to represent the earliest examples of urban civilization and written communication. As many of these collections formed in the early 20th century, university collections were being understood as vital to scholarly knowledge creation, and institutional leadership began to see investing in the capacity of such collections as a way to gain an advantage over peer institutions internationally.⁴⁵

Playing on these desires, Banks would specifically target via letter the highest authorities at these institutions, sometimes consulting “Who’s Who in America” for potential buyers.⁴⁶ Banks used a similar format in each of his letters, beginning with the claim that the tablets had somehow landed in his lap, and claiming that he could guarantee that they were genuine.⁴⁷ These letters were also a prime opportunity for Banks to tout his own credentials, presenting himself as an eminent academic still connected with the University of Chicago. For many years after the Bismaya excavation, Banks would sign his letters as the Field Director of the Recent Babylonian Expedition from the University of Chicago.⁴⁸ His actions mirror those of the Polish antiquarian and bookseller Moses Shapira (1830–1884), who was a known dealer in both authentic and forged antiquities in Ottoman Palestine. In addition to describing himself as a bookseller and antiquarian, Shapira promoted himself as an “Agent of the British Museum” on his business cards.⁴⁹

Redman documents an exchange between Chicago and Dr. Louis H. Powell, once the director of the Science Museum of Minnesota, highlighting the reality that Banks was using this title to bolster his image. Powell wrote to Chicago after developing suspicions about Banks and his credentials.⁵⁰ Clara Havill, secretary to Dr. John A. Wilson, wrote back to say “We do not feel that Mr. Banks is justified in using the name of the University of Chicago for furtherance of these sales.”⁵¹ While these letters were private correspondence, Banks was doing much more publicly on the lecture circuit, using the Chicago name alongside descriptors like explorer, traveler, and brilliant speaker to craft an image of himself as a successful and popular academic, much like the Indiana Jones character that some claim he inspired.

Forming a Public Picture of Edgar J. Banks

Evidence of Banks’s lectures first appeared in newspapers in 1898 with a notice for a talk in Morrisville, VT on “The Life and Habits, the Country and Religion of the Arabs of the Desert.”⁵² He is, for the most part, consistently active on the lecture circuit until the early 1920s, with a small gap in the schedule during his time abroad at Bismaya. 1911 and 1917 appear to be his most active years, in which he gave 11 and 10 lectures respectively. In embarking on this lecture tour, Banks was building on a tradition that began almost a hundred years before with the early American travelers to the Ottoman region. The Lyceum movement of the first half of the 19th century was bringing pilgrimage authors directly to American audiences through public lectures featuring art and photography that made real the lands of the Bible.⁵³

Banks traveled over 25 states to give lectures, often pulling from a repertoire of prepared talks, some of which shared titles with books he authored. For example, Banks gave the lecture “The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World” at least 11 times, making it his most popular lecture in addition to the title of his 1916 book. Similarly, he gave the lecture “The Bible and the Spade” six times, which shared a title with his 1913 follow-up to his book on his time at Bismaya.⁵⁴ These lectures were more than just promotional opportunities for his written work, but for Banks himself as a public scholar. The image that Banks was crafting for himself was perhaps most apparent in how he was described in over one hundred newspaper advertisements for his speaking engagements.

Even a century later it can be difficult to control how a news outlet refers to you, even when given something like a press release from which to work. It cannot be said that Banks maintained complete control over how he was depicted by newspapers advertising his talks. However, we can assume that at least some of these grandiose descriptions had their origins with Banks. Of the 119 advertisements I found in Chronicling America for Banks’s lectures, 75 included some kind of descriptor of his career and accomplishments. Banks was described with a mixture of plain and grandiose, true and false statements. Just as he described himself in his letters to potential buyers, Banks is referred to as the field director of the Chicago Babylonian Expedition 19 times and for at least 17 years past the conclusion of the excavation.⁵⁵ 12 times he is referred to as a professor of the Turkish language at the University of Chicago, which does not appear to have been true.⁵⁶ Again, it is very possible that these newspapers are sharing incorrect information through no fault of Banks’s own. However, it seems more possible that Banks was more than happy to spread this information about himself, considering his eagerness to connect himself to Chicago through his letters offering cuneiform tablets for sale. In addition to connecting himself to Chicago in any way that he could, Banks also used broader descriptions that molded him into an Indiana Jones-like explorer having returned from his adventures to share them with the public.

