From 1960 until 1980, archaeologists, architects, and hundreds of labourers worked to define, excavate, and preserve archaeological sites and monuments in the contiguous regions of Egyptian and Sudanese Nubia. The construction of the Aswan High Dam caused flooding that would submerge both those remains and the homes of the Nubian population who lived among them, and this vast effort--conducted under the banner of UNESCO’s International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia--constituted one of the responses to the threat. Promoted by the organisation and the countries involved as a global response, the Nubian campaign became tied to the universalist notion of ‘world heritage’ that the spectacle of this massive preservation project helped to bring about. Recent work has started to unpick this universalist narrative, not only emphasising that much of the Nubian campaign’s funding derived from the US government and mapped directly onto Cold War political goals, but also illustrating more broadly that the making of world heritage was subject to rather less universal--and considerably more Eurocentric--agendas than UNESCO liked to claim. This complex set of political strategies did, however, constitute the conditions in which other interests of the period could assert themselves. And considering that context makes it possible to decentre the narrative of the development of heritage as a Euro-American pursuit and to investigate the different ways in which that development overlapped with the formal end of colonialism. In this paper, I will discuss these other interests, placing the Nubian campaign and the development of world heritage within pan-Arab and non-aligned networks. Such relationships have otherwise gone unremarked upon, but they were both constitutive of the campaign’s success and are able to help emphasise the different ways in which the end of colonialism played into heritage’s fluorescence as a global phenomenon. Discussing the role played in Nubia by newly independent Kuwait (as a sponsor of monument preservation) and India (as a participant in archaeological excavations), I will show how pan-Arab ‘dinar diplomacy’ and non-aligned cultural politics worked to constitute a campaign--and a vision of heritage--that was sometimes more in tune with the concerns of the decolonising world than scholars have believed. Whether through top-down diplomatic action or in the grounded act of excavation and artefact registration, the development of heritage could draw together postcolonial interests in novel ways.