Archival Palimpsests. Investigating the History of Harald Ingholt’s Archive of Palmyrene Sculptures

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Harald Ingholt’s earliest involvement with Palmyrene art can be traced back to the early 1920s. By 1922, when he had begun planning a comprehensive corpus of Palmyrene sculpture, he had already started creating what became his archive. By 1983, when the archive was moved to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, it comprised more than two thousand sheets with photographs and notes. There, it was reorganized by Gunhild Ploug. Since 2012 the Palmyra Portrait Project team has worked on various aspects of the archive — including its original physical order — and have been able to reconstruct Ingholt’s primary organization of the sheets. This disentangling of later reorganizations revealed that Ingholt worked on the archive for his entire academic career. However, there are still open questions regarding the chronological sequence of its creation and upkeep. Through the study of the archive, it is clear that Ingholt added objects as he came across them, either by personal autopsy or through their publications. This contribution aims to study the creation of the archive as a process in its own right, by following the sequence of notes and publication dates of Ingholt’s references from its inception to its donation to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen.