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Chapter 8
Conjuring
Mesopotamia
Imaginative
geography and
a world past
Zainab Bahrani
Our familiarity, not merely with the languages of the peoples of the East but
with their customs, their feelings, their traditions, their history and religion,
our capacity to understand what may be called the genius of the East, is the sole
basis upon which we are likely to be able to maintain in the future the position
we have won, and no step that can be taken to strengthen that position can be
considered undeserving of the attention of His majesty’s Government or of a
debate in the House of Lords.
Lord Curzon, address to House of Lords, September 27, 1909
Introduction
By 1909 the importance of the production of knowledge for the British
colonial enterprise in the East was neither implicit in political rhetoric nor
subtly expressed. In Lord Curzon’s words it was “an imperial obligation…part
of the necessary furniture of Empire” (Said 1978:214). The need for this
knowledge was stressed as an integral part of the process of colonisation, and
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one that would facilitate the continuation of European authority over the East.
It is my contention that the development of the discipline of Mesopotamian
archaeology and its discursive practices during this time cannot be isolated from
this colonialist enterprise. Nor can it be divorced from the general Western
historical narrative of the progress of civilisation which was necessary for the
aims of a civilising imperial mission. I argue here that this narrative of civilisation
was heavily dependent upon a discourse of Otherness which posited a
“Mesopotamia” as the past of mankind, and furthermore that the presencing of
Mesopotamia through this imperialist discourse constitutes the ground whence
today archaeologists continue to unearth what counts as “historical fact,” and to
decide upon its acceptable mode of comprehension. First, in order to locate
Mesopotamia’s position in the Euro-American historical tradition I consider the
historical dimensions of time and space as structuring horizons for the framework
of “Mesopotamia.” Second, I argue that this framework, which in Heidegger’s
words “serves as a criterion for separating the regions of Being” cannot be
divorced from the cultural abstraction most commonly used to identify
Mesopotamia: despotism.
Postcolonial critiques have pointed to how the process of imperialism was
not limited to the overt economic and political activities of Western
governments in colonised lands. An entire system of classification through the
arts and sciences was necessary for the success of the imperial enterprise in
the East and Africa.1
Mesopotamian archaeological practices must be considered
within this system, not only because this field concerns a region that was of
geopolitical interest to the West, but because of its crucial place within the
metanarrative of human culture. Archaeology, like other human sciences such
as anthropology and history, allowed a European mapping of the subjugated
terrain of the Other. While ethnography portrayed the colonised native as a
savage requiring Western education and whose culture needed modernisation,
archaeology and its practices provided a way of charting the past of colonised
lands.
Mesopotamian archaeology is a discipline concerned with defining a particular
past, and a particular culture within this past, and like in other archaeological or
historical enterprises two of the basic constituents structuring the discursive
practices of this discipline are space and time. These ontologically “obvious”
measures are not neutral in archaeological practices. In fact, if we apply
Heideggerian terms, it is within this structure of space and time that
“Mesopotamia” was revealed as a Being-in-the-world. As an ontic phenomenon
therefore, Mesopotamia is prefigured by the temporal structure of European
metahistorical narrative. In other words, as I aim to show here, “Mesopotamia,”
as archaeologists generally think of this culture today, is a discursive formation.
The relationship of power to praxis in archaeological research has received
some attention in recent years (Hodder et al. 1995; Shanks and Tilley 1987).
Conjuring Mesopotamia
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Issues such as the promotion of one historical interpretation over another, or
the focus on one sector of society at the expense of all others, have been
confronted and discussed at great lengths by a number of scholars. In this
chapter, it is not my intention to liberate a “true” Mesopotamian past from the
power of Western representation. Rather, by analysing Mesopotamia as a
phenomenon within Western archaeological discourse I hope to show how a
particular Mesopotamian identity was required for the narrative of the progress
of civilisation as an organic universal event. My intention then is to question
the ontological or, rather, ontic concept of Mesopotamia as it has been
determined by Western archaeological discourse, and to consider the ideological
components of this phenomenon. In other words, I would like to open up the
field of politicising inquiry in archaeology to consider Mesopotamia not as a
factual historical and geographical entity waiting to be studied, excavated and
interpreted according to one set of conventions or another, but as a product
of the poetics of a Western historical narrative.
For Mesopotamian archaeology, scholarly considerations of the relationship
between politics and archaeology has meant two things only: (a) interpreting
the material and textual remains from ancient Iraq primarily as manifestations
of political propaganda of Babylonian and Assyrian kings and, more recently,
(b) pointing to the Iraqi Baathist regime’s use of the pre-Islamic past for
propagandist purposes. We, as Mesopotamian archaeologists, do not question
the nature of our discipline, its parameters, and its interpretive strategies. I
do not use the word “we” because I am a Middle Eastern scholar educated in
theWest. Eastern archaeologists work within the same parameters and according
to the same interpretive models as Western archaeologists (see Özdogan,
Chapter 5), due to the fact that archaeology is a Western discipline that only
became instituted in Middle Eastern countries while they were under European
rule. As a “high cultural” activity and a humanist discipline we do not question
its institutional character or presence. Mesopotamian scholarship assumes that
the colonial context of its creation is irrelevant except as a distant, indirectly
related, historical event.This attitude is not limited to archaeologists ofWestern
origins.Therefore, Mesopotamian archaeologists, regardless of nationality, have
been slow to reflect on the circumstances under which the constitution of the
field of Mesopotamian archaeology occurred, and how its textual practices
have formed ancient “Mesopotamia” as an area of modern knowledge.
On the level of the overtly political and ideological, ancient history and
archaeology have certainly been areas of contestation as in, for example,
Palestine/Israel (Silberman, Chapter 9) and Cyprus (Knapp and Antoniadou,
Chapter 1). However, it is not only such geographical areas and histories that
can be contested. In this chapter I would like to define and contest another
terrain: the conceptual territory which functions in the production of Western
culture as narration.
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Space and despotic time
During the second half of the nineteenth century the myth of Mesopotamia as
the origin of Western civilisation became institutionalised into the Western
humanist tradition.This modern humanist field of knowledge is a “metatemporal”
teleological discourse based upon the concept of culture as an organic natural
whole; one that encompassed the entirety of the world. Time, in this cultural
narrative, is visualised according to this organic structure and its potential
evolution. The past was seen as a necessary part of the present Western identity
and, its place in the serial development to the present, of paramount importance.
Michel de Certeau has defined the act of historical writing as a perpetual
separation and suturing of the past and present (de Certeau 1975). In the case of
Mesopotamia, the cut and suture are not limited to the separation and adhesion
of past and present time as abstract phenomenological concepts. This
reconstructive historical act has severed “Mesopotamia” from any geographical
terrain in order to weave it into the Western historical narrative. In the
standardised orthodox text book accounts of Middle Eastern history, Sumerian,
Babylonian and Assyrian cultures can have absolutely no connection to the culture
of Iraq after the seventh century AD. Instead, this past is grafted onto the tree of
the progress of civilisation, a progress that by definition must exclude the East,
as its very intelligibility is established by comparison with an Other.The Otherness
of the Oriental past, however, plays a double role here. It is at once the earliest
phase of a universal history of mankind in which man makes the giant step from
savagery to civilisation, and it is an example of the unchanging nature of Oriental
cultures.
In historical scripture, then, the Mesopotamian past is the place of world
culture’s first infantile steps: first writing, laws, architecture and all the other
firsts that are quoted in every student handbook and in all the popular accounts
of Mesopotamia.These “firsts” of culture are then described as being “passed” as
a “torch of civilisation” to the Graeco-Roman world. If Mesopotamia is the cradle
of civilisation, and civilisation is to be understood as an organic universal whole,
then this Mesopotamia represents human culture’s infancy.Already by the 1830s,
even before the start of scientific excavations in the Near East, Hegel’s lectures
on the philosophy of history defined this area as the site of the infancy of human
civilisation (Hegel 1956:105). European historical writing had provided an
interpretive framework in which the development of history was likened to the
growth of the human organism, and in which the cradle of that organism was the
East. When Mesopotamian material remains actually came to be unearthed in
the decades following Hegel’s lectures this evolutionary model was firmly in
place.Therefore, Mesopotamian archaeological finds were interpreted according
to a pre-established model. Conversely, architectural structures, visual and textual
representations, as well as every other aspect of culture, were used to confirm a
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model of progress that had been established before these same cultural remains
had been unearthed.
