Paper presented by Professor
Simon Goldhill
Professor of Greek at
Cambridge University, and a Fellow of King's College,
Cambridge
For at least 800 years, the
standard language of the elite in Jerusalem was Greek. From
Alexander's time to the coming of Caliph Omar, if you
didn't speak Greek you were excluded not just from elite
culture, but from the institutions of court and palace.
That is part of the heritage of Jerusalem, as much as it is
of western culture, and so I am going to take the privilege
of being a classicist by starting with three words of
Greek, each of which will open a vista, I hope, on to the
problems we are going to talk about today.
I take my first word from the first line of a play which
has a claim to speak most directly from ancient Greek to
cities and peoples in conflict in the modern age,
Sophocles' great tragedy Antigone, a play which speaks
vividly to any community faced by tyrannical law, social
division, and, above all, the passions of extremism. The
first line of the play is addressed by Antigone to her
sister, Ismene, and it reads o koinon autadelphon Ismenes
kara, that is, "Of common kin, my very sister, dear
Ismene". Typically for Antigone, it is a full on way of
saying "hello", an address that emphasizes with passion a
bond between the two girls. They share kin, they have
common blood, she is not just a sister, but a "very
sister". Antigone has just heard that her uncle Creon, the
ruler of the city, has given an edict. Their brother
Eteocles who died fighting to preserve the city from
invaders will be buried with full military honours; their
other brother, Polyneices who led the troops against his
own city, aiming to reclaim it for his own sovereignty,
will not be buried but his body left to rot. Antigone, of
course, is horrified at this different treatment of the two
bodies, and has already decided to bury her brother, the
one declared a traitor to the city. When she says to
Ismene, "of common kin, my very sister, dear Ismene", she
is not just saying "hello" but reminding her of the ties of
blood that link the two girls, because she is going to
appeal to her sister to join her in her venture to bury the
traitorous brother, precisely on the grounds that he is
their common kin, their very brother – even though he was
attacking their own city. Ismene is frightened and
unwilling to go against the authorities. The sisters
quarrel and by the end of the first scene Antigone is
yelling at Ismene that she is really no sister, and Ismene
is calling her mad. They may have common blood but that is
just a prelude to fighting.
Nor should that surprise us entirely. Antigone's father,
after all, is Oedipus who slept with his mother and killed
his father. Common blood is really dangerous in this world.
The two brothers too have killed each other in the war:
they have shared a common fate as the chorus remind us,
they have killed each other with a common hand. This is a
family that murderously rips itself apart. Creon, the king,
for his part is obsessed with the commonwealth: the bonds
that tie citizens, the claims of the state, the community.
He puts that above any family ties. His commitment to the
political destroys him as much as Antigone's commitment to
the family destroys her.
The whole play is a profound reflection on the play's first
word, koinon: the common, the shared. First it shows how
different ideas of what is shared, lead to conflict. Ideals
of what's common – the family, the state, the human race –
can conflict with each other and produce violent rows.
Second, it shows what happens when commitment to ideals of
what is shared become extreme: disaster follows. The
distortion of seeing things from only one side – even
sharing – leads to self-destruction. Antigone kills
herself, Creon is totally destroyed because they could not
control what it means to care for the family, or to do
one's duty to the community.
I begin with Antigone to make two simple points which must
underlie our discussion today. First, sharing is not a
simply positive term. Parents in England often say to
squabbling children: play nicely, share! But Antigone
reminds us that sharing isn't necessarily nice: it can be
the nastiness of feud, mutual murder, the worst
destructiveness of diseased families. When we talk of
shared cultural heritage, we have to be very careful that
we don't use the word "shared" without recalling and
defending against its dark side. "Shared" cultural heritage
in the Middle East will always also be a shared history of
violence, and we can't expect to ignore this. A shared
history of violence between groups, and within groups.
Second, Sophocles reminds us how often what is shared
becomes an aggressive appeal, an attempt to force people
into a position: because you share this blood with me, you
must think like me and do what I do… And Sophocles shows
how dangerous and extreme such demands for complicity can
be.
