Harald Ingholt collected material for his research on the Palmyrene funerary portraits before and while working on his higher doctoral dissertation, published as Studier over Palmyrensk Skulptur in 1928. The material was donated to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen after Ingholt’s retirement in 1983. At this point, it became an archive of its own, today known as the Ingholt Archive. Alongside the archive, there are six excavation diaries stemming from Ingholt’s fieldwork in Palmyra. Furthermore, photographs of the work in Palmyra, monuments in the city, and from Ingholt’s trips in the region were also amongst the archival material. This shows that not all his material was organized when it entered the museum or that it had been subsequently reorganised. Together, this forms a unique research source on the Palmyrene graves and funerary portraits.
During a lecture in 1922, Ingholt first mentioned his aspiration to comprehensively present the Palmyrene funerary portraits. The early stage of the archive must have been formed between the lecture and the publication of his dissertation in 1928. Each sheet contains an image (either a photograph, a cutout from publications, or photocopies from publications) and notes on an A4 sheet of paper. There are 540 portraits mentioned in his book; each was given a ‘PS’ number (standing for Palmyrensk Skulptur) that links the book with the paper sheets he used to organize the portraits chronologically.
Publication, however, did not mean the end of his ongoing image collection. Ingholt continuously added Palmyrene portraits that he saw in museums or that he read about in publications of other scholars, assigning sheets with PS numbers up to 1506. The sheets do not only show loculus reliefs, the group of portraits he started out working with, but also sarcophagi, stelai, and architectural reliefs. He also returned to the sheets to add bibliographic references, proving that he worked on the portraits into the mid-to-late-1970s.
Ingholt excavated in Palmyra in the 1920s and 1930s. The excavation diaries archived at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek stem from his campaigns in 1924, 1925, and 1928. During those three years, Ingholt excavated around 80 hypogea, underground tombs, in the south-western necropolis. In his diaries, Ingholt documented the tombs’ inscriptions, structure, interior decoration, and portraiture. All the tombs had been disturbed from Antiquity onwards and none were found in pristine condition. The diaries are thus the only documentation of their preservation at the point of (re-)excavation. Ground plans, including measurements and drawings of small finds such as tesserae (small clay tokens), accompany the detailed descriptions. Besides documenting his excavations, Ingholt also wrote about daily life at the excavation (see 7. Excavation Life in 1920s Palmyra) and his communication with other scholars (see 6. Harald Ingholt and his Network).
Ingholt used the diaries as the basis for publishing excavation data about some of the tombs in the years after the excavations. References to these publications are added to the diaries, showing that he revisited his documentation for many years after the field campaigns.
The image collection and the diaries were Ingholt’s private research resource. They transformed into an archive when he donated them to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. After the archive arrived at the museum, Gunhild Ploug worked on the documentation. She added comparanda and observations on the portraits’ physiognomy and suggested dating, and she also rearranged the archive. The archive’s new sorting at the time of scanning may hint at the structure of her lost book, which was announced as ‘forthcoming’ but was ultimately unpublished. When the Archive became part of the Palmyra Portrait Project, the sheets were all scanned, and a version of the material including a commentary is in print within the framework of the Archive Archaeology project. The digitized sheets are also available online.
The excavation diaries were not used for research for many years before they became part of the Palmyra Portrait Project. Many of the tombs that Ingholt excavated remained unpublished. With the publication of his diaries in 2021, the information documented by Ingholt became available to the general public and the scholarly community. The excavation diaries have been digitized and are available online and in print.
