Reviews three books on archaeology. "Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire," by Wendy M. K. Shaw; "Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesapotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe," by Frederick N. Bohrer; "Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon," by Lesley Adkins.