Crafting the Ancient Near Eastern Canon

This chapter offers a personal reflection on two projects that seek to find alternative ways to respond to Middle Eastern heritage: “Remembering the Romans in the Middle East and North Africa” and “Rematerialising Mosul Museum.” Both projects aim to provide ways for people to rejuvenate friendships with heritage objects through a range of craft and art practices (felting, drawing, photograph, and creative writing). This chapter reflects on the author’s own crafted responses and uses these to explore how crafting can help people think more deeply about how they relate to the canon as individuals and how they might use crafting to make their own personal canon. In particular, this chapter thinks through why practices of this kind are important to the author as a person who is a British Iraqi, as well as an archaeologist.

The Lucrative Business of the Cyrus Cylinder

This chapter focuses on the Cylinder of Cyrus the Great (c. 600–530 BCE) of Persia. More commonly known as the “Cyrus Cylinder,” this archaeological find housed in the British Museum is about 22 centimeters long, made of baked clay, and covered in cuneiform writing that has been noted by biblical scholars to corroborate the story of Cyrus’s liberation of the Jewish people from Babylonian captivity. Since the mid-twentieth century, it has been (mis/ab)used as a political tool to promote Iranian national identity. With its exhibition in Iran in 2010 and in the United States in 2013, it has also become a commodified icon in a lucrative international business.

Museums as Vehicles for Defining Artistic Canons

The modern Western encounter with the ancient Near Eastern canon has been mediated largely by museums. Indeed, for the vast majority of specialists and nonspecialists alike the material remains of the ancient Near East are accessible firsthand only through museums. This point is significant because it is now recognized that museum exhibitions and displays have an important role in the formation of disciplinary knowledge. This chapter considers the ways in which the British Museum in London has historically presented and thereby potentially shaped and reiterated canons of ancient Near Eastern art and archaeology, and how it was received and shaped in turn by the nonspecialist visitor. The British Museum has been selected because of its significant collections but also for its long institutional history that reflects changing approaches to display and interpretation.

How Ancient and Modern Memory Shapes the Past

Ancient Near Eastern state agencies that produced monumental art and architecture and crafted rare works out of luxury materials were essentially materializing their own interpretations of reality and thereby producing memories. Because elite memories were rendered into tangible forms and images, they dominated and endured. Thus, ruling bodies curated their particular memories through a range of canonical sites, buildings, monuments, and artworks, which they would have viewed as most representative of their power and legitimacy. Modern canons of ancient Near Eastern art and architecture are an indirect legacy of antiquity’s broken and biased record. Modern aesthetic and political agendas have isolated certain archaeological finds and elevated them to canonical status as representatives of a past best suited to modern needs. This chapter aims to detangle the ancient and modern canons, and, using the Assyrians as a case study, proposes a new memory-based paradigm for canon construction.

The Southern Levant and the Ancient Near Eastern Canon

When the artistic canon of the Southern Levant coalesced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars thought of the region, then Ottoman Palestine, as the locus of the Bible. The small-scale nature of the archaeological finds as well as their relative dearth reinforced a reliance on biblical narratives as a framework for understanding the culture of the region. Moreover, early scholarship did not recognize the complex regionalism of the Southern Levant or the diversity of its populations. Consequently, the artistic canon that developed did not represent the historical and archaeological realities of the region. This chapter examines the history of how the artistic canon of the Southern Levant formed over the past century of scholarship, why various scholars of the early and middle twentieth century included particular items in the canon, and why these now entrenched representations may or may not be helpful to the discipline’s future.

The Consequences of the Destruction of Syrian Heritage on the Syrian Identity and Future Generations

This chapter is a lament on the tremendous material and human losses from war in Syria. Palmyra and the Old City of Aleppo are two disastrous examples. The sites of Mari, Ebla, and Emar have been looted, and archaeological investigations have ceased. All of this desecration deprives Syrians of knowledge about their identity. What are the underlying causes of this massive destruction of cultural heritage? One is the legalistic and alienating way the government preserved and presented antiquities, leaving people with little agency or understanding of their heritage. During the recent war, antiquities have been exploited by extremists for propaganda purposes to gain monetary and ideological support. At this critical juncture, it is important to educate Syrians about their heritage so that they will appreciate and protect it. Syrian school children currently have no such opportunity. History tells us, however, that Syria has the resources to recover and prosper again.

Cultural Heritage Attrition in Egypt

This chapter is a call to archaeologists and museum curators to reflect upon their roles in the production of knowledge surrounding antiquities and to take more responsibility for historical awareness and appreciation in Egypt. Historical objects transform in significance over time and are in constant re-creation of identity, so we must keep pace with their contemporary relevance, and we should use that relevance to start a discourse on the construction of new identities in relation to cultural memories of the past through the contemporary interpretations of these objects in the daily life of different communities. People cannot appreciate what they do not know; if Egyptians do not have access to the knowledge of their ancient past, they will not understand the value of the significance of its material remains, and will continue to allow, through neglect, the total loss of archaeological sites to looting and commercial urbanization. In the end, this loss will result in a complete attrition of cultural heritage and historical memory that will further lead to a more diluted identity.

6,000 Years

In Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Iraq millions of people live among ruins. First, there are the archaeological sites of the ancient civilizations that settled the area, which rural and urban communities have grown around. These spaces were crucial to how local cultural heritage was conceptualized in the twentieth century, as artists, writers, and thinkers formulated postcolonial aesthetics. At the same time, there are the remnants of modern-day wars: pockmarked buildings, bombed neighborhoods, and makeshift memorials that serve as the physical reminders of catastrophic events and the precarious conditions of everyday life in the region. In both cases, ruins reflect the failure of political systems, the neglect of people, and the privileging of individual power over sustained collectivity, not to mention insurmountable loss. This chapter explores how visual artists make these links by appropriating the imagery of ancient artifacts in works that address recent conflicts.

Earth, Rocks, and Blood

The tale presented in this chapter illustrates a symbiosis between land and identity, and heritage and culture, as seen through the eyes of a young Assyrian woman living in Boston, Massachusetts. From identity appropriation to abject denial, the antagonist, an embodiment of the legacy of Mesopotamia, experiences the lives of her dispossessed community in what appears to be a waking dream. It is a story of the elephant in the room from the perspective of a people who see culture and heritage and home in a vastly different light—through experience. This story describes a community navigating an ongoing existential threat somewhere between apathy and empathy toward inevitability with but a small rudder of hope.

Past Resurrections

This chapter explores the growing need to work with antiquity through contemporary art in order to engage wider audiences with heritage. All too often archaeology is seen through a vague prism of heritage that is disconnected from the present, but working with present-day artists, especially from areas of conflict, interacting with “heritage” offers a dynamic and much-needed exchange. Today, the lauded role of the artist in a society in which the art world is an ever-growing platform can allow for a different conversation on heritage than the current one, which is more limited to dry, policy-related agency papers or the less accessible academic world of Art History and Archaeology. While issues of identity and national, racial, and geographic delineations are so contested today, antiquity—rather than serving to enrich debates—has mostly been too remote in the discussion or consciousness to have the nuanced impact that it can through contemporary art.