Subscribe now for full access and no adverts
Classical archaeology has a long and strong pedigree in Denmark, even though classical culture, in terms of its materiality, only reached the geographically defined areas of modern Denmark through exchanges and gifts passed between the Romano-Germanic cultures and Danish chieftains during what is termed the Roman Iron Age, from 200 BC to AD 200. In Denmark, classical archaeology became a key part of how Greek and Roman cultures were studied, following growing interest in their material remains from the late 18th and early 19th centuries onward.
The first Danish scholar to pursue this path was Peter Oluf Brøndsted, who in 1813 became Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Copenhagen: then the only university in the country. Following his extensive travels in Greece and engagement with classical Greek art and architecture in the early decades of the 19th century, he was appointed Professor of Classical Archaeology in 1832. Collections of Greek and Roman art had already been amassed by Danish kings, thereby connecting the Danish royal house with European ideas of a shared culture rooted in ancient Greece. The earliest objects in these collections arrived in the 17th century. Among them were two fragmented heads from one of the metopes of the Parthenon temple in Athens. These were purchased in 1688, and at that time labelled as two heads from the Temple of Artemis in Ephesos. Back then, this monument was considered more significant than the Parthenon, because it featured in the canon of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
In the late 19th century, the landscape of classical antiquities collections in Copenhagen changed dramatically, due to the activities of the brewer Carl Jacobsen. His first ancient acquisition was the head of an archaic Greek sculpture. It was, though, the contemporary availability of Roman-period sculptures on the art market across the Mediterranean – with an increasing focus on Rome itself as the market grew there – that came to define his collections. Today, displayed at a world-famous museum – the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, which Jacobsen gifted to the Danish state – the objects he amassed are regarded as one of the most outstanding collections of classical sculpture outside Greece and Italy.
Casts in the city
In Aarhus, Denmark’s second largest city, classical sculpture arrived as casts during the 1870s, when the city’s art collection moved into a new museum building. The board of the art collection was led by Andreas Weiss – a miller and close friend of Jacobsen – and the philologist and school teacher Lesor Kleisdorff. More than 100 casts were acquired under their auspices, representing what they considered to be the most important Greek and Roman sculptures. These were seen as the roots of Western and therefore European civilisation and art. At the opening, visitors could experience an art collection that ranged from copies of Greek and Roman masterpieces to works by renowned Danish sculptors Bertel Thorvaldsen and Wilhelm Bissen, thereby connecting classical heritage to Danish contemporary art. These plaster casts of ancient sculptures and parts of monuments are today a pivotal part of the study collection at the Museum of Ancient Art and Archaeology at Aarhus University.
A new university
Aarhus University is a comparatively young institution, founded in 1928 and now approaching its centenary. The university was established due to the efforts of citizens who were eager to see Denmark’s second university placed in their prospering city. Initially, the university offered courses in the humanities, philosophy, and languages, but medical studies were available from 1935, with law and economics following in 1936. The first archaeology teaching was offered during the Second World War by Harald Ingholt, a scholar famed for his 1920s excavations at Palmyra, and then later at Tell Sukas, both in Syria.
Classical archaeology was established as a discipline in 1949, when Poul Jørgen Riis was appointed professor. He had previously served as a curator at the National Museum in Copenhagen. Riis’ contacts proved useful during his first months in Aarhus, when he was able to arrange a long-term loan of 300 objects from the National Museum collections for teaching use. These artefacts reflected both his own pedagogical vision and his research interests in Bronze and Iron Age objects from the Near East and Greece, with a particular focus on periods with strong cultural exchanges between Greek and Near Eastern cultures. Riis was also an active field archaeologist, who conducted fieldwork in the Near East, among other places.
Although classical archaeology was initially integrated within the Institute of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, in 1966 it became independent as the Institute of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology under Professor Kristian Jeppesen. The focus of teaching and research shifted with Jeppesen, who had studied architecture and classical archaeology in Copenhagen. After participating in Swedish excavations in Caria – a region in Anatolia – during the 1950s, Jeppesen concentrated his research on late classical architecture there. In 1966, this led to the beginning of a lifelong engagement: excavating and studying the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, in present-day Bodrum, Turkey.
During 1971, the area of teaching at Aarhus was defined by Jeppesen as, first, the Greek Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic cultures’ material manifestations on the main continent, the islands, and colonies (sic!); second, the foundations of this culture in the Bronze Age and Iron Age; and, third, influences from and the further independent development of external regions, meaning Etruria and other parts of Italy, Spain, North Africa, and the Near East. It is notable that classical Greek culture was his point of departure and so lay at the heart of the definition of the discipline in Aarhus. Earlier cultures and cultural spheres were considered chiefly as precursors, and the neighbouring cultures and later periods were studied from what we would today term a ‘linear’ perspective. This ideological approach was deeply rooted in the concept of Hellenism as articulated in the late 18th and early 19th century, and described by the German scholar Friedrich August Wolf. Ancient Greece and its material heritage was viewed, in this tradition, as the ‘original’ culture. Wolf’s manifesto was translated into Danish in 1818, and these ideas remain embedded in the broader Danish educational system, where classical studies is mandatory for school students.
