In the human forest, some few persons are destined to be the redwoods: quiet, slow growing, tall in stature, oblivious to the usual canons of success, irreplaceable when they are gone. Such a one was Hans Eberhard Wulff, who died in Pakistan of a cerebral hemorrhage on the last day of the old year, anno Domini 1967.
Only at age sixty had Wulff made his presence known in the preserve of technology. The event was the publication of his The Traditional Crafts of Persia. Obviously such a book as Traditional Crafts does not grow overnight. To pretend to write it one must have steeped himself for a lifetime in the intricacies of human handicrafts. He must of necessity have been an engineer. He must have been willing to cultivate his own maturation at a pace consistent with the demands of his profession. Wulff was all these things and more.
And what a career his was to be, if he had been given only ten more years to see his undertakings through! When he died, he was leading an Australian team of three through Pakistan on the second leg of a great operation to record and salvage the still-extant crafts of the ancient culture area of the Middle East. I have been privileged to browse through the Smithsonian shelves hoarding the items from his first year’s expedition, which took place in Iran. They are a cornucopia of the fruits of man’s first proliferation of this thing called “labor”: a prototypal loom and the rich brocades from it, scales, wood- and metalworking tools, the wooden lock and key that guarded men from that form of attack on their new wealth and secrets called theft. One walked again in the bazaars of Ur or Jericho, following with Wulff’s keen eyes and ears the mysterious movements of the hands and their extensions that we in English summarize as “crafts” and the French as métiers.
Wulff, in fact, had just come up with the first satisfactory description of that process for yielding a glaze or faience termed “Egyptian blue.” In a recently published article he tells how he and his daughter had finally gained the confidence of these craftsmen of the Iranian holy city of Qom who manufacture the famous “donkey beads” that tinkle about the byways of Iran. To the surprise of Wulff’s ceramicist daughter, the technicians of Qom did not glaze the beads in any manner known to her but instead appear to use a variation of methods of salt glazing that involve both complex physical and chemical laws. With the help of Cyril Smith of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Leo Koch of the Department of Geology of the University of New South Wales, Wulff’s researches were completed and have just been published. They provide a glittering example of what can still be accomplished by bringing a trained and inquisitive mind to bear on the secrets of ancient technology before all the traditional lore that connects us to that technology will have vanished from our earth.
Inevitably, the life work of Wulff will be compared with that of Rudolf Hommel, whose China at Work was published the year that Wulff began in earnest to study the crafts of Shiraz. There is a certain parallel in the dedication of the two men, each laboring unknown in the vineyard of a great ancient civilization from which the harvest must have seemed distant indeed. If I like some of the technical details (and the photographs) of China at Work better than those of Traditional Crafts of Persia, by the same token I must acknowledge that Traditional Crafts is infinitely the more commanding book in its sweep and scholarship. Archeology there is in plenteous detail, though somewhat dated by today’s standards. But Wulff was an Islamic scholar as well as an engineer, and it is in those great interstices between the contemporary craft and what al-Kashani had to say about it six hundred years ago that the faience of Wulff’s scholarship begins to gleam. On the weaving of Persian carpets, he was excellent; but in my estimation he was superb when his talents were put to work on the weaving of gold brocade or the block printing of cloth in Isfahan.
Requiescat in pace goes the final rite of interment for the Catholic. In my mind’s eye I shall always see Wulff in the more profane act of disinterment. Our respective expeditions intersected briefly in the fall of 1966, south of Kerman, at Tal-i-Iblis. Wulff had willingly loaned himself to the leader of the expedition, Joseph Caldwell, to help with the dig. When our team arrived at the 5,000-square-meter hole in the ground, who should peek over the rim but a dusty Wulff and daughter, deep in the outlining of a furnace or oven of unknown usage. A site seven thousand years of age—this Mound of the Devil—its strata of baked red clays, charcoal and bone-littered pits, and workshops challenged the Wulffs in all of us to relive human patterns of work as the first trading settlers might have lived them at this site when it was founded.
He had come a long way in time, space, and ultimate wisdom, had Hans Eberhard Wulff. Who could have supposed that a man born in 1907 at Liidinghausen in Germany and trained at Cologne and Lubeck in mechanical engineering and vocational pedagogy would in time become an Australian citizen, lecturer in mechanical engineering at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, professor of Islamic studies, authority in Persian crafts, and leader of a Smithsonian expedition to rescue the technology of the ancient world? God moves in his mysterious ways. Not the least of those tribulations that Wulff endured were incarceration at the hands of the British as a German citizen in 1941 and loss of crucial notes and photographs to the British and Russian forces which occupied Iran in that year. Whatever political fate had brought him to Persia in 1936 to organize technical colleges was transformed into something higher when the former ruler, Reza Shah, asked him to study traditional industries. The same higher fate restored his lost notes to him in 1955. It had become a mystic thing when it brought him to the United States in 1965 to publish his book and inaugurate the Smithsonian program to salvage man’s ancient handiwork. It reached its ultimate when it buried him in Pakistan on the second day of January, 1968, among those murky and anguished figures of seven thousand years ago who gave us urban contrivance and the city of today.
Theodore A. Wertime
Originally published as Theodore A. Wertime, “Hans Eberhard Wulff (1907–67).” Technology and Culture 9, no. 3 (1968): 459–61. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894263.
“The Dexter Prize.” Technology and Culture 10, no. 2 (1969): 189–90. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1969.a892361.
Shepherd, Dorothy G. “Review of The Traditional Crafts of Persia; Their Development, Technology, and Influence on Eastern and Western Civilizations, by Hans E. Wulff.” Technology and Culture 9, no. 3 (1968): 476–80. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894266.
Wulff, Hans E. “Door Locks in Persia.” Technology and Culture 7, no. 4 (1966): 497–503. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894533.
Wulff, Hans E. “A Postscript to Reti’s Notes on Juanelo Turriano’s Water Mills.” Technology and Culture 7, no. 3 (1966): 398–401. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894586.
Wuff, Hans E. The Traditional Crafts of Persia: Their Development, Technology, and Influence on Eastern and Western Civilizations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966.
Wulff, Hans E. “Notes on Damascene Steel and Pamor.” Technology and Culture 6, no. 4 (1965): 627–29. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894644.