The temporal organisation of this evolution of human civilisation puts
Mesopotamia into the distant primeval past of mankind, a time that is both “ours”
(i.e. the West’s) and that of a barbaric, not yet civilised, civilisation. Thus, the
temporal placement of “Mesopotamia” also determines the spatial organisation
required for this system to function. In terms of geographical land, Mesopotamia
is not to be associated with Iraq as it can only inhabit a temporal, not a terrestrial,
space.Thus, in this case, the will to power which is often turned to the production
of history, has established as historical fact the development of culture as one
Olympic relay with its starting point in a place that needs to remain in the realm
of theWest, although its savagery can never be totally overcome.
However, the Western historical narrative is not a coherent discourse which
merely uses the East as the origins of civilisation for its own political ends, in
the sense of appropriation of land, history, or the declaration of cultural and
moral superiority; nor does the ancient Orient simply appear within this narrative
as a representation of Otherness. The exercise of power may often work on the
level of the consciously political. But at the same time, academic discourse as an
apparatus of power, with its metaphoricity and rhetoric, is a matrix in which
unconscious desire also manifests itself symptomatically. The representation of
the ancient Near East within the Western historical narrative then is not limited
to overt racial comparison and hierarchisation through linear time; it is also a
form of control and fixing of that uncanny, terrifying and unaccountable time: at
once “ours” and Other.2
In the simplest terms, if the earliest ‘signs of civilisation’ were unearthed in
an Ottoman province inhabited primarily by Arabs and Kurds, how was this to
be reconciled with the European notion of the progress of civilisation as one
organic whole? Civilisation had to have been passed from ancient Mesopotamia
and Egypt to Greece. Therefore, the contemporary inhabitants of this area had
to be dissociated from this past, and this unruly ancient time was brought within
the linear development of civilisation. However, as a sort of primeval European
past it was also construed at the same time as an era of despotism and decadence
and, paradoxically, Orientalist notions of nineteenth-century Eastern culture,
systems of government and economy were projected backwards in time and
applied also to Babylonia and Assyria. From within this matrix of control, the
unruly despotic past continues to resurface in descriptive language and
interpretive methods.
The structuring of historical time is not only a teleological device. It is my
contention here that this temporal framework is necessary for the operations of
taxonomy which were so crucial for the colonialist project. It has often been
stated that in the evolutionary process of civilisation the telos is equivalent to
the West. Countless texts from the Western historical tradition describe how
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civilisation was passed from the Near East through Greece and Rome to the
modern West and this is hardly a point of contention any longer. However, it is
my belief that this unilinear time also acts as an organising device for a taxonomy
of political systems which are then aligned racially to particular past cultures
that are, in turn, seen as the developmental steps of the human cultural organism.
According to Montesquieu, the so-called founder of political science, there
are three species of government: the republic, the monarchy and despotism.The
republic was the ideal government of Classical antiquity and monarchy that of
theWest. Despotism, according to Montesquieu, is the government of most Asian
countries and, as Louis Althusser has pointed out, the first feature of despotism
in Montesquieu’s definition is the fact that it is a political regime which has no
structure, no laws and lacks any social space. Montesquieu represents despotism
as “the abdication of politics itself” hence its paradoxical character as a political
regime which does not exist, as such, but is the constant temptation and peril of
other regimes (Althusser 1972:82). According to Althusser’s description of
Montesquieu’s characterisation, despotism is “space without places, time without
duration” (ibid.: 78).
Despotism’s timeless quality then explains how latter day Middle Eastern
despots can be converged with a primeval past world.3
Mesopotamia therefore
exists within despotic time as the mythical time of despotism or civilisation’s
unruly malformed past. I have discussed this abstraction in my previous work
(Bahrani 1995) and will address it further below. However, first I would like to
focus upon how the process of naming the historical region in question was so
indispensable for its placement within the Western cultural narrative—because,
as we have learned from the ancient Mesopotamians, a thing does not exist until
it is named.
