Portland State Magazine, Spring 2021

M I D D L E E A S T S T U D I E S C E N T E R 1 The Rock and the Rising Waters It’s easy to miss the Vanport Rock as you pass in and out of Lincoln Hall, but this mossy memorial has a story to tell. Named after PSU’s frst iteration, the Vanport Extension Center, the rock was dedicated in honor of the college’s second anniversary and buried nine days later by the devastating Vanport food. Dug out of the mud and debris, then moved to the college’s second home—the former Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation Building—the rock was picked up and moved again when campus relocated to downtown Portland in 1952, fnally fnding a permanent place outside of Lincoln Hall (then known as “Old Main”).Te Vanport Rock is one of only a few items that survived the 1948 food, including three library books rescued by the college founder and director, Stephen Epler; a few microscopes; football gear recovered by athletics director Joe Holland; and a Vanport administration guestbook. —JENNIFER LADWIG 2 22 // PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE Ancient Treasures Te Roman lamp shaped like a man’s head seen here (left), is from the frst century B.C. and is one of the frst ever made in human form. It’s part of a collection of nearly 200 ancient oil lamps and burial urns made from 5,000 B.C. to the frst several centuries of the current era.Te collection includes lamps both simple and fanciful, including one (bottom right) decorated with a frog, symbolizing fertility and spring, and another (top right) shaped like a fsh, a secret symbol for early Christianity. All were donated to Portland State’s Middle East Studies Center in 1962 by Robert Bogue, a friend of Frederick Cox, the center’s founder. Bogue, formerly adviser to the World Health Organization, collected ancient artifacts across the Middle East and Mediterranean. Founded in 1959, Portland’s Middle East Studies Center built one of the best Arabic collections in the western United States and the lamp collection is unlike any other in the nation. A few of the artifacts are on campus, nine are on display at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University in Salem, and the rest are stored at the Portland Museum of Art. —JENNIFER LADWIG PIECES OF HISTORY