The Researcher
The wish to travel through the Middle East, to explore the landscape and to describe it in a scholarly manner determined Oppenheim’s life as a researcher from the very first. Without these journeys, he would not have found his way to the two subjects that determined his work for decades: ethnography, with his focus on the Bedouin, and archaeology, traceable to his nearly coincidental discovery of Tell Halaf.
Photo: Max von Oppenheim with hat and cane (center foreground), Syria 1929