Inscribing Ideology: Construction of the Levantine Landscape

            Alan R. H. Baker and Gideon Biger titled their 1992 co-edited volume Ideology and landscape in historical perspective, emphasizing the way in which landscape is culturally constructed. Humans do not just modify their environments for purely functional reasons; they often do so in an ideological manner, embedding their motivations and paradigms into the space they inhabit. It is this human tendency that makes landscape archaeology a valuable subdiscipline. Through analysis of the physical remnants of human impacts on landscapes, archaeologists can make interpretations concerning not simply which materials cultures historically utilized, but also concepts higher up on Hawkes’ ladder of inference: concepts that are more ideological. Social class divisions can be inscribed on the landscape through privatization and restriction of certain preferential locales, and religious beliefs are evidenced by, for example, the association of offerings with particular spatial attributes (cardinal directions, water features, elevated areas, etc).

            This use of geography to infer ideology is not restricted to prehistoric cultures, however, nor is it restricted to material remains uncovered during excavation. Ideology can just as easily, if not more so, be construed through analysis of historical records, particularly maps. There is a tendency to see the advent of cartography as the beginning of an objective view of space, as if with mapmaking humans were able to visualize the Earth’s “true” geography. Any map, though, inscribes the worldview of its maker, which is dangerous when this subjectivity goes unrecognized. For example, maps of the Levant continue to refer to archaeological sites by Biblical names assigned to them by European imperialists, often without historical or material evidence. Yet, because of the emphasis placed by Western thought on the written word, and because of the Eurocentric global power structure, these maps are preferenced over other narratives that may exist in the eyes of, for instance, Bedouin peoples who actually inhabit the area.

            It is important to consider the role that archaeology played, particularly in the 19^th century, in imbuing Levantine landscapes with a Judeo-Christian ideology. In her book A World History of Nineteenth-Century Archaeology: Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Past, Margarita Diaz-Andreu discusses several instances of archaeologists who set out specifically to map Biblical sites. Some of these pioneering figures in the archaeology of Palestine in particular, including Eli Smith, lived in Missions and thus aimed to convert local peoples to the Christian faith. Therefore, archaeology provided one means to the end of illustrating the essential “truth” of Christianity. Even if conversion of others was not an explicit goal, the naming of sites based on nonspecific Biblical descriptions implies a preeminence of that time period in history, as though little of note occurred before or since. Diaz-Andreu includes this passage from one account of traveling in Mesopotamia, written by British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard in 1849:

With these names [Assyria, Babylonia and Chaldaea] are linked great nations and great cities dimly shadowed forth in history; mighty ruins in the midst of deserts…the remnants of the mighty races still roving over the land (135).

The terms “ruins” and “deserts” in particular connote uninhabited, desolate landscapes, even though the land was still occupied at the time of Layard’s travels, and the word “remnants” indicates a belief that any culture that does remain is but a lesser shadow of the region’s former majesty.

              It is obviously problematic to confer Biblical names on archaeological sites, as occupation of the region predates the advent of Judeo-Christian tradition by many millennia. Perhaps more problematic, however, is that these labels are still utilized on political maps to refer to current settlements. As a student of archaeology, it is on some level gratifying to see the extent to which archaeology is valued in the Levant, demonstrated by this constant referencing of land areas by the material remains that exist belowground. Yet, this act intrinsically denigrates the current inhabitants of these regions that do not subscribe to a Judeo-Christian ideology or to a Eurocentric concept of land ownership (e.g. nomadic Bedouin peoples). Like on the African continent, European powers were able to assume control of land partitioning due to military might. But because of the significance of the Levant within the Western religious tradition, imperialist ideology was supplemented by a Biblical one, and thus the names themselves, not just the initial act of naming, continue to elevate the imperialists and their supposed Biblical ancestors, denying others the agency and power to define themselves.

