ARIT Ankara (ARIT-A)

The library of the Ankara Branch of ARIT has recently been named the Toni M. Cross Library in memory of its long-time director. The library contains over 7,000 monographs, 300 journal titles, 1,000 offprints, 200 maps and 650 slides and prints. The greater part of the collection deals with the archaeology of ancient Turkey and neighboring regions, and spans the millennia from the Paleolithic to the Byzantine period. The Anatolian collection of Professor Carl Blegen, the American archeologist who re-excavated Troy in the 1930s, formed the original core of the Ankara library. Expanding from this core collection, the archaeology section now covers the geographical areas of Anatolia, Greece, Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, Iran, the Aegean, Cyprus, and Italy, with sections on Classical Antiquity, the Roman Empire, and the Byzantine period. The collection is especially strong in publications of archaeological surveys and excavations within Turkey itself, from Assos in the northwest to Zeugma on the Euphrates in the southeast.

Here too are all the Turkish publications (many written in both English and Turkish) of government-sponsored salvage work along the Euphrates and Tigris river systems, which began in the late 1960s, and of the reports presented at the week-long archaeology symposium organized annually since 1980 by the Turkish Department of Antiquities and Museums. A solid reference section contains such basic items as the Loeb editions of the classical authors, the Cambridge Ancient HistoryPaulys Realencyclopaedie der Classischen Altertums-Wissenschaft, and the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World. The Ankara library also has a fine collection of maps, including topographical maps of regions of Turkey, as well as a growing collection of works dealing with the modern Republic of Turkey, with emphasis on Ataturk and Kemalism, cultural anthropology, economic development, present-day politics, and sociology.