My second Greek word is epichorios, which can be translated
as "local" ". It is a common word in Greek works about
cultural heritage. It is used in phrases like, "that's what
the locals believe". In every single case that Herodotus,
the father of history, uses the word epichorios, he uses it
to refer to people who are not like himself, who are not
proper Greeks. So he says about the foreign places he
visits, "that's a local custom there". And he often uses it
to dismiss these places as odd and exotic and not like us:
so he says about the Egyptians – a country he actually
admires for its wisdom and antiquity – that women go to the
market while men sit at home and weave, sons do not have to
support their parents, but daughters do, and men pee
sitting down whereas we pee standing up. That is, Egyptians
do things upside down, and that is how you can tell that
they are not Greek. It's a way of expressing who we are by
defining the other as the negative, the opposite of us –
and a very common strategy it is too.
Thucydides, however, the founder of scientific history,
uses the same word in a quite different way. Every time he
uses the word "local", he uses it to refer to himself and
Athens where he was born and bred. This is what we do, he
says, this is our local custom. He sees the idea of the
local as a way of describing himself and his people to
others. So he will explain that "here in Athens we have a
collective grave for war heroes, it is our local custom …".
The distinction between Herodotus' habit and Thucydides'
habit is crucial for how we think about the issues of
cultural heritage. The stories we tell about places,
customs, people, may always be ways of talking about
ourselves but there are quite different positions we can
take. We can explain ourselves to others, we can use the
other to define ourselves. We can exclude or include.
Whatever story we are to tell about shared cultural
heritage will depend on what position the speaker adopts.
And who the audience is imagined to be.
If we try to imagine the signs in any problematic
archaeological site – and what site in this region isn’t
problematic? – we can see how insistent this difficulty can
become. Where history is contested, who writes the sign and
for what audience, becomes a pressing anxiety: but it comes
down to how you negotiate the problem of the local. Are you
describing a site as an insider for insiders, or as an
outsider for insiders, or as an insider for outsiders or as
an outsider for outsiders? Cultural heritage depends on
story telling. Cultural heritage is not material, although
it is often focused on material objects: it is a dynamic
and changing relation between a community and its material
culture and its patterns of behaviour, a relation which is
constantly formed and transmitted through stories. Without
the stories, there is no cultural heritage. But a story
cannot be told neutrally. There is always a position for
the speaker, somewhere to speak from. So where is that
place in the case of sites of shared and conflicting
meaning? Who is the local here? Who is the audience?
The word epichorios, local, shows us, then, that heritage
depends on stories, on passing on stories, and stories are
always told from a position, a position on a map of
insiders and outsiders. We cannot hope to find an answer to
the immediate questions of this conference if we don’t
recognize that the position of story teller and audience is
essential.
My third Greek word is stasis, which is the word Greeks use
to describe "civil discord". I want to read you one of the
most famous passages of the historian Thucydides, as he
describes what he calls the "new extravagances of
revolutionary zeal, expressed by an elaboration in the
methods of seizing power and by unheard-of atrocities in
revenge". He writes: "To fit in with the change of events,
words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used
to be described as thoughtless acts of aggression was now
regarded as the courage one would expect to see in a party
member; to think of the future and wait was merely another
way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was
just an attempt to disguise one's unmanly character;
ability to understand a question from all sides meant one
was unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark
of the real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his
back was legitimate self-defence." And he concludes "love
of power operating through greed and through personal
ambition was the cause of all these evils. To this must be
added the violent fanaticism which came into play once the
struggle had broken out. Leaders of parties had programmes
which appeared admirable…but in professing to serve the
public interest they were seeking to win the prizes for
themselves. In their struggle for ascendancy nothing was
barred; terrible indeed were the actions to which they
committed themselves, and in taking revenge they went
further still". Thucydides declared that he wrote his
history as a "possession for all time", but even so this
seems to me to be an eerily and depressingly precise
account of our contemporary world of political stasis. What
I want to emphasize is the sharpness with which the
historian recognizes the distortions of language that
follow from stasis and in turn contribute to its
escalation. And the moral collapse that the shifting of
words' usual meanings brings. This is the necessary third
step in recognizing the difficulties of talking about
shared cultural heritage. Telling the story of the past is
inevitably tied up with the distortions of contemporary
politicised language and the violence which it fuels and is
fuelled by. In stasis "shared cultural heritage" all too
easily becomes violently opposed stories in mutually
dismissive languages. Finding a shared language in which to
tell the story of cultural heritage will mean facing up to
what has happened to the language of culture in
contemporary conflict.
