In 1782 the University of Pennsylvania appointed John Christopher Kunze, a Lutheran clergyman who had studied Hebrew, Arabic, and other languages in Halle and Leipzig, as a professor of “Oriental and Germanic languages”. On this basis, some scholars have boasted, Penn can claim the oldest Arabic professorship in the United States. However, drawing upon University of Pennsylvania archives and museum collections, as well as on the writings of generations of Penn scholars, this study will argue that the university’s development of “Semitics” and as it was later known “Oriental Studies”, only took off in the late nineteenth century and reflected the convergence of three trends. The first was a strong interest in Christian and Judaic studies – and this, despite the university’s foundation as a self-consciously non-sectarian institution with cultural debts to Quaker tolerance and the “secular” thought of its founder, Benjamin Franklin. These interests in Judeo-Christian studies fostered the study of Hebrew, which led, somewhat circuitously, to research on Judeo-Arabic among Jewish scholars, and from there to the study of Arabic and Islamic studies more broadly. The second was the university’s commitment after 1887 to building its Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. This was a period when museum makers in major American cities believed that objects could not only “speak” to visitors but could also civilize them – especially if they were immigrants. Materials that Penn archaeologists collected in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Palestine became chief exhibits in the Penn Museum’s civilizing mission within Philadelphia. The third trend was a close relationship between Penn archaeologists and U.S. diplomats in the Ottoman Empire, its post-World War I successor states, and Iran. The U.S. government not only advocated for Penn researchers abroad, but also used their presence to cultivate cordial diplomatic relations with Sultan Abdulhamid II of the Ottoman Empire and later the two Pahlavi shahs in Iran. In short, the U.S.-government’s support for American academics abroad, which began in the late nineteenth century, provided antecedents and foundations for its Cold-War-era sponsorship of professors and students specializing in “strategic” Middle Eastern languages and cultures.