oa Rostovtzeff’s Dura

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This paper explores some of the continuing problems in studying Dura-Europos, arising from the specific historical circumstances of the dig in the context of inter-war Mandate archaeology in the former Ottoman Empire, American funding and sponsorship before and after the great stock market crash, and the nature of the interests of the team principals in charge of the dig, especially the towering charismatic intellectual, Michael Ivanovich Rostovtzeff (1870–1952). These issues, which profoundly govern the nature of the primary Dura archives held by the Yale University Art Gallery, will always structure the contours within which historians and archaeologists work on Dura or understand the site, alongside the variety of other scholarly, political, and military interventions that have hugely complicated its study in the hundred years since its discovery in 1920.