My three Greek words, then, lay out an initial set of
problems for talking about shared cultural heritage. First
of all, we have to recognize that the shared can and will
involve conflict, and also attempts to force individuals
into an ideological programme. Second, all stories of
cultural heritage are told from a particular position, but
finding the right position is especially awkward when the
topic is contested cultural heritage. Who is the local and
who is the outsider? Is this my shared story or not? Third,
the history of violent conflict which has so scarred this
region has had a dire effect on the sort of language we can
use, and on the sensitivities to moral positions that come
from careful language.
That may seem like enough problems for one day. But I have
three big questions which follow directly from what I have
said. My first question is this: How much truth can we
bear? That is, in this conflictual world where there are so
many local political pressures and ideological demands to
toe the party line, can the authorities who will be charged
with managing sites of shared cultural heritage actually
commit themselves to truth, or will it all prove too
dangerous and awkward? Let me give an example of what I
mean, and if you don't mind, I will be a little provocative
by taking an example from Jerusalem, and I hope you don't
mind if I share a fantasy with you.
When you go the Temple Mount Plaza there are signs
informing the visitor where he or she is and what to see
and how to behave. My fantasy is about what you actually
might want to put on such a sign, and what you might put on
a sign at the entrance to the Haram al-Sharif. I wonder
first of all whether it would be acceptable to point out
more clearly that the Western wall is the retaining wall
built by Herod at the end of the first century BCE. The
sign at present could easily lead one to think that this
retaining wall was built back in the 6th century BCE. It
might be nice to mention that the temple and a good deal of
its wall was destroyed by the Romans in 70, and that the
top few courses were built by Muslims much later. But what
would be thought if the sign also mentioned that the
splendid plaza was built in 1967 by knocking down the
Mugrhabi quarter? Or that worship here started in the 18th
century? My point is this: there is a very long history of
building, destroying and rebuilding on this site, which
intertwines Jewish, Roman, Christian, Muslim, and Moroccan
communities at very least. It is a site of shared cultural
heritage. Could we allow a story that tried to tell such a
story – without an aggressive political agenda? A story
which recognizes that history interweaves these different
communities, however much some people from each of these
communities would like them to be absolutely separate and
sovereign. And that things change here, however much some
people in each community pretend that things have always
been just like this or this.
And what would happen at the entrance to the Haram al
Sharif if there was a parallel sign reminding everyone of
expected standards of behaviour on the Haram, but also of
the fact that the place became sacred to Muslims because of
the Night Journey of Mohammed, a journey to this spot
precisely because of its associations with the story of
Abraham, David, Solomon, and because it was here that the
Temple had been built. It could also mention that the Haram
was developed as a Muslim site from the seventh century,
after years of Christian neglect, a story of development
which would include not only the century when it was ruled
and built on by the Crusaders but also the period of the
Ottoman Turks, the empire against which Arabs revolted in
the twentieth century. Again, the point of such a bare
narrative would be to remind all concerned that the stories
of different groups are indeed intertwined, but even within
such complexity there are or should be some basic shared
facts.
Well, I said that was my fantasy. But there is a strong and
fundamental point that lies under my fantasy. Shared
cultural heritage, if the sharing is to go beyond the
conflict of competing stories and aggressive claims, needs
to establish some basic points of agreement and I don't
know of any better criterion than truth. It would need
immense self-confidence, bravery and honesty to let such a
story to be told. My suggestion, note, is not that the
story should be one which everyone wants to hear or agrees
should be told. It is not a call for the lowest common
denominator: but a story which tells the truth, and allows
for interpretation. So that's my first question: How much
truth can we bear?
