Thread by @royllovians

Wrt "British Museum" discourse, it cannot be emphasized enough that, with few exceptions, the ancient civilizations of the Near East played no role at all in the culture or identity of the Arab and/or Islamic peoples of the region before European archaeologists rediscovered them

It is not even that Muslims, in principle, often regarded pre-Islamic cultures with contempt—in fact, neither they nor anyone else had any knowledge or memory of ancient Near Eastern cultures beyond that preserved in Greek tradition until the work of 19thC European archaeologists

The main exception being Iran, which did place significant value on its pre-Islamic history—even so, Muslims still regarded it with ambivalence. The Zoroastrian tradition through which this knowledge was preserved also did not preserve a coherent pre-Sassanid historical timeline.

It is arguable that the ancient Egyptian heritage played a role in Egyptian culture via the prominent presence of ruins in the built landscape—but no Egyptian, whether scholar or peasant, knew the names of Narmer, Hatshepsut, or Nefertiti before Frenchmen discovered them

Some might bring up non-Muslim minorities such as the Copts, but while they carried over certain practices (e.g. the use of a few glyphs from the Egyptian Demotic script), they did not preserve any real historical knowledge from the pre-Christian written traditions

As for why this even needs to be said: Starting in the Tumblr era, Anglosphere MENA diasporoids invented a notion that their cultures had a deep and sentimental attachment to cuneiform/hieroglyphic civilization—that Western archaeologists had cruelly stolen their beloved heritage

I recall a bunch of discourse back in 2013/2014 after Katy Perry released a music video with ancient Egyptian imagery, with Tumblr activists accusing her of committing "cultural appropriation" against the Egyptian people, since ancient Egypt is allegedly "sacred" to them (lol)

Not to place it all on Tumblr; in the 20th century a number of political movements in MENA sought to connect modern-day nationalism with the pre-Islamic Near East. Let us be clear: Absolutely none of this would have been possible without Western archaeologists and scholarship.

Not a single human being on the planet Earth, let alone anyone in Iraq standing 20 feet above the buried Sumerian ruins themselves, knew what "Sumer" was or who Hammurabi or Gilgamesh were, until British and French archaeologists dug up and translated the artifacts and tablets.

Like, absolutely nobody knew how far back the history went: The Greek tradition and the Bible recorded information about the Neo-Babylonian Empire and the preceding Neo-Assyrian Empire, but there was no surviving information about anything in Mesopotamia further back than that.

Again, the Greeks knew about the later pharaohs—what we call the "Late Period"—and knew some names of much earlier pharaohs via an extremely garbled and inaccurate history by Manetho, but *nobody* knew about the actual history of the Ramesside dynasty or Akhenten or any of that.

Back to "the British Museum": These artifacts ended up in the West through various means, some licit and some illicit, but on the whole the Ottomans gave the green light to Western archaeologists because they did not give a fuck about any of this and it had no meaning to them.

So, the Ancient Near East is just as foreign to the current inhabitants of MENA as it is to Westerners and all other humans. The legacy of these cultures was transmitted to much of humanity through fragments that survived in the Classical tradition and Abrahamic monotheism.

So no, I definitely don't agree that the people of Iraq or Egypt have an exclusive *moral* or *cultural* right to house these artifacts. As for political rights, I'm no expert on that, but it's undoubtable that many of the artifacts were not "stolen" in any sense of the word.

And ultimately, pragmatically speaking, it's a good thing that these artifacts were evacuated to the West: MENA and Muslim countries harbor large elements who remain hostile toward ancient heritage and have on numerous occasions sought to destroy what they can get their hands on.

We can only hope for a day when large portions of the Middle East and other Muslim regions no longer subscribe to a belief system that views pre-Islamic heritage as a threat that needs to be destroyed.

https://twitter.com/royllovians/status/1600176788574855183

A final disclaimer is that this thread is specifically about *archaeological* findings—objects that were long forgotten, neglected, or ruined by a society—Europeans certainly did "acquire" or "steal" objects that were still "in use", and that involves a different set of questions

For those who need to hear it: This thread is *particularly* about the misapprehension that people in MENA societies had some preexisting cultural closeness to those ancient cultures known only through archaeology, beyond that of the archaeologists who actually discovered them!

"Umm actually there were ancient Arabs who engaged with surrou"—yeah I know Arabs existed before Muhammad. I'm talking about Hammurabi. Or about things from the Classical era that never got copied down by any post-Muhammad scribe, or that never made it into any garbled folk tale.

And if you REALLY want to go there, insofar as some pre-Islamic civilizations *were* remembered and perhaps appreciated in Muslim MENA societies, it was almost always only as inferior shadows of Islam that merely anticipated the glory of the final revelation.

Again—*before* Western scholarship! Your Pharaonist flights of fancy and neo-Babylonian raptures are the products of scholarly disciplines initiated and disseminated by Westerners! Before them, those ruins were only valued insofar as they fit into the story of Islam.