Name and being
The earliest European interest in the remains of the ancient cities of Babylon
and Assyria stemmed from the desire for the validation of the Bible as an
historically accurate document. As early as the twelfth century AD, Western
travellers such as Benjamin of Tudela and Petahiah of Ratisbon attempted to
identify remains of cities around the area of the city of Mosul in northern Iraq
mentioned in the Old Testament. However, it was not until the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries that a number of European travellers began to record their
attempts at the identification of ancient sites, sometimes with illustrations of
those sites accompanying the written descriptions. The first organised
archaeological expeditions or missions in Mesopotamia began in the midnineteenth
century. This is also the time that a number of terms came to be
applied to this geographical locale: Mesopotamia, the Near East, and the Middle
Conjuring Mesopotamia
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East. While the latter two names were interchangeable originally, and
encompassed a larger geographical terrain, Mesopotamia became instituted as
the name of the pre-Islamic civilisation of the region that under Ottoman rule
was known as Iraq. This name, Iraq, had already-long been in use by the local
inhabitants of the region by the time of the writings of the geographer Yakut
al Rumi (born 1179 AD/575 AH [Anno Hijra]) and the early tenth century AD
(4th century AH) descriptions of the region by Ibn Hawkal.4
The terms “Middle East” and “Near East” came into use in Europe and North
America in order to identify more clearly the vast geographical terrain that
had previously been referred to simply as the Orient, an area that encompassed
basically the whole of Asia and northern Africa. In order to distinguish what
was nearer to Europe, in a time when European interest in this vast area was
intensified, a closer definition of what Europe was dealing with became
necessary. The term “Near East,” which was first applied at the end of the
nineteenth century, soon fell out of general usage. Nevertheless, it has survived
until today primarily as a designation for the same geographical locus in the
pre-Islamic period, for the place named the Middle East. This is especially
true in academic literature produced in the United States. The name “Middle
East” was coined in 1902 by the American naval historian, Alfred Thayer Mahan,
for whom the center of this region for military strategic purposes was the
Persian Gulf (Lewis 1994:3). In this way a distinction came to be made between
the region before and after the advent of Islam that implied the death of one
civilisation and its replacement and eradication by another. Within this
disciplinary organisation the term that came to be the acceptable name for
Iraq in the Pre-Islamic period was “Mesopotamia.” This revival of a name applied
to the region in the European Classical tradition came to underscore the
Babylonian/Assyrian position within the Western historical narrative of
civilisation as the remoter, malformed, or partially formed, roots of European
culture which has its telos in the flowering of Western culture and, ultimately,
the autonomous modern Western man. Thus the term Mesopotamia refers to
an atemporal rather than a geographical entity, which is, in the words of the
renowned Mesopotamian scholar, A.Leo Oppenheim (1964), a “Dead
Civilisation.” This civilisation had to be entirely dissociated, by name, from
the local inhabitants and contemporary culture in order to facilitate the
portrayal of the history of human civilisation as a single evolutionary process
with its natural and ideal outcome in the modern West.
The distinguished American scholar of Middle Eastern history, Bernard
Lewis, tells us that only “two of the peoples active in the ancient Middle East
had survived with a continuing identity and memory and with a large impact
on the world. The Greeks and Jews were still Greeks and Jews and still knew
Greek and Hebrew; in these ancient yet living languages, they had preserved
the immortal works of religion and literature, which passed into the common
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inheritance of mankind” (Lewis 1994:10). Therefore, according to this still
commonly held view, the “torch of civilisation” was passed from Mesopotamia
to Europe via the two “Eastern ethnicities” that are acceptable to the West:
Greeks and Jews. Paradoxically, in the two main sources of the Western cultural
narrative, Classical texts and the Bible, the Assyrians and Babylonians and their
successors, the Persians, are the hostile Other, presenting a constant threat to
the political freedom of democracy and the worship of the true God. The
earliest archaeological expeditions to Mesopotamia then were unambiguous in
defining the purposes of their mission. Since human civilisation was thought to
originate in Mesopotamia, and this civilisation was transferred from the East
to the West, the two justifications for the archaeological expeditions were
repeatedly stated as being the search for the “roots” of Western culture and to
locate the places referred to in the Old Testament.5
This obsessive desire to disassociate the past of the region from its present
and to present it instead as a primitive stage in the evolution of mankind
facilitated the concept of “Mesopotamia” as the rightful domain of the West,
both in a historical and a geopolitical sense. A separation and division of
(Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian) cultures and an exclusion of the later
history of the region was successfully articulated through the act of naming.