My second question follows on from this first question: How
many stories can we bear? Everyone knows that these days as
soon as I say truth, someone is bound to say "whose
truth?", or "who knows what the truth is?" and similar
familiar questions of the cynical modern academy –
questions I have asked myself on enough occasions, and
which are inevitably part of modern history writing. So let
us remember that in the Middle East, if anywhere, there are
competing stories about pretty well anything. Shared
cultural heritage also means multiple stories. Can we allow
such an idea in the management of any site? Different
stories may be told not only between Muslims, Christians
and Jews, say, but also within such groups: where orthodox
and secular Jews may take opposed views of a site, or Greek
Christians and Protestants, or Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims.
Could we imagine a site of shared cultural heritage which
paid tribute to multiple stories? Which recognized that
there are different interests and different versions of
what counts.
There is an obvious tension between my first two points:
commitment to truth and recognition of multiple stories.
How can we be committed to truth and committed to
recognizing multiple stories? I think you can be, and I
think the tension can be creative rather than wholly
debilitating. Indeed, not only is it possible to hold on to
both ideas, but I would say also that this tension is
absolutely central to Judaism and Islam. Both Judaism and
Islam hold onto some basic and unnegotiable truths, which
they take to be binding, authoritative and everlasting. But
both Judaism and Islam multiply stories in midrash and
hadith, and both have intense interpretative traditions of
law, ethics and literature where stories also spin off in
complex, argumentative tapestries. Both Judaism and Islam
have different sects who produce very different accounts of
things. And neither Judaism nor Islam cares to read its
central texts of the Torah or Qu'ran without commentary –
without supplementing the text of the word of god with
further stories, ideas and discussions.
This leads then to my third question: what language can we
use? "Sites of shared cultural heritage" is a phrase which
brings its own difficulties. First of all, "heritage".
Heritage brings to an English ear the idea of stately homes
and museums. This can give a misleading idea of what is at
stake in the Middle East. Here we are talking about sites
of passionate religious and political involvement. Heritage
may have too passive a ring. Cultural heritage also
threatens to ignore what matters here: it is rarely culture
per se, but history, and with history identity, and with
history and identity, politics and religion. Culture can
involve all these things, but can sound rather bland for
what's at stake here. But the real problem is "shared"?
Shared between whom? Does shared mean different sides have
to agree or overlap? Does shared mean a shared agenda as
well as a shared history? Shared seems to imply that there
is one thing which more than one group can have a bit of:
the problem is rather that there is one site with multiple
and competing stories, and in some cases multiple and
competing claims of ownership based on those stories.
"Shared" doesn't quite get it. "Common" might be better, or
"interwoven" or even "overlapping". But I wonder what would
happen if we really bit the bullet and said what we mean,
and called them "sites of contested cultural heritage". It
is the contest we need to learn to live with.
Let me end positively by imagining the sort of sign I would
like to see, and to avoid too much controversy, I will take
the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Greece. Perhaps something
like this. "This temple to Athene is a triumph of classical
Greek art. It was built by the Athenians under Pericles as
the crowning achievement of their imperial building
programme in the fifth century BC. It contained the famous
statue of Athene by Pheidias, and was used as a treasury.
It was a celebrated building throughout antiquity. The
Parthenon was converted into a church by Christians, and
used for some 800 years as such; it was then used as a
mosque by the Ottomans, who ruled Athens from the 1460s. In
1687 a Venetian shell exploded an Ottoman gunpowder store
in the Parthenon, and destroyed much of the building. It
remained unused after this. The Acropolis was cleared to
reveal the ruin we now see by the German King of Greece in
1834. It has become a lasting symbol of the importance of
the ancient Greek past for subsequent generations." A brief
set of facts, the truth, which none the less recognizes the
different histories of the building, which notes its
symbolic role and its historical functions, and tries to
indicate why people have cared about it, without forcing
any particular agenda. It even allows for some nationalism
without endorsing its naïve forms. My vision I suppose is
the day when groups of school kids from any community can
visit any site in the Middle East with respect and a decent
historical appreciation, fostered by educational programmes
on site, in school, and with guides that pay due attention
to truth and to multiple stories, in language that brings
about a decent recognition of the other without sacrificing
the importance of one's own cultural identity. It means
letting people see more than one side of a question: but
that to me is the essence of a mature political citizenship
and mature self-understanding through history.
.