Most commonly Banks is referred to as a noted explorer, archaeologist, and traveler. He is also called a brilliant and forceful speaker,⁵⁷ and very interesting⁵⁸ with a national reputation.⁵⁹ A kind of lore about his time in the Middle East begins to emerge the more lectures he gives and the more local newspapers advertise them. In a May 3, 1913 notice for a Vermont lecture, The Brattleboro Daily Reformer writes that Banks was “twice arrested by the Turkish Authorities as a foreign spy.”⁶⁰ The story is repeated by the Arizona Republican on March 16, 1915.⁶¹ Banks is also often cited as the first American to ascend Mt. Ararat, a story that makes an appearance in the newspapers as well. Often added on to that adventure is the claim that he “disguised as an Arab, crossed the Arabian desert by camel,”⁶² the mention of the disguise underscoring the supposed danger of the mission. A May 5, 1913 article in The Brattleboro Daily Reformer previews this expedition and its high risk in saying that Banks was “planning an expedition into the heart of Arabia this summer. The country has never been explored and it will be necessary to go under disguise. Even then the undertaking will be attended with great danger.”⁶³ This image of himself as an intrepid explorer, taking dangerous chances, while also contributing to archaeological knowledge through his work with high-profile institutions comes through in Banks’s own writing about his research and experiences.

Banks did not hesitate to tout his own accomplishments in his writing, reminding readers of the strength of his academic contributions and the intrigue of his explorations abroad. Over the course of several publications, Banks paints Ottoman officials as irresponsible and poor stewards of their own cultural heritage, as well as himself as the archaeologist who worked to right these wrongs. In doing so, Banks aligned himself with many scholars who visited Ottoman territory. For example, Lebanese antiquities dealer Azeez Khayat (1875–1943) lamented the “ignorance and greed of rulers that limited archaeological discoveries.”⁶⁴

After spending most of the first hundred pages of his book on Bismaya painting a picture of himself as an intrepid explorer traveling across Mesopotamia, Banks tells the story of visiting a structure built by Nebuchadnezzar and attempting to measure it more carefully than his predecessors only to be stopped by the guard house and local worshippers.⁶⁵ Descriptions of interference from the Ottoman officials only intensified in Banks’s writings over the course of the book and in his future writings. In the same publication, Banks writes of discovering hundreds of tablets in a palace complex that he then “rescued” from their findspots.⁶⁶ Seven years later, in an article for Scientific American, Banks levels even more serious accusations against Ottoman archaeologists. He writes that, “Whenever a Turk has found a human portrait sculpted in stone by some ancient artist, it has been his sacred duty to destroy it.”⁶⁷ He complains extensively about both the difficulty in obtaining a firman from the Ottoman government and the number of treasures that have been lost to the world due to Ottoman incompetence. He again invokes the language of rescue when describing a situation where a human-headed marble figure was found at Nineveh that was lost despite the fact that Banks “tried in vain to rescue the monster from the hands of the vandals.”⁶⁸

One can only think of the thousands of tablets that Banks was personally responsible for importing into the US and then selling when reading his denunciation of the Ottoman government and their handling of their cultural heritage. At the time of these writings, he had been blacklisted from academia, made an example of, likely for this behavior. In painting the Ottoman people as those who would have destroyed these objects if given the chance, Banks positions himself as the contrast, as the hero who prevented this destruction by removing objects from a dangerous situation. For Banks, he was the accomplished academic who had “recovered a distinct picture of the age when the Semites first appeared in the world’s history,”⁶⁹ while the Ottoman officials were the corrupt officials who could be bribed into allowing their country’s treasures to populate the modern museums of the US.⁷⁰ If someone were interested in stemming the flow of antiquities from the Middle East that Banks himself had been a part of, all one had to do was stop the Ottoman interference and then “the illicit digging by the Arabs will cease, for the traffic in antiquities and the smuggling of them from the country will no longer be possible.”⁷¹ Despite Banks himself not only not working to stop the movement of antiquities out of the Middle East, but contributing to it himself, he took multiple opportunities to paint himself in contrast to the Ottoman people to shed better light on his own activities.

Banks as Popularizer

While it would seem Banks took any chance he could get to use the printed word to disparage others, he was also a prolific writer of public scholarship. Much of his writing was done for publications like Scientific American and Putnam’s, but was reprinted in local newspapers for a wider reach. Not only was he putting himself in front of the public literally in standing behind a lectern, but figuratively through his writing. From 1910 to 1915, Banks published four articles with Scientific American on such topics as ancient metallurgy, Nebuchadnezzar, and the most recent discoveries from Mesopotamia.⁷² In 1906 the Mount Vernon Signal published an article by Banks on the history and evolution of the lamp, which was subsequently reprinted by seven newspapers across five states.⁷³ The next year, another Banks article, this time on the “Oldest City in the World,” was printed for the first time in Putnam’s before being reprinted in three newspapers across three different states.

The interest in explaining complex subjects to a public audience found its way into his books as well. In his book on Bismaya, Banks makes an effort to explain such topics as the formation of a tell to the non-archaeologist reader: “Those to whom the subject of Assyriology is new, frequently wonder how it is possible for a large Babylonian city to turn to mounds of clay, or how it happens that as the excavator digs down through the mounds, he finds layers of ruins, one beneath the other, each representing a city at a different age.”⁷⁴ His subsequent books took a similar tone, in some cases featuring explicit statements as to the intended audience for his words. His 1916 work, The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, included a note that the impetus for the book began as a magazine article.⁷⁵ The Bible and the Spade, his follow-up to Bismaya, includes the following in the front matter:

Interest in the Bible and the promise of some kind of proof that the stories in the Bible are factual was a motivating factor for much of the initial exploration of the Middle East by Americans. Banks tapped into this not only in his writing, but for his lectures. Many of his lectures were given at YMCAs or local churches, catering to an audience that was similarly motivated to better understand the stories that were part of their Christian faith.⁷⁷ While there is undeniable benefit in scholars sharing their work with a wider audience, it also appears that Banks was working to capitalize on the religion angle specifically. Interest in the ancient Middle East, for academics and the public alike, was fueled by a desire to understand the Bible and even find archaeological proof for the stories within. In playing to these interests and desires, Banks is able to position himself as the expert providing the insight the public is looking for. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in Banks’s third professional act: the film industry.

Just as it does today, Hollywood and the film industry in general is seen as a quick way to raise one’s profile and reach a national, even worldwide, audience. In the early 1920s, the number of lectures Banks was giving began to wane, which appears to be related to his interest in making popular films on similar topics to his lectures. Banks claims that in 1921 he was invited to Hollywood by famous director Cecil B. DeMille to consult on historical matters related to DeMille’s biblical stories.⁷⁸ At the time, DeMille’s Biblical epics were some of the most popular films being shown for both popular and critical audiences. His supposed consultations continued into the next year, during which he served as a producer for Sacred Films. His role in this company and the impact it had is a story that has largely been controlled by Banks’s own narrative of the time. Just as he did with his credentials in selling tablets and in promoting his lectures, Banks increasingly inflated his own contributions.

