Background
John Haynes was born on June 27, 1849, at Rowe, Massachusetts, United States, the son of John W. and Emily (Taylor) Haynes.
John Haynes was born on June 27, 1849, at Rowe, Massachusetts, United States, the son of John W. and Emily (Taylor) Haynes.
John attended the public schools of North Adams and Drury High School, from which he went to Williams College, graduating in 1876.
For the next four years after graduation John Haynes was principal of the Williamstown High School. In the fall of 1880 he took a similar position at the South Hadley High School but resigned after a few weeks to go with W. J. F. Stillman on his expedition to Crete. In 1881-1882 he was a member of the expedition of the Archaeological Institute of America which excavated at Assos. Leaving Assos, he tutored until 1884 in Robert College, Constantinople, then went as business manager and photographer of the Wolfe Expedition to Mesopotamia led by William Hayes Ward in 1884-1885, to reconnoiter for the most promising site to excavate. For the following three years he taught at Aintab, Turkey.
In 1888 the first expedition of the University of Pennsylvania was organized by John P. Peters for the excavation of Nippur, and Haynes became its business manager and photographer. In the same year an American Consulate was established at Bagdad and he became the first American consul at that place. He was continuously in Mesopotamia from 1888 to 1890, assisting Peters in his two seasons of excavation at Nippur and performing his work as American consul at Bagdad.
Later two additional expeditions were entrusted to him as field director and he excavated almost continuously at Nippur from early in 1893 to 1895, and again from 1896 to 1900. Without undervaluing in any way the work of Peters, it must be said that it was owing to the long, continuous, and systematic work of Haynes that the more important discoveries, which gave the expedition its scientific importance, were made. It was he who laid bare the lower strata of the mounds and who discovered by far the larger portion of the tablets.
While Haynes was field director, Herman V. Hilprecht in 1895 became scientific director of the expedition. When, in the early months of 1900, Haynes reported that he had discovered an archive of some hundreds of tablets, Hilprecht at once set out for Babylonia, and afterward, as Haynes’s superior officer, took the credit of the discovery of the tablets, which he designated the “Temple Library. ” Afterward in his book, Explorations in Bible Lands During the Nineteenth Century (1903). Hilprecht was at pains systematically to belittle the work of Haynes, to represent it as unscientific, and to magnify his mistakes.
Haynes had returned from Nippur in broken health - a martyr to science - and this treatment from his chief broke his heart. Hilprecht’s criticisms were regarded by all who knew the facts as ungenerous and unjust, and, , the injustice of the treatment and the loss of credit for what he had done cast a deep shadow over his last years. He died in North Adams, Massachusetts.
Haynes was married in March 1897.