The Delivery Boy of Myth : BETWEEN PAST AND PRESENT Archaeology, Ideology and Nationalism in the Modern Middle East <i> by Neil Asher Silberman (Henry Holt: $24.95; 275 pp.) </i>

Neil Asher Silberman recently toured architectural sites around the Middle East to assess their political and social impact. His travels do not seem to have had much of an organizing principle and neither does the resulting “Between Past and Present.” He zigzags in and out of Israel, the terrain he is most familiar with, and up and down the centuries from the period of Ottoman rule to the biblical era and before. But we follow happily because this collection of chapters that don’t quite add up is studded like a fruit cake with delectable bits.

Silberman, a professional archeologist, already has published one popular book on archeology in a nation’s service (the nation being Israel). Yet he claims, somewhat ingenuously, not to have realized until round about the middle of his tour that “archeology was not the handmaiden of history. It was the delivery boy of Myth.”

This is the theme of this volume, an important one. Silberman delineates convincingly the ways in which the modern nations of Yugoslavia, Turkey, Greece, Egypt, North Yemen and, above all, Israel use information about the past to explain, and even define, their modern identities.

We never doubt the insight of the Victorian antiquarian, Benjamin Thorpe: “No people on earth is indifferent to the fancied honor of being able to trace its origins to the gods, of being ruled by an ancient race.” While it is common knowledge today that 19th-Century explorers from England, France and Germany carved up the map of Africa in their search for empire, textbooks do not relate how other adventurers excavated fields, dunes and tombs in what is now Turkey, Greece and Egypt in an effort to expropriate the past as well as the present from the conquered peoples.

Silberman points out that one of the results of this rampage was the legacy, especially in contemporary Egypt, that archeology itself is a vestige of colonialism. Egyptian archeologists today must battle on one hand the fundamentalist Islamic injunction that the world before Islam was sinful and that a search for the Pharaonic era is idolatry, and on the other hand the suspicion that Egyptology as a field of study is a Western import.

While Egypt has still to come to terms with its past, Greece, Turkey and Israel are struggling to control both the treasures in the digs and the meaning of those digs. In this struggle, Silberman describes the creation of two kinds of myths: ancient tales supposedly transformed from legend into “fact” by latter-day archeology, and tales that enshrine the archeologists themselves as agents of destiny.

Standing amid the ruins of Troy in a remote field in western Turkey, Silberman retells the legend of Heinrich Schliemann who, in 1873, unearthed what he labeled the treasure of King Priam. Not one of Turkey’s major tourist sites, the ruins of Troy still boast a “Helen and Paris” gift shop and a large wooden horse.

Silberman also mentions a small wooden hut with the sign, “This is not Schliemann’s house.” For Schliemann is as famous as the cities he unearthed, his discoveries having “mirrored popular Victorian sensibilities, highlighting the public taste for stories of wealth and empire.” The real Schliemann, Silberman informs us, has been exposed recently by University of California professor David Traill in an investigation of Schliemann’s American years that turn out to be “a mixture of exaggeration and psychopathic fantasy.”

In a chapter on Israeli archeology, Silberman updates the story of Masada. The dig did not, after all, “prove” Josephus’ tale of mass suicide in the face of defeat. Suicide was a popular literary convention of the first century, mentioned in the works of at least 13 contemporary authors including Herodotus, Pliny and Plutarch. But Masada is still a dramatic ruin, and a useful symbol in contemporary Israel. Silberman explains that archeology has become part of a religion of history in which ancient artifacts have begun to possess the power of sacred relics and are sold and distributed like the Byzantine distribution of pieces of the “true cross.”

As Silberman travels, he reminds us that archeology is itself a 19th-Century artifact. The three-age system of dating--Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age--was developed in Denmark and accepted universally with no caveats about the assumption that progress equals technological progress. But we also learn how archeology has kept abreast of the times, with great interest today in industrial, agricultural and economic archeology as a way to understand the recent past as well as the days of legend. In Byzantine Cyprus, for example, where sugar-cane plantations have been excavated.

With the revelations possible through modern dating techniques, Silberman describes the riddle presented by the discovery in caves on Mt. Carmel of 90,000-year-old fossils of both Homo sapiens sapiens (modern man) and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis (Neanderthal man). They present challenges to orthodoxy, not the religious kind but those of evolutionary theorists who had not pictured the two species of Homo coexisting.

“Between Past and Present” does not include any startling new material, but Silberman does bring together a good deal of information for the armchair digger. Without getting our hands dirty, we learn about the growing sophistication of the science, even as we realize that it is used selectively, and politically, by different nations.