Writing for The Educational Screen, Banks describes a tragedy in the public school system: the teaching of the Bible is forbidden. He offers the solution of educational films on stories from the Bible, 12 of which have been completed and another 16 are in production.⁷⁹ He writes that though several companies have tried and failed to fill this role, Sacred Films has survived and succeeded. Already having positioned himself as a kind of hero doing the work that many others could not, Banks set out on his own at the end of 1922 to form his own film company and continue his mission. Seminole Films, Inc. was incorporated in November 1922 in Eustis, Florida. In April of 1923, a Bell and Howell 2709 camera was sold to Banks for the production of his films.⁸⁰ In the local announcement for Banks’s new company, he is referred to as not just a former producer for Sacred Films, but also as the former vice president, director, general manager, and scene writer for the company. He is also said to have already engaged “several prominent citizens” in assisting him with the necessary funds required by a production company.⁸¹ Banks continued to not be shy about promoting his connections to powerful people and in crafting a narrative that positions him as not only an expert, but a highly successful one whose aim was to right the wrongs of broken systems.

As with most things with Banks, it is difficult, if not impossible, to get at the truth. Did he produce at least 12 Bible films? Was Seminole Films as successful as he claimed Sacred Films to have been? Very few traces of Seminole Films remain. Banks’s daughter has reported that her father destroyed all films produced by Seminole as he was dissatisfied with the final product.⁸² Some 1938 correspondence between Banks and publisher Charles Lesley Ames concerning an exhibit on Babylonian gods included stills from the Bible film The Rescue of Lot, a Sacred Films film for which Banks claims he reconstructed the city of Ur.⁸³ The films were brought up in correspondence by Banks, perhaps as yet another way to boost his credentials. A further 200 film stills remained in Banks’s family, providing further evidence that Sacred Films and Seminole Films produced at least some Bible stories.⁸⁴

Lacking substantive remnants of Banks’s film career, and forced to rely largely on words from Banks himself, it appears that his time in the film industry was rife with yet more master manipulation of his own image. By the time of his involvement with Sacred Films, Banks had already positioned himself as a rescuer of antiquities mishandled by the Ottoman government, an intrepid explorer going where no other American had gone before, and an eminent public lecturer spreading his expertise on the Bible and the Middle East. It follows that however his film career actually went, he would make sure to connect himself to both figures like DeMille and to important missions like spreading stories of the Bible in a world that no longer felt they were important to teach. Without enduring evidence of such supposed successes, we are left with Banks’s words and those of his promoters like Wasilewska, who assures us that the film companies were secret, “but many important people were involved, including famous actors and actresses.”⁸⁵

Who Was Banks Emulating?

Though certainly a character who stood out in his own way, Banks was not operating in a vacuum, and in many ways he was a product of his time. Banks appears to have been heavily influenced by the religious zealotry that drove many of his contemporaries to explore the Middle East in search of the Bible, and by seeing the fame and success it had garnered others. From the late 19th century, explorers of the Near East were deeply committed to uncovering the truth of the Old Testament, seeing their work as being on the front lines of the defense of the study of the Bible.⁸⁶ This feeling was certainly more prevalent among American explorers than European ones.

Banks appears to have seen himself as such a crusader, following the goals of the American religious explorer, but hoping for the fame that accompanied the returning European archaeologists. At the time that Banks was beginning his studies, Hilprecht was excavating at Nippur for the University of Pennsylvania. When Hilprecht arrived in the United States, he was at the height of his fame. Newspapers reported of his heroism in leading dangerous expeditions and of his skill in uncovering an ancient library.⁸⁷ Banks too claimed to have found a library at Bismaya in addition to his claims of his own Near Eastern exploits, perhaps in an effort to duplicate the praise he saw being bestowed on Hilprecht.

