النشأة الدمويّة لِداراسات دورا-أوروبوس: الاستعمار والعنف في الصالحيّة 1916-1920
Identification in 1920-22 of Salihiyeh as ancient Dura-Europos was an outcome of Anglo-French carve-up of the Middle East following collapse of Ottoman power in 1918. The first archaeological discovery in March 1920 was accidentally made by British Indian troops (sepoys) from Iraq, who had seized temporary control of the region during negotiation of the border line between future Iraq and Syria. Archaeologist James Breasted worked at Salihiyeh for a single day, when the sepoys revealed another painting, attesting the name ‘Doura’. This, 4 May 1920, is the symbolic birthday of Dura-Europos Studies. Breasted’s accounts record recent British fighting with Arab insurgents, but suggest uneasy peace during his visit. However, British military archives reveal a shockingly different picture. Transformation of Salihiyeh into a globally important archaeological heritage site began amidst prolonged and bloody fighting, involving pitched battles, shelling of villages, bombing of tented camps, and probably hundreds of deaths. The origins of Dura studies lay in the midst of a small colonial war, in which the people of the Middle Euphrates fought for an independence doomed, for decades to come, by the British and, soon after, the French. Archaeology at Dura was, then, from the outset morally compromised by entanglement with violent Western colonial domination of the region, and direct dependence on Imperial military power, also characterising Cumont’s work in 1922-3, and, slightly less blatantly, the Yale expedition. This stark reality has to be acknowledged. Yet there is more to the dark tale of violence at early twentieth-century Salihiyeh than a simplistic good guys vs bad guys narrative of Arab nationalist freedom fighters heroically resisting evil empires. Other evidence indicates that the people of the Salihiyeh region had been actively involved in far greater, almost unimaginably horrific acts just a few years before, in 1916. Modern scholarship, with Western roots but today increasingly global, reveals a recent history of the region in which few actors had clean hands…