The acquisition of monuments and works of art that were shipped to London,
Paris and Berlin in the mid-nineteenth century was thus not seen solely, or
even primarily, as the appropriation of historical artefacts of Iraq but as the
remains of a mythical pre-European past. Mesopotamian cultural remains
unearthed in the first days of archaeological exploration then served to illustrate
how the modern West had evolved from this stage of the evolution, and that
Biblical accounts were true, thus that the Judeo-Christian God was the true
God.Yet these were certainly not the only needs that dictated the archaeological
endeavour in Mesopotamia. And, more importantly, the European concepts
that formed “Mesopotamia” are not limited to the earliest days of archaeological
work in the region. It is even more important to realise that the construction
of a “Mesopotamia” within the discourse of nineteenth-century colonialism is
not a thing of the past. The structure of this colonialist discipline continues
virtually unchanged today, and remains all but unquestioned.
The most recent and comprehensive engagement of Mesopotamian
scholarship with the issues of imperialism and Orientalism, with the
“construction” of the field of Mesopotamian archaeology during the height of
Western imperialism, was the 1990 conference “The Construction of the
Ancient Near East” (Gunter 1992). The participants, however, confined
themselves to the workings of the field of Ancient Near Eastern studies—
whether publications, excavations, funding—to pre-World War II Europe and
North America, and maintained that the field today is untainted by any political
power interests. Mathew Stolper seems to be the exception when he says, “The
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European literary and intellectual history that shaped the study of the ancient
Near East is not to be separated from political history” (Stolper 1992:20).
More significantly, however, although the contributors refer to the
“construction” of the discipline during the period of Western imperialism, the
major consensus seems to be that Near Eastern archaeology is the “stepchild
of imperialism,” thus having only an indirect relation to it, and that it was
never used as a tool of imperial power (Cooper 1992:133). A reading of the
papers presented at this conference indicates that the silence in Mesopotamian
studies regarding the colonial context of the field is not an oversight. The
issue has indeed been brought up, but only so that it may be dismissed.
While conferences, such as the one organised at the Smithsonian, and articles
written by a handful of scholars attempt to engage with issues of Orientalism
and colonialism these endeavours, especially in the area of Mesopotamian
archaeology, have been limited to positivist historical documentation of the
origins of the discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
There has been no engagement with issues such as representation, cultural
translation, or prevalent paradigms of discourse, which have been major areas
of focus in related academic disciplines. Although there has been some concern
with the recording of the events that occurred in the earliest days of
Mesopotamian archaeology, there has been a decided lack of questioning of
the (internalised) structure of the field and its practices. The rhetoric of
objectivity and realism is today still operative in Mesopotamian archaeology.
However, what I find equally disturbing is that now this objectivity is at times
presented in the guise of politically correct “post-colonial” approaches that are
alternatives to the hegemonic mainstream of the discourse.
The superficial incorporation of the vocabulary of dissent from the margins
into the hegemonic discourse of the center without any reassessment or
awareness of the epistemological boundaries of the discipline only serves to
neutralise and deflect, thereby allowing the central system of practice to remain
dominant and effective. In Gramsci’s sense of the word, hegemony is not
ideology and manipulation. Hegemony constitutes the limits of common sense
for people, and even forms a sense of reality (Gramsci 1987; Williams 1973).
Thus, the vague references to Orientalism and imperialism in the contemporary
discourse of Mesopotamian archaeology have only served to further validate
the status quo and preserve the conventional epistemological limits of the field.
