Historical events through 2023 and 2024, and the shaping of politics and diplomacy, are providing intriguing insights into our world, bridging the past with a violent, volatile present. Widely reported in the global media is the mind-numbing, incessant and most intense bombing campaigns of Israel in Gaza. Israel said it struck at least 12,000 targets from 7 October to 1 November 2023, not sparing hospitals, schools, mosques, churches. Al Jazeera reported that by 25 October, just 19 days into the assault, Israeli attacks kill ed at least 7,028 people, including 2,913 children, in Gaza.
Residents, including children, who had taken shelter in the Church of Saint Porphyrius, were killed in the bombings. Saint Porphyrius in Gaza’s Old City is considered the third oldest church in the world. Built in 425 CE, it offered sanctuary to many Christian and Muslim residents of Gaza. Over the last 20 years, since 2003, the axis of destruction has been shifting when the Gulf War engulfed the entire region, with brief intense conflicts between Iraq and combined forces of the US and UK, and later, the US-led occupation of Iraq with the aim of dethroning Saddam Hussein. The mysterious ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and the decadence of Saddam’s long reign became common knowledge; what is lesser known is the story of saving the cultural heritage in the aftermath of military actions in Iraq, once the ancient land of Mesopotamia, a rich and powerful civilization which flourished 5,000 years ago.
The world’s first great cities emerged here, becoming major centres of knowledge, learning, trade and commerce. In The Burlington Magazine (December 2015), an editorial brings alive the role played by the British Museum during the traumatic Gulf War. “Three weeks be – fore the war broke out John Curtis, then Keeper, Department of the Middle East, and Robert Springborg, of the Middle East Institute at the School of African and Oriental Studies, warned the Minister of Defence (Geoff Hoon) of the potential danger to the cultural heritage of military action in Iraq.
Why had the Coalition not sought to protect Baghdad’s National Museum? These and other questions about Iraq dominated a British Museum press conference, on 15 April 2003.” It was under the leadership of the Museum Director Neil MacGregor that the Prime Minister’s office was contacted with a request for immediate protection of key historical sites. With remarkable alacrity, MacGregor announced that British Museum would play a lead role within an alliance of five world-class museums (the Hermitage, St Petersburg; the Louvre, Paris; the State Museums in Berlin, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) in providing Iraq’s National Museum with assistance.
MacGregor’s sense of urgency, as The Observer rightly pointed out on 8 June 2003 had moved antiquities up the political agenda. He also drew media attention to the universal sense that what was being lost or desecrated in Iraq were not distant artifacts but a heritage and history that belonged to the whole world. From this time on, MacGregor would repeatedly state his belief that we are all becoming ‘world citizens’. This magisterial ability to focus on world heritage and joining the dots between yesterday, today and-tomorrow makes MacGregor’s chapter titled ‘Thy Kingdom Come’ (in ‘Living with the Gods’) a compulsive read. “By the rivers of Babylon ~ there we sat down; and there we wept / when we remembered Zion”.
He began with Psalm 137 which saw a Jamaican reggae band, the Melodians, turn the lament of the Jews for their ‘lost Jerusalem’ into a Rastafarian song of hope. Initially the Jamaican government found it dangerously subversive, only later realising the words were straight from the Bible. When the popular Boney M performed this song, it topped charts across Europe. Remembering Zion, as MacGregor pointed out, has been a subject not just of a song but of political action for over 2,500 years. “The idea of Zion, a place remembered or imagined where the people of God could properly worship their God free from the tyranny of the powerful, became an enduring strand of Jewish thought, and later of all the Abrahamic faiths,” he explained referring to Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
World citizens of today who can stomach gut-wrenching details, imagery of devastation and death unleashed by Israel, do recall that 70 per cent of Gaza’s population is composed of refugees of the 1948 Nakba, when an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homes by Zionist militias. What the relentless bombings are reviving are not just the memories of the Nakba 75 years ago, but brutalities and destruction in thancient lands of the last 3,000 years. Jerusalem itself, the Zion of song and longing in Babylon, is perhaps the single most bitterly contested patch of land in human history, wrote MacGregor.
Through his words the long span of global history unfolds: “The tragic conflicts of today are only the latest phase of a continuum that stretches back over thousands of years and includes British and Babylonians, Arabs, Crusaders, Persians, Egyptians and, most systematically brutal of all, Roman.” He wrote: “In 587 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar, one of the greatest Kings of the Chaldean dynasty of Babylonia, conquered Jerusalem. He destroyed and plundered the Temple, the supreme focus of Jewish faith and ritual sacrifice which had been built and embellished around 400 years earlier by King Solomon.
Many thousands of Jews were deported to Babylon, by whose rivers the canals of the Euphrates they dreamt of the day when might return to the land of their fathers and worship in a rebuilt Temple. Until then they would endure their exile, repeat the plaintive question of the psalmist: ‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’” Timelines of the next 700 years are significant. By 539 BCE, Cyrus the King of Persia conquered Babylon; he allowed the deported Jews to return in joy to Jerusalem, to re – build the city and the Temple where worship and sacrifice resumed.
“It seemed a miraculous deliverance,” commented MacGregor, adding “the experience of exile left a deep mark, spiritual as well as scriptural.” By 60 BCE when the Romans had effectively taken control of the area around Jerusalem, a strategic crossroads between Egypt and Persia, a puppet Jewish King was installed who bowed to the Roman Kings and Gods, sullying the Jewish faith in the heart of the Temple, besides imposing heavy taxes on the people. The test of endurance for Jews continued for almost hundred years. They were advised by Jesus to remain accommodative and comprising.
MacGregor explained: Jesus took a Roman coin, showed the Emperor’s head on it and told his antagonists to ‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s’. In 66 CE, a great revolt against Roman military occupation broke out resulting in defeat for the Jews, and the total destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by 70 CE. Rome’s victory over the Jews became for decades a central part of imperial propaganda. By 131 CE, simmering hatred of Jews towards their Roman rulers exploded into another war, with rebels fighting for an independent state: the Jewish rebel leader was Simon bar Kokhba.
From the British Museum collection, MacGregor weaves together the narrative through a clumsily-minted coin dating to 132 CE. The coin became instrumental in understanding turbulent centuries when people were being massacred, just as they are being ruthlessly bombed today. The coin in question is a rough and powerful statement, with an image of the Temple destroyed in the first Jewish revolt: it also carried the rebel leader’s name on its edge, Shim on.
On the other side, Prof Mary Beard of Cambridge University explained, there are palm branches and in Hebrew script the words, ‘For the liberation of Jerusalem’. Not just a coin, she felt it was an aggressively propagandist coin, minted by rebels of the second great revolt. For MacGregor the coin has a key message: “the miracle of deliverance from oppression, and of restoring worship in the Temple. The promise of Shimon bar Kokhba and his coin was that it could happen again. The occupier could be driven out. Zion could be restored.” The story of Shimon bar Kokh ba had its heroic but tragic end, even though he created a small State of Beth Israel before being decimated by the mighty Roman armies in 135 CE.
Emperor Hadrian wiped off buildings, culture and memories of the Jewish revolt, giving off the lands to the enemies of Jews, the Philistines. ‘Jerusalem’ simply ceased to exist; at the Temple where Jehovah was once worshipped, now the Roman God Jupiter and the Emperor were celebrated. MacGregor ended the section, with prophetic words, “For the Romans and for the Jews, it had become impossible to separate politics and religion.” For world citizens today, after the attack by Hamas and Israeli invasion from October 2023 onw – ards, it has become impossible not to shed tears for the 40,000 killed in the Gaza Strip, as reported by UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
(The writer is a researcher author on history and heritage issues and a former deputy curator of Pradhanmantri Sangrahalaya)