Eva Miller is a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at University College London History.
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In the early 20th century, architects and artists like Hugh Ferriss drew on the myths and monuments of ancient Babylon to imagine futuristic skylines—melding ziggurats with modernism in a visionary blend of the past and the possible.
Eva Miller is a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at University College London History. Her postdoctoral project explored the ancient Middle East, the modern West, and the relationship between the two, through asking questions about processes of rediscovery, transmission, and reception. She investigates how imagery uncovered in mid-19th century excavations of ancient Assyrian sites in northern Iraq (dating to the 9th-7th cent. BCE) was adapted and 'revived' by European and American artists, architects, politicians, authors, and academics, especially in the United States and Germany.
Miller is interested in the wider intellectual climate that shaped and was shaped by this process, in which newly discovered pasts from Egypt and Iraq wound up being used, by different groups and in different ways, to work out what it meant to be modern and Western, and to chart the supposedly progressive ‘rise of civlization.’ Her book, Early Civilization and the American Modern: Images of Middle Eastern Origins in the United States, 1893–1939 was published with UCL Press in 2024. As part of this project, she has also edited a volume (with Guillemette Crouzet) Finding Antiquity, Making the Modern Middle East: Archaeology, Empires, Nations (2025, Bloomsbury).
Increasingly, her research focuses on larger questions about interpreting the past in public culture. She is especially interested in how these interpretations are shaped by museums, of history, art, and natural history.
Miller’s background is in the art, history, and languages of ancient Mesopotamia. She holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford where her thesis investigated representations of enemy punishment in palace art and Akkadian cuneiform texts of the 7th century BCE Assyrian monarch Ashurbanipal. She has previously been a teaching fellow for the ancient Middle East at UCL History, a teaching fellow at the University of Birmingham, and Henri Frankfort Fellow at the Warburg Institute.External
Historicism, Authenticity, and Fantasy in E. M. Lilien’s Bible Art
The Art Bulletin | 2023
The Art Bulletin 105, no. 1 (2023): 37–63.
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Archaeology, Empires, Nations
Co-authors: Guillemette Crouzet | Bloomsbury Academic | March | 2025
This volume presents innovative studies of how the emerging disciplines of archaeology and ancient history shaped the modern Middle East, and how they were in turn shaped by competing visions and agendas of empires and new nations. The Middle East was a region constructed through its putatively unique relationship to the whole world's past-and its special relevance for the destiny of empires and nations. Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European empires fought for influence and control over this 'cradle' of civilization, empire and monuments, and local powers and people in the Middle East worked with and against these historical and heritage frameworks in their own quests for self-determination.
In this volume, contributors from the fields of history, archaeology and heritage explore how historical consciousness about the Middle East was contested in the nineteenth and early twentieth century through excavation and interpretation of the past. Chapters span West Asia and North Africa, covering Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Egypt and Tunisia, and the imperial history of Britain, France, Germany and the Ottoman Empire. The result is an original contribution to our understanding of the origins and influence of Middle Eastern archaeology, which resonates today in contemporary discussions on heritage discourses and practices.
Images of Middle Eastern origins in the United States, 1893–1939
UCL Press | August | 2024
In the early 1900s, archeological discoveries in Egypt and the Middle East were incorporated into a narrative about the place of the United States in world history. This narrative suggested that civilization—including things like science, law, writing, art, and architecture—started in Egypt and Mesopotamia, then moved westward, to reach its peak in the United States. This narrative was created and shaped, to a large extent, in public spaces through art and popular history
Early Civilization and the American Modern examines how this narrative helped soothe anxieties about the United States’ unique role on the world stage. Eva Miller focuses on key figures who helped create a visual story of progress in museums, world’s fairs, and popular media. These figures include James Henry Breasted, an expert on the Middle East; astronomer George Ellery Hale; architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue; and artists Lee Lawrie and Hildreth Meière.
As new discoveries about the ancient Middle East were being made through archaeology, Egypt and Mesopotamia were seen as both old and new. This period was also important for shaping public spaces and civic life in the U.S., as leaders and thinkers worked together to build a shared sense of history.Interpreting the dragon of Babylon, from archaeological excavation into fringe science
Endeavor | 2021
In 1918, German archaeologist Robert Koldewey, excavator of Babylon, Iraq, observed that the depiction of the fantastical "dragon of Babylon" on the sixth century BCE Ishtar Gate must reference a real animal whose closest relatives would be dinosaurs like the iguanodon. Though ignored within archaeology, Koldewey's comments were taken up in German-American popular science writer Willy Ley's "romantic zoology" (1941), then by Bernard Heuvelmans (1955), founding figure in the fringe field of cryptozoology. Their interpretations would ultimately inspire expeditions by the International Society of Cryptozoologists in Central Africa to find the Mokele-Mbembe, a "living dinosaur," and migrate into Young Earth Creationist and ancient aliens theories. An analysis of Koldewey's marginal academic observation serves as a means of considering the process of knowledge formation and canonization and the unpredictable life of scholarly ideas.
Assyrian Revival and New American Meanings
Liverpool University Press | January | 2020
Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue’s influential ‘prairie skyscraper’ design for the Nebraska State Capitol, inaugurated in 1928, has long defied stylistic categorization. A now greatly overlooked element of its unclassifiable style was noted in numerous assessments at the time which identified ‘Oriental’, ‘Assyrian’ or ‘Assyrian-Babylonian’ features which, despite (or because of) their associations with a deep antiquity, contributed to the new, distinctly American architecture of the building, and of its sculptural programme by Lee Lawrie. This article considers the Assyrianizing tendencies of the capitol in the context of Art Deco interest in the ‘revival’ of ancient styles, and American civic architecture’s engagement with the ancient Middle Eastern past as an origin of civilization. Goodhue’s close collaboration with Lawrie, muralist Hildreth Meière, and ‘symbologist’ Hartley Burr Alexander exemplified the productive and creative application of revived ancient iconography, which was employed in Nebraska in the service of various historical narratives and as a reflection of the designers’ aesthetic appreciation for Assyrian sculptures. Finally, this article also investigates how the capitol’s treatment of the ancient Mesopotamian ‘lawgiver’ Hammurabi influenced ‘Hammurabis’ in subsequent sculptural contexts, including in the State Capitol of Louisiana, American federal government buildings, and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
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Feature | October | 2020
Assyrian palace art provides some of the most impressive imagery in the history of world art.
To the modern viewer, monumental carvings excavated in northern Iraq are powerfully effective, aesthetic masterpieces. They are both exquisitely beautiful and forceful.
Viewed by the Assyrians themselves, these artworks were something else: invested with supernatural power, they offered a sense of security by displaying the divine protection for the palaces they adorned.
Miller’s talk looks at the artistic techniques these works use to evoke the magical and the divine. It also explores how the viewer can’t help but confront the artificial nature of the image they are looking at—even while they pull us into the reality they construct.
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The art also sent a strong message: being “Assyrian” meant having the power to reshape others. This was especially shown in how defeated enemies were pictured—often humiliated, weak, and with distorted bodies.
The article focuses on the reign of King Ashurbanipal, when the art began to highlight the faces and features of specific foreign leaders to set them apart. This act of drawing differences was not just for show—it helped support the empire’s goal of expansion and control. The palace and its artwork became a small version of the empire itself, showing who held power and who had been conquered.