by Dr. Eva Miller (University College, London)
Warwick Global History and Culture Centre Annual Conference: Archaeology, Antiquity, and the Making of the Modern Middle East: Global Histories 1800–1939. Organisers: Guillemette Crouzet (European Research Institute at Florence) and Eva Miller (UCL)
Since Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798 with a cadre of scientific experts, the Middle East has been framed as the cradle of the world past: the place where civilization began, burgeoning with antiquities, where ancient history was visible in the landscape—or could be made so through the right kind of labour. This framing continues to affect heritage politics and international relations in the region.
The conference ‘Archaeology, Antiquity, and the Making of the Modern Middle East: Global Histories 1800–1939’, held on 25–26 May, 2023 at the University of Warwick, explored how historical consciousness about the Middle East was reshaped in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and new senses of its ancient past forged through excavation and exegesis of traces of ancient civilisations (programme here). The Past & Present Society supported the essential participation of ECRs travelling from the Middle East.
Poster for the GHCC Annual Conference: Archaeology, Antiquity, and the Making of the Modern Middle East: Global Histories 1800-1939, via the University of Warwick (2023) all rights reserved
Why was a conference about one particular area of the globe the annual conference of a centre for ‘global’ history and culture? The final roundtable ‘Whose Heritage? Living with the Legacies of Imperialism, Colonialism, and Nationalism in the Middle East’ explicitly critiqued the common notion of the Middle East’s past as ‘world heritage’. Panellists noted how this has contributed to the erasure of local traditions and local claims to objects and site management. Prof Lynn Meskell offered a sobering statistic: a recent study she conducted with colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania indicated that for almost 1200 UNESCO World Heritage sites worldwide, the inscription of global heritage had actually increased conflict rather than cooperation.
Of the many leitmotifs running through our conference, one of the most persistent was a personal, local, or regional sense of antiquity, in contrast to a de facto Eurocentric ‘world historical’ approach. Participants sought to recover Middle Eastern perspectives on the Middle Eastern past, or at least reframe historical discussions with this in mind. The significant new results they presented indicates the benefit of new approaches to familiar texts, and tapping ignored archives.
‘Local’ pasts in the Middle East
For centuries, European explorers and archaeologists have justified the ‘extractivist’ paradigm of archaeology through a rhetoric of preservation, as Amany Abd el Hameed and Robert Vigar highlighted in their paper on site-looting British Colonial archaeology in Egypt, bolstered by portrayals of the peoples of the Middle East as dis/uninterested in, or even hostile to, their ancient past. This notion was given a renewed lease of life in Western commentary in the wake of image destruction carried out by Daesh; Boris Johnson, writing in the Telegraph in 2015, spun this as only the latest proof that military and administrative intervention in the Middle East was a means of protecting heritage ‘for the world’ from the people who live there (see also ‘colonial’ discourse around the site of Palmyra in Syria).
It is now conventional for histories of Middle Eastern archaeology to acknowledge that this alleged ‘local disinterest/hostility’ is a product of biassed European accounts. Yet it is still relatively rare to see studies that actually explain how people living in the Middle East did relate to antiquities and the ancient past, and how they regarded Western archaeological projects. Research presented at our conference offered numerous models for recovering various Middle Eastern perspectives—beyond, and beneath, the level of state actors.
Debbie Challis opened proceedings by showing a map of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, in present-day Turkey, as it existed in the mid-nineteenth century, offering a new way of seeing a famous archaeological site of the ‘Classical past’: as a location of Turkish homes, which were destroyed to conjure a ‘heritage site’. British Museum curator Thomas Newton related as a comic anecdote how he surprised residents by tunnelling unexpectedly through their hearths.
Daniel Foliard read the (in)famous Austen Henry Layard’s popular accounts of his 1840s excavations in Nineveh ‘against’ the grain, and incorporated insights from Mosul’s social history, to reveal the political practicalities that lay behind local resistance to his excavations. He was able to reveal just what kind of books were being written and read in Arabic in Mosul at the time about the region’s past—hardly the ‘disinterest’ Layard portrayed in a spurious ‘Letter from a Turkish Cadi’ which he ‘reproduced’ in his book and which became one of the most-cited evidence of an Islamic or Middle Eastern hostility to science.
Layard as his own publications presented him: master of men and antiquities. W.L. Walton, ‘Lowering the Great Winged Bull’ frontispiece in Austen Henry Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains, vol. I (London: John Murray, 1849). Photo credit: public domain, via Wiki:Commons
Similarly, Nora Derbal countered the German travel writer Heinrich von Maltzan’s accounts of North African ‘disinterest’ in Phoenician antiquity by pointing out that he was denied access to ancient inscriptions precisely because a local Ottoman ruler wanted to collect and publish the inscriptions himself. The significance of the Phoenician past in Lebanese society and identity was also highlighted by Marwan Kilani. He argued that, while French colonial discourses were adopted by various Lebanese groups, they were modified by pre-existing senses of history, community, and identity.
Laith Shakir contested the widely-accepted historiographical narrative that Iraqi interest in archaeology arose only belatedly and only in response to European paradigms, by revealing a strong and multifaceted interest in archaeological developments in Iraq in both the local and regional Arabic press. Archaeology and antiquity was reported on as a matter of ‘human interest’ and also taken as a serious political matter that affected the region’s identity as a whole. Shakir’s work was a ‘pandemic project’ that resulted from studying digitised Arabic newspapers, and discovering a tremendously revealing resource.
Nicole Khayat, working in part from family archives, presented a case-study of a Palestinian antiquities dealer (her great-grandfather) who conducted his own excavations, to find pieces to sell, but also as a means of community enrichment (employing locals and creating local heritage institutions), and out of a historical-antiquarian interest in ancient artefacts within his specialised expertise. This case study was complemented by Sarah Griswold’s work on antiquities traders in Syria who struggled to adapt their business models to an ever-evolving range of laws from Ottoman and later French Mandatory administrations.
Heba Abd el Gawad spoke about her position as an ‘indigenous Egyptian’ scholar of ancient Egypt, and the contradicting demands such an identity places on her. She highlighted her weariness at having to prove over and over again that Egyptians care about their own history. At the same time she questioned why Egyptians should necessarily have to follow the paradigms laid down by European archaeologists. Is the Rosetta Stone significant to Egypt’s history, or only to the history of Egyptology?
A 1903 painting by Osman Hamdi Bey, founding director of the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, showing the University of Pennsylvania excavations at Nippur (1889–1900), in present day Iraq. Photo credit: public domain, in the collection of the Penn Museum, via Wiki:Commons
Zeynep Çelik’s keynote on the second day looked at Ottoman museums and antiquities policies, detailing how provincial towns created ‘museums’ within high schools, police stations, or other municipal buildings. While the Istanbul Museum might represent a towering, elite edifice of imperial self-fashioning (as Çelik’s foundational work on Ottoman heritage politics has shown), small regional museums had an entirely different setting and would have been encountered in entirely different ways by the communities they were located amongst.
These papers resonated when panellists at the final roundtable discussion discussed contemporary issues in the allegedly ‘global’ heritage of the Middle East. Ammar Azzouz discussed how ‘heritage’ for all of us often encompasses ordinary sites, like schools and markets, which he framed as those things that evoke, not world historical, civilisational achievements, but simply ‘home’.
In addition to the Past and Present Society this event was supported by the University of Warwick’s: Habitability Global Research Priority, Connecting Cultures Global Research Priority, Humanities Research Centre, the Institute of Advanced Studies and the British Institute for the Study of Iraq.