Hilprecht was also lauded for his contributions to the then newly constructed University Museum at the University of Pennsylvania. The building itself was striking architecturally and its collections were meant to be a sign that the United States had fully entered the discussion with European collections in mounting an assemblage of items symbolic of high culture from around the world.⁸⁸ Banks hoped to do the same for Harvard, but their frustration with the firman process eliminated that possibility. While Chicago ended up being the sponsor of the Bismaya excavations, Banks’s finds were to be sent to the Smithsonian. It is perhaps the instinct to be seen in the same light as Hilprecht that motivated Banks to illegally import the thousands of cuneiform tablets he would come to be associated with. However, he made a fatal miscalculation. There was an unspoken code around bringing treasures back from overseas excavations. As Bruce Kuklick writes, “Receiving stolen property was fine, but the direct and public accusation of robbery was damning.”⁸⁹ Archaeologists like Hilprecht, and later Albert T. Clay of the Yale Babylonian Collection, were allowed to receive stolen goods, but stealing them oneself was frowned upon. Though without the notoriety from the academic world that he hoped for, Banks certainly made a name for himself populating the US’s institutions with cuneiform tablets.

Another contemporary of Banks’s worthy of inspiration was James Henry Breasted, also of the University of Chicago. While Banks was completing his education, Breasted was excavating in Egypt under the Chicago banner and taking the first steps towards the creation of the Oriental Institute (now the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures). In addition to his academic achievements, Breasted was accomplished at writing ancient history in an accessible manner. His book, Ancient Times (1916) was regarded as balancing an authoritative with a popular voice in a way that made it clear the book was not just for the highly educated.⁹⁰ Banks had a similar goal for his publications, saying as much in the introduction to his work The Bible and the Spade, quoted above. Banks was also ahead of Breasted in this regard, writing his articles for a public audience years before Breasted’s book was published. However, Banks never seems to have been praised for this effort in the same way his counterparts with academic appointments were.

Conclusion

Even in hearing from Banks himself, it’s difficult to come to any kind of conclusion as to who Banks truly was or what motivations were at the core of his actions. Surrounded by academics doing the work he wanted to be doing with the institutions he wanted to be associated with and even being praised for similar work that he did in silence or was even criticized for almost certainly had an effect. When continuing his association with Harvard didn’t work out, he sought out Chicago and their sponsorship. Academia never welcomed him fully back into the fold after he was found to be importing, buying, and selling cuneiform objects himself against Ottoman law, and, more importantly, against the unwritten rules of his field at the time. Banks was prolific on the lecture circuit and managed to continue selling cuneiform objects to some of the most notable academic leaders in the country, but still he wanted more and took a chance on the film industry. In each of these endeavors, Banks painted himself as an expert, an adventurer, a savior, and a popularizer.

There are many possible reasons as to why these diverging versions of Banks’ legacy persist today, likely contributing at least a little bit in their own way. Banks’ role in the formation of so many American collections of cuneiform objects and the still present resistance to fully confront provenance issues of the past could certainly lead to a kind of willful ignorance about Banks. This is certainly not true for every one of the collections he contributed to, but it can be upsetting to learn that a collection in your institution’s possession was likely looted. On the opposite end of the spectrum is a continued willingness to work with the collections that Banks helped form, regardless of how they may have found their way into the United States. Much of scholarly debate over engagement with the antiquities trade has been over the publication of unprovenanced or problematically provenanced materials. Wasilewska, for example, has published translations of several of Banks’s collections in Arizona and Utah, along with American Assyriologist David I. Owen of Cornell University.⁹¹ Owen has argued in opposition to refraining from publication of problematic collections in stating that scholarship and politics should remain separate.⁹² For those uninterested in confronting the nature of how ancient objects find their way into our collections, there is a vested interest in maintaining a muddled narrative around the actors involved.

Over the course of the many acts of his career–archaeologist, antiquities dealer, public lecturer, and filmmaker–Banks appeared to be more interested in popularizing himself and attaching himself to people and institutions that could raise his public profile. In some ways he was successful. There are people today like Ewa Wasilewska, who insist that Banks was a good man with good intentions and a brilliant academic record. However, it seems that the voices of criticism outweigh those of praise. Always self-promoting, Banks was a master manipulator of his image, leaving us today with a fractured image and more investigation to do to better understand the depths of the man who is responsible for so many of the cuneiform tablets Americans interact with today.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.