It seems that a principle of silent exclusion is in operation, barring any real
oppositional views through the adoption of their vocabulary into the central
dominant discourse.6
Therefore, this mimicry and subsequent neutralisation of
counter-hegemonic terms within the parameters of hegemony are decoys of
sorts that lure the possible danger to the integrity of the discipline by deflecting
any oppositional realities.7
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Time of the Despots
Once identified and placed within a Western matrix of knowledge,
“Mesopotamia” as the cradle of civilisation began to be reduced to
characteristics that were identifiable by and recognisable to (scientifically)
trained archaeological research. A number of powerful abstractions, not
unlike those upon which ethnographers depended in order to get to the
“heart” of a culture more rapidly, graphed a diagram for Mesopotamian
archaeological practices. Components of this framework were a priori
summaries of the East that discerning scholars could access through objective
inquiry into every realm of culture. However, if we analyse this “valueneutral”
research on the level of the mimetic description of the data we can
see that the creative distortion inherent in all mimesis, as Aristotle describes
it, forms a dominant mode of discourse. And, furthermore, this discursive
mode is heavily dependent upon the prefiguration of the master tropes of
metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche for its prosaic mimetic image of antiquity.8
In metaphor, which is literally “transfer,” a figure of speech is used in which
a name or descriptive word is transferred to an object or action through
analogy or simile. Metonymy, “name change,” works through displacement.
The part of a thing may be substituted for the whole, cause for effect or agent
for act, whereas synecdoche (regarded by some as a form of metonymy) uses
a part to symbolise a quality presumed to inhere to the whole (White 1973).
The main recurring tropical or hologramic abstraction in the textual
practices of Mesopotamian archaeology is that of despotic rule.Working within
the rhetorical boundaries and signifying processes of essentialising metonymy
and synecdoche, scholarship has further identified a despotic Mesopotamia as
a historical fact, and it is this abstraction of despotism that has allowed
Mesopotamia to assume its position as a non-place. The abstract immediacy of
Mesopotamia as a despotic entity is found in all manner of archaeological
interpretation regarding this culture, from agricultural production to religion,
and recurs repeatedly in descriptions of the arts and architecture (see Hodder,
Chapter 6). Decay, violence, inertia and excess, all characteristics of despotic
lands in Montesquieu’s classification, are abstractions through which
Mesopotamian culture is represented. Here, I focus on how despotism resurfaces
in the form of metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche in the descriptions of
aesthetic traditions and artistic genres of Mesopotamian culture. An early
example can be seen in the writings of James Fergusson, the architect who
worked with Austen Henry Layard in reconstructing the Assyrian palaces:
Khorsabad formed a period of decay in Assyrian art…but this is even more
striking when we again pass over eight centuries of time and reach Persepolis,
which is as much inferior to Khorsabad as that is to Nimrud. In Persepolis,
Conjuring Mesopotamia
169
the artists do not seem to have been equal to attempting portrayal of an
action, and scarcely even of a group.There are nothing but long processions
of formal bass reliefs of kingly state.
(Fergusson 1850:363–4)
In this passage decay and repetitive inertia are characteristics of an architecture
that is metaphorically defined for us, in Montesquieu’s terms, as despotic.
Such a viewpoint published in London in 1850, during the period of British
colonial expansion in the East, should come as no surprise. However,
abstractions of decay, repetition, inertia and despotism appear more often than
not in descriptions of Mesopotamian material culture today. In a whole series
of articles and books, Assyrian art—wall reliefs, free standing monuments and
entire buildings—has been interpreted as despotic (e.g. Pittman 1996; Winter
1981). For instance, in a recent study of Sennacherib’s palace, an entire building
is interpreted as an oppressive propagandistic building (Russell 1991:267).The
architectural structure of the palace is described metaphorically as possessing
the awesome magnificence of all oriental despots and the power to reduce
troublemakers to submission, both in Assyria proper and in distant lands.
