The most dynamic pioneer was Howard Crosby Butler, a specialist in ancient Near Eastern archaeology and architecture who mounted expeditions to Syria and Anatolia in 1899, 1904, and 1909 and headed the notable excavations at Antioch and Sardis; he was Princeton's charter trustee of the Jerusalem School for Oriental Research. In 1901 he brought to Princeton the noted German epigrapher, Enno Littmann, who had accompanied him in Syria; Littmann served as librarian of the Oriental collections and as lecturer in Semitic philology until 1906 when he returned to Tbingen. Four years later he was succeeded by another German scholar, Rudolph Brnnow who was Professor of Semitic Philology. After Brnnow's death in 1917, the teaching of Semitics declined, and the development of Sanskrit and Indo-European philology began auspiciously under Harold H. Bender, who was appointed Professor of Indo-Germanic Philology in 1918. In 1927 Bender organized the precursor of the Departments of Near Eastern and East Asian Studies -- the Department of Oriental Languages and Literatures (later Oriental Studies); he served as its first chairman until 1944.
Meanwhile ancient history and Semitics had been well served by David Paton 1874, a self-made Egyptologist who toiled in the western tower of Pyne Library translating important works in this field. In 1919 his mother founded the Paton chair in Ancient and Modern Literature, first occupied by William Robert Rogers of Drew Theological Seminary, a popular lecturer during his ten years as visiting professor, and then by Philip Khuri Hitti, who worked with Bender on comparative Indo-European and Semitic studies, and later gave his attention to Islamic and modern Near Eastern studies.
Princeton's superlative Near Eastern library collections were begun with Arabic manuscripts collected by Robert Garrett 1897 and deposited in the University Library in 1900. He continued to acquire and lend to the University valuable Near Eastern collections, and in 1941 gave them all to Princeton. The collections were further enriched by Littmann's acquisitions and by bequests of the personal libraries of Brnnow and Paton. In 1943 Garrett climaxed his contributions with the gift of the Cairene Yahuda Collection of over 5,000 medieval Arabic items. Thus Princeton has come to possess one of the two greatest collections of books on the Near East in the United States and by far the greatest collection of manuscripts in the Western Hemisphere.
In 1944 Hitti succeeded Bender as chairman, serving until 1954. The department's founding of the country's pioneer Program in Near Eastern Studies after World War II was largely due to Hitti's vision and fund-raising abilities. This program concentrated on the modern Near East. Initially, the three major Islamic languages -- Arabic, Turkish, and Persian -- constituted the core of the program around which were grouped integrated courses in history, politics, sociology, economics, and related subjects. Three appointments were made to the department to implement the new program: Walter L. Wright in Turkish studies, T. Cuyler Young in modern Persian, and Lewis V. Thomas in Arabic. On Wright's death in 1949, Thomas took over the work in Turkish.
In 1951 the Program in Near Eastern Studies was reorganized as a separate interdisciplinary program emphasizing the social sciences, administered by a committee of representatives from the departments of economics, history, and politics, as well as of the department of oriental languages and literatures. The Program undertook to meet the lack of teacher-scholars in the sociology and politics of the Near East by providing language study and research opportunities in the area for two social scientists. One of them, the sociologist Morroe Berger, later served twice as Director of the Program for a number of years. The other, the political scientist Denkwart Rustow, eventually became Distinguished Professor of Political Science at City University of New York; his place was taken by Manfred Halpern in 1959.
The department expanded during Young's chairmanship (1954-1969), with major emphasis on Arabic and Islam, including modern history and contemporary affairs. The teaching was enriched by foreign scholars who came frequently as visiting professors. Two regular appointments in the mid-1950s, Norman Itzkowitz and Martin Dickson, strengthened the Turkish and Persian fields respectively. John H. Marks, who came in 1954, has specialized in ancient Near Eastern history and West Semitic languages. A year later Rudolph Mach became Curator of Near Eastern Collections; within a decade he had made the Islamic collection, especially for the medieval period, the best in North America; he has continued to add hundreds of important items to the manuscript collection.
In 1956 the department added to its staff Sinologist Frederick W. Mot~e -- its first appointment in the East Asian field. Under him and Japanologist Marius Jansen, this field of studies developed rapidly, and in 1969 the Department of Oriental Studies divided into the two departments of Near Eastern Studies and East Asian Studies.
In the mid-1960s Near Eastern Studies suffered grievous losses with the deaths of Ottoman historian Thomas and Arabic linguist Majid Sa'id, and were further depleted by the departure, to head up new programs elsewhere, of Bayly Winder and Farhat Ziadeh, teachers in the Arabic-Islamic field. Reconstruction involved some change in emphasis. Medieval Islam and modern Arab and North African studies were strengthened by L. Carl Brown's arrival from Harvard; he served as chairman from 1969 to 1973. New depth in Islamic history was provided by Abraham Udovitch, from Cornell. He is a Semitist and medieval Islamist with a special interest in neglected economic history; he became departmental chairman in 1973. These Arabists were joined in 1968 by Andras Hamori, a specialist in classical Arabic literature, and subsequently by similar specialists in Persian and Turkish. In 1970 modern Hebrew language and literature were added to the department's curriculum. In 1972 John Willis was appointed for Islamic civilization in Africa.
In the early 1970s the family of Cleveland and Bayard Dodge (both Class of 1909) endowed twin chairs in Near Eastern Studies to honor these two eminent alumni whose careers, in various and distinguished ways, were connected to that area of the world over the past half century. These two chairs made it possible to add faculty of unusual distinction to the department. Bernard Lewis, the leading historian of the Near East in the English-speaking world, came to Princeton from the University of London in September 1974. He accepted the joint appointment of the University as first Cleveland Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies, and of the Institute for Advanced Study as a long-term member of its School of Historical Studies. In September 1975, Charles P. Issawi, the most renowned economist and economic historian of the Middle East, came to Princeton from Columbia University as the first incumbent of the Bayard Dodge Professorship in Near Eastern Studies.
On July 1, 1977, the department was further enriched when the eminent historian Nina G. Garsoian came from Columbia as dean of the Graduate School and professor of Byzantine and Armenian Studies. The same year, John H. Marks succeeded Abraham Udovitch as departmental chairman.
Over the years Princeton's pioneering has contributed much to the national development of Near Eastern Studies. The department has provided leadership in cooperative ventures such as Princeton's National Critical Languages Program, the Inter-University Summer Language Program, the Center for Arabic Study Abroad in Cairo, and the founding of the Middle East Studies Association; and also by its consultation with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in the administration of the National Defense Foreign Language Act. Cooperative scholarship in the field has been furthered by the department's annual conference, begun in 1949; in 1974 it brought together in Princeton the first large international group of scholars in Islamic economic history. Not the least important contribution has been the number of well-trained Ph.D.'s the Department has sent out to universities in the United States and Canada, and in the Near East itself, as well as the personnel contributed by the Program to business, government, and public affairs.
T. Cuyler Young
A. L. Udovitch