The Antiquities Threshold: Gaza's Ruins and the Mandatory Muting of Ottoman Heritage

In May 1922, a junior inspector of the Palestine Department of Antiquities was sent to conduct an archeological survey in the city of Gaza. Following his visit, he embarked upon a series of articles, documenting the Arabic inscriptions that he found.¹ The inspector, Leo A. Mayer, would soon gain fame as a prominent orientalist. His series of articles on Gaza became a milestone in the study of Palestine under Islamic rule. But as an antiquities inspector, Mayer's quest for Arabic inscriptions also had a rather instrumental function. In his survey report, Mayer concluded that "eighteen of [the inscriptions] are historical," yet the others "are of the date later than 1700."² By identifying the inscribed dates, Mayer sorted the historic buildings in Gaza into those older than the year 1700 and those newer. That was not his personal preference, but the definition of the mandatory Antiquities Ordinance, which took antiquities to be "any object of construction made by human agency earlier than 1700."³ Only these buildings were protected by the law against modification or destruction, and were registered by Mayer as historic monuments.

Neither British law nor the Ottoman antiquities laws going back to 1869 defined antiquities according to their age. According to both, any artifact from the past could have been considered a protected antiquity.⁴ This novel definition for antiquities in the mandate territories was first suggested during the

Figure 1.

Leo A. Mayer next to an Arabic inscription in Gaza, 1922. Sourced from Leo A. Mayer, "Arabic inscriptions of Gaza," Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 11 (1931), 150–151.

1919 Paris Peace Conference. It was part of a much broader effort to internationalize the postwar administration of antiquities and archeological work in the Near East and Asia Minor. The Ottoman Empire had lost sovereignty over these lands, and the Allied governments opted to establish an "open door" policy between European powers, to allow mutual access to archeological sites, and most importantly, to regulate the division of artifacts between the local museums and archeological expeditions. These policies were meant to reverse the former Ottoman laws that had supposedly made excavation work unnecessarily complicated and exporting antiquities illegal.⁵ Under British and French control, then, each of the League of Nations "A" mandates in the former Ottoman territories were obliged to enact a new law of antiquities, in line with the new international regulations. Among other things, this law redefined antiquities as those sites older than 1700.⁶

Excluding from protection anything from 1700 onwards attests to a broader British bias against the heritage of the last Ottoman centuries: the antiquities law that the British enacted in Cyprus in 1905, for example, defined antiquities as objects only "up to the Turkish conquest of the Island;"⁷ and British military governors in the occupied Ottoman territories during WWI, by no means archeology specialists, similarly defined antiquities as "antecedent to the year 1600" in Palestine, and "before 1500" in Mesopotamia.⁸ No justification was given for these specific years, and none was given either when a civil ordinance later set the threshold to 1700. Indeed, the specific year was not the point, so much as the assumption that some periods lay outside historical significance.

How did this policy work in practice? The British, after all, could not just ignore monumental buildings newer than 1700. Upon encountering these, then, they had to reinterpret the land's history in order to include them within the scope of the law. In his report from Gaza, for instance, Mayer had mentioned the discernable ruins of a caravanserai named Khan al-Zayt, that had been disfigured during WWI when the Ottoman governor of Syria, Cemal Pasha, paved a boulevard across it.⁹ Having no inscription or other indicative signs to rely on, Mayer could not date the structure and thus did not define it as an antiquity.¹⁰

In 1934, more than a decade after Mayer's report, a former shopkeeper in the khan appealed to...