Synecdochally here, consciously political propaganda is the part of
Mesopotamian cultural practices taken to stand for the whole, integrating the
entirety. The ideology of despots has clearly become a handy ethnographic
abstraction through which archaeologists can get to “the heart” of Mesopotamian
culture and describe its aesthetic practices more easily and quickly than if they
were to accept the possibility of a certain amount of variation of purpose or
means in the cultural production of this despotic non-place.
Political rhetoric and propaganda were certainly important components of
Assyrian and Babylonian cultural production. In fact, I argue that no
representation, regardless of its country of manufacture, can be entirely
separated from politics and ideology. But all manifestations of Mesopotamian
culture have been reduced through essentialising metaphors, synecdochally and
metonymically, into one identity.While sculpture and architecture created under
royal patronage were no doubt infused with some form of propaganda, many
other factors went into their creation besides the consciously political. Reading
all Mesopotamian cultural remains as nothing more nor less than the
propagandist utterances of the king reduces this Mesopotamian identity to the
epiphenomenon of articulate ideology and thus serves the rhetorical strategy
of “Oriental despotism.” In this way, current scholarship repeats and diffuses
the prototypes of imperialism.Through the power of writing, abstractions that
are colonial in principle are left intact.
This kind of essentialising metonymic and synecdochal representation does
not take place solely in text. Since the mid-nineteenth century objects
collected from Mesopotamian archaeological sites by Western travellers,
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adventurers or archaeologists have been displayed in Western museums as a
metonymic visual presence of that culture.The categorisation of these objects,
and their display in Berlin, Paris and London, in museums that were built or
enlarged specifically for that purpose, was unquestionably part and parcel of
the Western imperial project in the East in the nineteenth century. At the
British Museum, the original installation of the Assyrian finds was advertised
to the general public as both an antiquarian object of study and a national
prize or trophy (Bohrer 1994; Jenkins 1992). Today, a metonymic method of
display continues to be utilised in museums for Mesopotamian (and other
Near Eastern) antiquities. A group of Mesopotamian royal monuments,
including the famous Stele of Naramsin, formed the main focus of an
exhibition entitled “The Royal City of Susa” at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York in 1992. These monuments had been mutilated and carried
to Iran by the Elamites in the twelfth century BC. According to the established
tradition in scholarship, the didactic material and the catalogue entries
expressed horror at this act of theft and destruction. Oriental violence and
cruelty was seen as a valid explanation for these actions (Bahrani 1995).
“Stolen” works of art from Babylonia were placed directly in the central space
of the galleries, as the main focus of the exhibition and as a prime example
of, in this case, Elamite cultural practices.
Further, what is interesting for my purposes here is that neither the didactic
material in the exhibit, nor the wall maps, made mention of the words Iraq
or Iran. The reasoning behind this was, no doubt, that only the ancient names
should be represented in a “high cultural” institution. However, I shall venture
to say here that this is not common practice with exhibits representing ancient
Western cultures within the same institution, nor others like it in this country.
The museum and its representation of alien cultures is clearly not a valueneutral
domain since this is the arena in which information and
representations of other cultures are disseminated to the general public. The
deliberate omission of the names Iran and Iraq from these maps and
descriptions have only added to the general conception of this area as a nonplace,
and further strengthened the disassociation of the past and present of
a particular geographical region (one which, whether relevantly or irrelevantly
happened to be at the moment either at war, or without diplomatic relations
to the United States), while paradoxically presenting these cultures as typically
“Oriental.”
My insistence on the political ramifications of this exhibition through its
omission of names from the map may seem unwarranted or at best misguided;
however, references to it in the popular press and leading newspapers in the
United States indicate that its message was successfully deployed and
understood.The following is an excerpt from an article published in The Houston
Chronicle, after a US air attack on Iraq:
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171
Before initiating his pre-inaugural raids on Iraq (Clinton) should have visited
the exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art called ‘The Royal
City of Susa.’ Had he attended the exhibit, he would have seen that, like
Saddam Hussein, the kings and queens of ancient Mesopotamia lived in mortal
fear of losing face before their enemies.
