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3. Harald Ingholt: Life and Career of a Danish Archaeologist

Kai Harald Ingholt, known by all as Harald Ingholt, was born in Denmark on 11 March 1896, the son of a hotel porter at the famous hotel D’Angleterre in central Copenhagen. Ingholt seems to have been a hard-working student and quickly launched his scholarly career. He studied theology and Near Eastern archaeology at the University of Copenhagen, where he also was awarded a gold medal prize for his work. He earned several national and international scholarships early in his career, allowing him to take up fellowships around the world and to travel widely in Europe and beyond. Among his travels, he undertook a trip to the Far East, during which he met his future wife, Janet Ward Woolverton (1897–1992), while sailing between China and Japan. They got married in Slangerup, Denmark, and they had two children together: a daughter, Mary Ebba (b. 1927), and a son, Harald (1929–2021). It was through Janet’s family that Ingholt made his first American connections that later took him to New Haven, CT, for a tenured position at Yale University, where he stayed until and beyond retirement. The couple lived together in Denmark, Lebanon, and America until Ingholt’s death in 1985.

Ingholt’s career was deeply influenced both by his passion for the Middle East and its history and by contemporary events, including the two World Wars. During the early years of the French Mandate in Syria, he worked in Palmyra, and he also lived and worked many years in Beirut at the American University. In 1934, he founded the journal Berytus, which to this day is hosted and run by academics at that university. He worked at different Danish universities and museums, including Aarhus University and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. During the Second World War, he fled Denmark through Sweden to Finland and from there by ship to America to rejoin his family, whom he had already sent there. Ingholt passed away on 28 October 1985 in his home in Hamden, Connecticut, at the age of 89.

Ingholt and the Palmyrene Sculpture

Ingholt became an established name in the field following the publication of his higher doctoral dissertation, Studier over Palmyrensk Skulptur, in 1928. By that point, he had collected more than 500 Palmyrene funerary portraits and had conducted archaeological field work in Palmyra. His work remains a standard to this day and underlines the solidity of his academic work on the topic. Even though most of his career was outside Denmark, he obviously felt a strong connection to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, where he had been a curator for some years and where he had first become interested in Palmyra. In the 1980s, he donated his field diaries and his vast archive to the museum, where they have been kept ever since.

Ingholt, Palmyra, and the Danish Connection

  • 1678: Palmyra is ‘rediscovered’ by a group of English merchants based in Aleppo.
  • 1693: Hofsted van Essen paints a panorama of Palmyra.
  • 1750–1751: Robert Wood and James Dawkins travel to Palmyra, then publish The Ruins of Palmyra.
  • 1882–1886: Carl Jacobsen buys the first objects from Palmyra for his collection.
  • 1889: David Simonsen publishes the first catalogue of the Palmyrene sculptures in Carl Jacobsen’s collection.
  • 1893: The Danish scholar Johannes Elith Østrup visits Palmyra and (in 1894 and 1895) speaks to the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters of a painted tomb.
  • 1918: Harald Ingholt writes his prize-winning thesis on Semitic and Eastern philology at the University of Copenhagen.
  • 1922: Ingholt earns a Master’s degree in theology at the University of Copenhagen.
  • 1922: Ingholt is a fellow at Princeton.
  • 1923: Ingholt studies in Paris.
  • 1924: Ingholt carries out his first excavation campaign at Palmyra, funded by the Rask-Ørsted Foundation, collaborating with the French archaeologist Maurice Dunand.
  • 1924–1925: Ingholt is a fellow at the American School of Archaeology in Jerusalem.
  • 1925: Ingholt carries out his second excavation campaign at Palmyra funded by the Rask-Ørsted Foundation, collaborating with the French architect Albert Gabriel.
  • 1925–1930: Ingholt takes up a curatorial position at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen.
  • 1927–1930: Ingholt also serves as secretary of the New Carlsberg Foundation.
  • 1928: Ingholt earns his doctoral degree (Dr.Phil.) after defending the dissertation Studier over Palmyrensk Skulptur (Studies of Palmyrene Sculpture).
  • 1928: Ingholt carries out his third excavation campaign at Palmyra, funded by the Rask-Ørsted Foundation.
  • 1930: Ingholt explores ground for archaeological work in Hama, Syria.
  • 1931–1938: Ingholt leads the Danish excavations at Hama, funded by the Carlsberg Foundation.
  • 1931–1938: Ingholt serves as lecturer and curator at the American University in Beirut and its museum.
  • 1934: Ingholt founds the international journal Berytus.
  • Mid-1930s: Ingholt returns to Palmyra to make supplementary notes and documentation and to excavate the Tomb of Malkû.
  • 1939–1941: Ingholt is a reader in Semitic philology at Aarhus University.
  • 1942: Ingholt takes up a position in the US as associate professor at Yale University, New Haven, CT.
  • 1953: Ingholt is elected to the Board of Directors of the Danish-American Rebild Society.
  • 1957: Ingholt and Jørgen Læssøe head the Danish expedition at Shimshara, Iraq.
  • 1960: Ingholt takes up a Chair in Archaeology at Yale University.
  • 1983: The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek receives Ingholt’s photographic Palmyra archive.
  • 1993: Professor Finn Ove Hvidberg-Hansen and Gunhild Ploug publish a new catalogue of the Palmyra collection at the Glyptotek.
  • 2012: Professor Rubina Raja founds the Palmyra Portrait Project at Aarhus University, with funding from the Carlsberg Foundation.