Dimitri Baramki

Dimitri Baramki was born in Jerusalem in 1909 and joined the Department of Antiquities of Mandatory Palestine, rising to chief archaeologist from 1938 to 1948 in succession to Robert Hamilton. He was one of the very few Palestinians to hold a senior post in the Mandate’s antiquities administration, in a period when the country’s archaeology was overwhelmingly the work of European and American expeditions.

His major excavation was Khirbat al-Mafjar near Jericho — the early Islamic desert estate known as Hisham’s Palace — which he dug between 1934 and 1948. Among the finds was graffiti naming Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik, on the basis of which he dated the construction to the caliph’s reign, 724–743 CE. The site’s carved stucco, bath hall, and the great mosaic of the Tree of Life are among the finest surviving works of Umayyad art; Baramki published the excavation in successive reports in the Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine.

The end of the Mandate ended that career. Baramki briefly headed the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem in 1948, then worked as a consultant and librarian for the American School of Oriental Research, and declined an appointment to head a West Bank Department of Antiquities under Jordanian rule. In 1952 he was invited to the American University of Beirut as curator of its Archaeological Museum, and taught there as a professor of archaeology until retiring in 1975; his AUB doctorate, completed in 1953, was on Arab culture and architecture of the Umayyad period. He died in California in 1984. The excavator of Palestine’s most important Umayyad site spent the second half of his working life unable to work in the country whose antiquities he had been responsible for.

Selected works

• Excavation reports on Khirbat al-Mafjar, Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine
• Phoenicia and the Phoenicians (1961)
• The Art and Architecture of Ancient Palestine (1969)

Sources

• “Palestinian Christians in the Mandate Department of Antiquities: History and Archaeology in a Colonial Space” — Springer
• Dimitri Baramki — All4Palestine
• Dimitri Baramki — Wikipedia