(Makiya 1993)
The writer clearly associated an oppressive antique despotism with the
dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, although confusing Iranian for Mesopotamian
artefacts in his comparison.This is hardly surprising considering the exclusion of
the names from the exhibition maps and descriptive texts. The omission of the
names and the confluence of Iran and Iraq as one despotic entity is traceable to
an established Western concept of the East which is still intact from the days of
Montesquieu—namely, that everything East of the Mediterranean is one vast
oppressive country. Because of the omission of the names and the nature of the
display, the writer, Kanan Makiya, came away from this exhibition with a general
vague notion of violence and oppression which he was able to apply generically
and racially to Middle Eastern dictatorship—the contemporary oriental
despotism.
The extraterrestrial Orient
The creation of a historical narrative in which space and time became
transcendental horizons for the Being—Mesopotamia, was part of the larger
discursive project through which Europe attempted its mastery of the colonised.
The narrative of the progress of civilisation was an invention of European
imperialism, a way of constructing history in its own image and claiming
precedence for Western culture. But this narrative of world civilisation is a
representation and one which necessarily requires what is described by Adorno
and Horkheimer, as “the organised control of mimesis” (1944:180).The economy
of rhetorical structures in this mimetic organisation certainly depended upon
prefigurative tropological languages. However, it also involved a metaphysical
cartography that provided a conceptual terrain necessary for the narration. And
the charting of an extraterrestrial Mesopotamia was essential for the success of
this representational enterprise. Edward Said points out that “in the history of
colonial invasion, maps are always first drawn by the victors, since maps are
instruments of conquest. Geography is therefore the art of war” (Said 1996:28).
Historical cartography is also drawn according to the requirements of the
victorious, and archaeology is instrumental in the mapping of that terrain.
Likewise, representation in archaeological writing is not a duplication of
reality: it is a mimetic activity that cannot be neatly separated from questions of
Zainab Bahrani
172
politics and ideology. The ancient Greeks were well aware that mimesis always
involves distortion but by some transposition we have come to think of mimesis
as an exact realistic copy.9
In the Poetics, Aristotle defines representation as
differing in three ways: in object, manner, and means of representation.The first
is the thing or action which is represented, the second is the way in which it can
be represented, and the last is the medium of representation. While the choices
involved in the first and last aspect of representation are addressed in
Mesopotamian archaeological theory, the second remains mostly disregarded, any
mention of it construed as a radical subversive act. The image of Mesopotamia,
upon which we still depend, was necessary for a march of progress from East to
West, a concept of world cultural development that is explicitly Eurocentric and
imperialist. Perhaps the time has come that we, Middle Eastern scholars and
scholars of the ancient Middle East both, dissociate ourselves from this imperial
triumphal procession and look toward a redefinition of the land in between.
Notes
1 The bibliography on this subject is vast but see Said (1993).
2 For the application of the Freudian concept of the uncanny to historiographic
analysis see especially M. de Certeau (1975); H.K.Bhabha (1994).
3 As an example of this type of scholarship see Lewis (1996).
4 Encyclopaedia of Islam (1938), vol. 2, part 1 (H-J), Leiden: E.J.Brill, 515–
19.
5 In 1898, for example, the Deutsche Orient Gessellschaft stated that these
were the reasons for the newly established journal, Orientalistische
Literaturzeitung, vol. 1 (2), 36, 1898.
6 See Raymond Williams (1973:3–16) for the concept of the deflection of
oppositional “emergent” cultures by the hegemonic center. See also Edward
Said, “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community” in The Politics
of Interpretation,W.J.T.Mitchell (ed.), pp. 7–32.
7 Similar critiques have been made regarding the assimilation of postcolonial
theory into what Stephen Slemon calls “an object of desire for critical practice:
as a shimmering talisman that in itself has the power to confer political
legitimacy onto specific forms of institutionalized labor” (Slemon 1994).
8 These are three of four master tropes defined and analysed by Hayden White
in his Metahistory (1973). See also Paul Ricoeur (1984) for the function of
mimesis in historical writing.
9 The current usage of the term in the English language according to The Oxford
English Dictionary refers to very close, accurate, resemblance.
Conjuring Mesopotamia
173
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