Naming Names

Zimbabwe is the only country named after an archaeological site, yet although Great Zimbabwe itself dates back to 13th-15th centuries CE, the country has only been officially called by that name since 1980.  From 1923 until 1965, it was a self-governing British colony known as Rhodesia.  Then, in 1965, the country’s white minority declared independence from England illegally, and operated as the Republic of Rhodesia - reinforcing the association with Britain’s chief colonial industrialist, Cecil Rhodes, who founded the British South Africa Company in 1889.  Under the prime minister Ian Smith, and despite UN sanctions, it remained a white supremacist state until 1979, when the black majority came to power under Robert Mugabe.  It was only then that the new country was named after the great pre-colonial ruins that more than anything symbolized the ancient connection to the landscape of the native African population.

The need to name and classify is essential to humans; there is even thought to be a gene for it.  Whenever naming is required, the wheel is reinvented in order to precisely reflect the essence of what the thing or idea being named is.  Fixing its place and defining its identity with specific clarity is essential in order to ensure that when the thing is called by whatever name it is given, no other hands rise in acknowledgement.  In theory, a name reflects the discrete individuality of that which is named; thus Americans saddle their children with badly spelled invented names, although they refuse to amend the Constitution which is seen as written in stone, while France formally regulates the use of the French language through the Académie française and had, until quite recently, an enforced national policy governing acceptable and legally permitted given names.    

Names signify specific individual things.  Churches, temples and mosques are all sacred spaces first, then houses of worship, and then buildings.  But not all buildings are houses of worship, and not all houses of worship are either churches, temples or mosques, and, of those, not all are sacred spaces.  The old nightclub, Limelight, on 18th  street and 6th Avenue was an Episcopal church that was deconsecrated, and repurposed, so that although it remains a building that appears to be a house of worship -indeed, it’s a rusticated brown stone Gothic church with a typical pointed arch door that looks like dozens of other Episcopal churches-  it is no longer the latter, since it is not a sacred space.  Recent developers have made it into an indoor mall while maintaining the church exterior.  Now it is a building that looks like a church -is a church- but functions as an agora, and is neither a house of worship, nor a nightclub, although it could still become a sacred space if the shopping is good enough.  Names and nouns represent things and ideas that are concurrent interdependent parts of both greater categories and smaller groups.  Since these relationships can be of incalculable number, and are simultaneously fluid yet permanent, it is essential that names and nouns maintain their fixed and discrete autonomy.  If one word is changed, everything linked to it is transformed through kinetic reaction.

Assigned names maintain order.  Otherwise, it’s like writing about musicians such as , the Artist (Formerly Known as Prince),  Prince,  or TAFKAP,  and Sean Combs, aka Diddy, P. Diddy, Puff Daddy and now Diddy-Dirty Money.  But that was his name in March.  After that it was Swag, the first expiration-dated name, to be used for one week only starting 5/24/11 and reverting to Diddy  on 6/1/2011.  This analogy is not merely cute, it’s appropriate.  If naming reifies that which is named, then changing its name transforms it to some degree into something else.  Whether it changes so subtly that the shift is invisible, or completely to the point of unrecognizability,  it is nevertheless made fundamentally different.  The act of  of renaming causes uncertainty, shifting the point of view by destabilizing the taxonomic equivalent of the lowest common denominator of language, which is the noun, be it proper or common.

The geographical area currently known as the State of Israel has formerly been known as, in no particular order, Palestine, the British Mandate, the Palestinian Mandate, the Roman Province of Palaestina, Παλαιστίνη, Israel, Canaan,  Philistia, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem, among numerous others.  It has been in the possession of  the empires of Egypt, Greece, Rome, France, Syria, Turkey, Germany, England, and of the Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Mesopotamians, Holy Romans, Byzantines, Ottomans and Mamelukes, at one time or another, and sometimes more than once.  These nomenclatures represent different rulers, their assorted points of view,  and the various desires of past and current territorial occupiers.  Each different name in each different language describes a separate perception of what that landscape represents to the speakers of that language; how it defines the conception of the named place in relation to the observer-speaker.  The names given to the area are not mere translations of the same word and identical ideas, but subtly and profoundly different interpretive identifiers of the same place as viewed by different parties and subject to the idiosyncratic characteristics of the language as well as the time in which the words themselves were forged.

The French named the Eastern Mediterranean le Levant to signify it as the place where the sun rises.  Levant means rising, and the sun really does seem to rise from there, especially if you’re viewing dawn from Western Europe.