Blendeff

Gold earrings from the Holy Land

Academic collections are usually created with a clear collection plan in mind. The collection should serve to support teaching and research. The relevant pieces are carefully selected and filed in a clear and readily-understood system. But academic views change over time. So do the collections assembled based on those views. The order of the exhibits changes. More appropriate objects are pushed forward, while others lose their significance. At times, the original collection plan is still barely noticeable. In fact, the exhibits themselves become scattered and lose their coherence. The heritage manager is in for a conundrum. Which pieces belong together? And why were these pieces ever assembled with such care?

It is precisely these questions that are being raised following the recent discovery of some gold jewellery and a veritable herbarium, from the university's Biblical Museum. That such a museum had once existed was well known, but the survival of long-lost pieces was a surprise. Where did the pieces come from? How did they go about building the collection? And why did Leuven University invest so many funds in acquiring the collection?

These questions are the common thread of a heritage project that brings together numerous stakeholders to bring a piece of university history (and possibly much more than that) to the surface.

Professor Honoré Coppieters (1874-1947), former student of Ladeuze and professor of Biblical exegesis and Hebrew, was appointed Director of the museum. Rector Ladeuze tasked Jozef Vandervorst (1884-1959), a student at the renowned École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem, with the developing collection. Vandervorst's purchases included items from the Palestine Exploration Fund founded in 1865, and he also acquired pieces from the collections of priests Léon Cré and Joseph Germer-Durand.

The collection of the Biblical Museum has not been preserved in its entirety. After the division of Leuven University and the distribution of the academic collections, the Museum was dissolved. The exhibits that remained in Leuven were placed in different faculties and research groups. Fragmentation was facilitated by the collection's interdisciplinary nature. Pieces were accommodated in archaeology, art history, ancient history and Near Eastern history, theology and zoology. Yellowed labels or entries in old inventories barely allow the provenance of the pieces and their interrelationship to be identified.