The Ancient Near East and Egypt in the Netherlands: overview of Dutch societies and initiatives in the 19th and 20th century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This contribution describes societies and institutes in the Netherlands that played key roles in scholarly research on the Ancient Near East and Egypt. Public interest followed academic developments at a distance. Leading figures, almost all academics, are briefly discussed. After a promising start in the 19th century, development in Dutch Egyptology was mostly limited to religious studies. Assyriology was largely a side-interest for theologians. While other European countries founded national scholarly societies and financed grand expeditions, attention in the Netherland was mainly directed to the Dutch East-Indies, with Oriental studies mostly a function of colonial administration, in combination with Semitic languages (connected to Bible studies). During the first quarter of the 20th century, Oriental studies in the Netherlands were marked by proliferation and specialisation – albeit with a continued emphasis on language studies, and usually from a biblical perspective. The general public was not yet involved. The second quarter of the 20th century saw further diversification of the field, a failed marriage between Ancient Near Eastern and Classical studies, and a broadening audience. After World War II, the range of history, language studies, and archaeology fully developed in the Netherlands. Internationalisation, rising population and student numbers, and economic growth were instrumental. The fourth quarter of the 20th century was characterised by the definitive division between Middle and Far Eastern versus Ancient Near Eastern studies. State-funded research was the norm; the popular audience increased. In the first quarter of the 21st century (not comprehensively addressed in this contribution) state-funded research declined while modest private initiatives (societies of museum and excavation “friends”) can be observed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".