Lost Nubia

Lost Nubia: A Centennial Exhibit of Photographs from the 1905-1907 Egyptian Expedition of the University of Chicago is the catalogue for the inaugural exhibit in the Marshall and Doris Holleb Family Special Exhibits Gallery of the Oriental Institute Museum. Curated by John A Larson, Oriental Institute Museum Archivist, the exhibit of fifty-two historic photographs from the Oriental Institute Archives was selected as a temporary accompaniment to the new permanent installation of objects from ancient Nubia. These photographic images document some of the archaeological sites in Nubia that have disappeared under the waters of Lake Nasser and a few places that are so remote that few tourists have ever seen them. These documentary images, taken during the consecutive winter field seasons of 1905-1906 and 1906-1907, represent just a small part of a corpus of nearly 1,200 black-and-white negatives that were made by the Egyptian Expedition of the University of Chicago, under the direction of James Henry Breasted. The original glass-plate field negatives for the first season of the expedition, 1905-1907, were made by German photographer Friedrich Koch. For the expedition's second field season up the Nile (1906-1907) Breasted decided to supplement the professional glass-plate photography of Horst Schliephack with a second camera that used roll-film. The smaller-format film negatives were used to take ethnographic photographs, as well as candid photographs of the expedition members at work.