A relic of its own past: Mesopotamia in the British imagination 1900-14

Abstract

For British travellers in the early 20th century, Mesopotamia was a place replete with cultural references. As they traversed the region, Britons saw the remnants of Mesopotamia’s ancient history and civilizations all around them, but they found it difficult to understand how a land that they understood to be the progenitor of their own ‘western’ civilization could now appear to them to be poor and ‘primitive’. In order to cope with the incongruence between ancient Mesopotamia - the object of their nostalgic desire - and their experiences of contemporary Mesopotamia, travellers engaged in a two-fold process of acquisition. On one level of this process, artefacts of archaeological significance were transported to European museums. On another level, those elements of Mesopotamia’s history that were seen to be progenitors of a ‘western civilization’ were understood to be exclusively a part of a ‘western’, rather than an ‘eastern’, or Mesopotamian cultural heritage.