While the following decades saw Near Eastern studies slowly disappear from the curriculum at Aarhus University, a strong research profile in Roman archaeology was also developed by professor Niels Hannestad. Meanwhile, Riis’ interests in the Etruscans and cross-cultural connections of the Hellenistic period were pursued by Lise Hannestad, who, among other things, worked on the finds from the Danish excavations in the Gulf region.
The museum
It was thanks to Kristian Jeppesen’s foresight in the mid-1960s that the university transformed the terrace of its main auditorium into museum space. The building had been constructed during the Second World War, but structural instability led to a new concrete structure with two floors for displays and teaching. In 1970, the collection moved in. Prominent among the material were 182 Greek and Roman casts that the Aarhus Museum had decided to dispose of in 1951. Relocating them to the university rather than junking them – as was a common fate for cast collections in this era – allowed Jeppesen to create a display charting the evolution of Greek art from the Archaic to the Late Classical period, materialising his research activities. In the following decades, smaller permanent and special exhibitions were organised by staff members, often with student involvement.
Following the opening of the new museum galleries, all associated teaching took place in the museum rooms. These were only accessible to the public via the department offices, emphasising their status as a study collection. In 2004, however, university restructuring led to the researchers and teaching moving out of the museum, while a new entrance opened the museum’s main façade to the university park. As a result, activity in the museum has become more equally divided between university teaching, research, and collaboration with communities beyond academia.
Developing collections
Over the years, the collections have been enriched in various ways, including long-term loans from other museums. One notable acquisition is a collection from ancient Carthage. This was assembled by a Danish nurse, Sigrid Birk, who worked in Tunisia after its independence in 1956. Birk formed part of a WHO team dedicated to maternal and child health. She amassed a collection of about 1,000 ancient objects, mostly small artefacts such as lamps, pottery, bone tools, gaming tokens, and glass fragments. Before her death, Birk wrote an account of her time in Tunisia, which provided insights into the find-spots of some of the objects, even if a precise archaeological provenance will forever be lacking. Many of the objects now appear in a permanent display called ‘Roman Connections’. This was made in collaboration with a research project called MINERVA, which examined the Roman economy and road network, by associate professor Tom Brughmans in 2023. The practice of connecting special exhibitions with collaborative research projects was initiated by one of the authors of this article, Professor Rubina Raja, with a co-curated exhibition on cult and religion in 2010, and then one on Ingholt and Palmyra in 2015 (see CWA 118). In recent years, this was followed up by an exhibition on a large-scale excavation project in the Decapolis city of Gerasa, Jordan, in 2018 (see CWA 107) and an online exhibition on archival materials, alongside objects donated by Ingholt exhibited within the museum.
A focus on provenance studies has intensified in recent years, following a long-term loan from the Italian Ministry of Culture in 2018-2025, made possible by collaboration with the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. In 2016, more than 1,600 fragments of South Italian red-figure pottery – mostly manufactured in the ancient region of Daunia – were confiscated from a dealers’ warehouse in Geneva and returned to Italy. These were then loaned to Aarhus, prompting research into illicit trade, a need for more provenance studies of South Italian red-figure pottery, and the exhibition In Search of the Daunians. In this way, museum activities still reflect the research agendas of the classical archaeologists at the university.
RAC/TRAC 2026
The next joint Roman Archaeology Conference and Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference will be held in May 2026 at Aarhus University, Denmark. The event is jointly organised by Aarhus University, including its Museum of Ancient Art and Archaeology, UrbNet (Centre for Urban Network Evolutions), the Roman Society, and the TRAC Committee. Several events will be hosted at the museum, whose collections are open to the public.
RAC/TRAC 2026 will gather scholars from around the world for a dynamic programme of thematic sessions highlighting the latest research and approaches to Roman studies. Topics will range from urbanism and landscapes to connectivity, the use of archaeological archives, and critical perspectives on the decolonisation of the discipline. The organisers are currently preparing the final programme of the conference. The Call for Posters remains open until 31 January 2026, and registration is now open via the Roman Society website.
For more details and updates, visit http://www.romansocietyrac.ac.uk/ractrac-2026/
Further Reading:
• O Bobou, R Raja, and J Steding (2022) Excavating Archives: narratives of 20th-century Palmyra (online exhibition: https://projects.au.dk/archivearcheology/cultural-heritage-resources/virtual-exhibition-excavating-archives-narratives-from-20th-century-palmyra/excavating-archives-narratives-from-20th-century-palmyra).
• L M Andersen Funder, T M Kristensen, and V Nørskov (2019) Classical Heritage and European Identities: the imagined geographies of Danish Classicism (Routledge).
• V Nørskov (2024) ‘Roman Carthage seen through the eyes of a Danish nurse: a private collection in a Danish university collection’, in J Lund and
J Carlsen (eds) Roman Carthage: a reappraisal (Quasar), pp.275-282.
• P Guldager Bilde (2000) ‘From study collection to Museum of Ancient Art: a Danish university museum of Mediterranean antiquities and plaster casts’, in J Lund and P Pentz (eds) Between Orient and Occident: studies in honour of P.J. Riis (Copenhagen: The National Museum), pp.209-231.
• R Raja and A H Sørensen (2015) Harald Ingholt and Palmyra (Aarhus: Fællestrykkeriet Aarhus University).
You must be logged in to post a comment.