A small treasure found in the back of a downtown office closet–six ancient clay tablets from Babylonia covered with cuneiform writing–was never really lost, just benignly ignored by its owner, the Geographic Society of Chicago.
Now, the tablets have been “rediscovered” and soon will be on their way to become bona fide museum artifacts at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute.
The story of the tablets–the last artifacts from the society’s heyday–in a way mirrors the fate of the Geographic Society itself, at 101 years old something of a relic of a way of life.
The society once was one of the city’s highest-profile cultural organizations, with offices, a library and a large paid staff; now all that it owns is in a single file cabinet drawer in a management company that runs its affairs.
Hence, the need to find a home for the six tablets, ranging from 2,500 to 4,000 years old, once part of a trove of treasures the society had collected and archived.
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“By the time we closed our last office,” said Vincent Michael, a present-day society board member, “we didn’t have much stuff left–just a drawerful of old photos and some signed correspondence with famous people like Charles Lindbergh, (Roald) Amundsen and (Richard) Byrd.
“The (Babylonian tablet) case was just stored in the back of a closet, the last item the Geographic Society had from . . . the 1920s, when the society was very, very active.”
Most big American cities once had similar societies, offering extremely popular travel lectures by globe-trotting celebrities such as Lowell Thomas, who could pack the biggest auditoriums in town. But now only a few such societies are left, and most are struggling.
The combination of television travel documentaries, Internet access and cheap air travel has transformed the way people see the world and get around it.
Even the pre-eminent National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., faced with falling membership, is taking measures to stanch the resulting financial bleeding, including selling its magazine at newsstands for the first time in its history.
“New York’s geographic society shut down,” said Carl Sholeen, president of the Chicago society, “and so has San Francisco’s. Philadelphia’s is still going but is a lot smaller than it used to be.”
While not exactly moribund, the Geographic Society of Chicago, with fewer than 700 members, is but a shadow of what it was in 1926. That’s when one of its wealthy members–who then numbered in the thousands–came home from a trip to Iraq and presented the tablets to the society’s archives as a memento of his adventure.
In those earlier days, the society had the power to regularly hail the century’s greatest explorers and adventurers to Chicago to bestow honors on them– truly heroic trailblazers such as Amundsen, Byrd, Robert Peary, Amelia Earhart and Jacques Cousteau.
Like the Michael Jordan era was for the Bulls, the society’s travel lecture and film series was for decades one of the hardest wintertime tickets to come by in the city.
The society would schedule four sessions for each program in the series in Orchestra Hall’s 2,500-seat auditorium, two on Saturday and one each on Sunday and Monday, and sell out every one.
Those glory days began to fade about 30 years ago, and the society’s membership has dwindled. Ten years ago, moving to smaller quarters to save on rent, the society gave away its well-stocked library of maps, atlases, globes and hundreds of geography-related books to DePaul University.
When its paid executive director decided to retire a little more than a year ago, the society chose not to replace him and closed its office, hiring a management firm to handle its organizational affairs. That’s when the question of what to do with the Babylonian clay tablets arose.
Henry Patten, a turn-of-the-century grain trader whose wealth financed a globe-trotting lifestyle, bought the tablets in Iraq in 1926, when such trade in antiquities was still legal. A member of the society, he presented the tablets, each about the size of a present-day belt pager, to the organization in a custom-made, black-leather-covered, glass-fronted box, each tablet given a nest of its own in crushed red velvet.
Covered with wedge-shaped cuneiform markings pushed into the clay by ancient scribes, the tablets are of value primarily to scholars. The writings, mostly records of commercial transactions, are a sort of brief attestation of daily life in Babylonia, one of humanity’s earliest civilizations.
From the start, when Chicago educator and women’s rights advocate Zonia Baber founded the society in 1898, it attracted many of the city’s intellectual, social and business elites as members.
It pushed actively and effectively for some of the world’s first efforts to preserve ecological treasures, helping to establish the Chicago region’s unparalleled system of forest preserves and fighting to protect the Indiana Dunes and Starved Rock areas from destruction by developers.
Its main appeal to most rank-and-file members, however, was as a respite from everyday ennui during the long, drab, isolating winter months of pre-television, pre-economy jet travel days.
Major national celebrities in their day, the best of the travel lecturers–such as Thomas–still are well-remembered today. But Chicagoan Burton Holmes was the legendary standard by which all other travel speakers were measured.
From 1893 to the early 1950s, the elegant, goateed Holmes strode across sold-out lecture hall stages in a tux and white tie. The lights would dim and the film projector’s beam would pierce the darkened auditorium, delivering pictures to the screen as Holmes delivered a cultivated, informed, often witty narration.
No less than Claudia Cassidy, the doyenne of Chicago’s mid-century arts critics, deemed Holmes’ lectures so noteworthy that she critiqued them in the Tribune each time he came to town.
Holmes’ biggest competition in the 1920s and 1930s was Richard Halliburton, a swashbuckling adventurer and superlative writer whose lectures, like Holmes’, often were standing-room only. With matinee-idol good looks, Halliburton and his daily comings and goings were a staple of gossip columns until he disappeared in a typhoon while sailing a Chinese junk from Hong Kong to San Francisco in 1939.
“Earlier in the century, most people couldn’t afford to travel very much,” said Sholeen. “In the winter, this was exciting stuff, to come downtown and see slides or film of a tropical paradise and listen to a really polished storyteller who happened to be the guy who took the pictures.”
The society also organized guided tours for members, both locally and, in the earlier days, to national destinations such as Yellowstone National Park. Later, it began to offer guided tours to foreign locales too.
Society membership kept growing after World War II, peaking in the early 1960s. Then television discovered the public’s interest in exotic places and well-told natural history, and programs such as “National Geographic Explorer” began satiating those hankerings in the comfort of people’s own living rooms.
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Moreover, with jumbo jets and savvy tour packaging, the travel industry opened the world to people of modest means, letting them bring home their own camcorder videos from exotic ports of call.
As a result, the last three decades have not been kind to geographic societies.
But the Chicago society’s local and foreign guided tours continue, as does its winter travel adventure lecture series, with 10 speakers each season. Now, however, the lectures are in a 500-seat auditorium at the Harold Washington Library, two presentations on Saturdays, one on Sunday, none usually filled to capacity.
“We have a graying membership, but a very faithful group,” said Sholeen.
As for the tablets, John Brinkman, an ancient-language scholar at the Oriental Institute who examined them, said: “This is an incredibly generous gift from the Geographic Society, one we very much appreciate. We’ll give the tablets a good home. They won’t sit here just gathering dust.”