Governments increasingly looked to remains of the distant past to bolster national identities and a sense of greatness, or to marginalise disfavoured groups. Saddam Hussein used the ruins of Babylon to spread ideas of Iraq’s greatness as well as his own, even portraying himself as a modern Nebuchadnezzar. China’s leadership has used archaeology to project national greatness onto the distant, semi-legendary past. Today, India’s prime minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government has worked to use archaeology to prove that modern Hindus can trace their descent from the earliest inhabitants of India.
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Alongside the language of nationalism, international organisations also associate cultural heritage with universal values. They argue that cultural heritage belongs not just to individual nations but to all of humanity. UNESCO, for example, promotes ‘Unite for Heritage’, a popular social-media hashtag campaign. The UNESCO World Heritage List presumes the universal value of heritage. At first blush, the universalist trend seems to be a new one that directly challenges older nationalist ideas. But, in fact, it is neither new nor a challenge. In the 19th century, Europeans often spoke about Egyptian antiquities, as Elliott Colla points out in Conflicted Antiquities (2007), not in terms of the political or commercial interests of their nations – as they did with other aspects of Egypt – but of civilisation in general. When in the 1820s Jean-François Champollion, the French decipherer of hieroglyphics, was questioned about his plan to hack painted reliefs from an ancient Egyptian royal tomb, he replied that he was doing so as a ‘real lover of antiquity’. That Champollion worked for the Louvre, his country’s national museum, and the reliefs would be deposited there, was mere convenience. The French elite saw themselves on a civilising mission to ‘barbaric’ Africa, an altruistic enterprise benefiting humanity that just happened to include ancient Egyptian monuments and artifacts as their country’s reward. ‘If Africa becomes humanised, if civilisation ever flourishes again on its shores, where the monuments of Roman grandeur lie,’ according to one writer in 1836, ‘the glory must come back to France.’
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Universalist language serves a double purpose. It justifies the urges of the developed world to acquire, often in effect to loot, heritage from developing nations. And it does so while presenting those same developing nations as less enlightened. But this characterisation of developing nations runs counter to the actual history. In 1989, John Henry Merryman, professor emeritus of law and art at Stanford University, questioned ‘[t]he deference still routinely given to state claims to their “national cultural patrimony” in international affairs’. At the time, European and American powers had just begun taking the antiquities laws of developing nations seriously. Western scholars love to critique and mock the image of Hussein as Nebuchadnezzar, but it is not qualitatively different from Napoleon’s depiction as a Greek god or hero, defeating the Mamluk rulers of Egypt and bringing civilisation back to the country. In Europe and America, nationalist use of heritage is depicted as an aberration. It’s what others do. The West rarely holds itself up to the same mirror.
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