Theodore Macridy was a leading Ottoman Greek archaeologist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century whose life and career spanned across the Ottoman Empire, Greece and Western Europe. He was one of the pioneer Ottoman archaeologists participating in the excavations of Western archaeological missions in locations as diverse as Ephesus, Thessaloniki, Baalbek, Sidon and Hattusas. Particularly long was his collaboration with the German archaeologist Hugo Winkler who has been one of the founding fathers of Hittitology. Apart from his excavating activities, Macridy had a very rich and diverse publication record and became the second director of the Archaeological Museum of Constantinople, after its founding director Osman Hamdi Bey. He remained in the Ottoman Empire and republican Turkey throughout the tumultuous period of the 1910s and 1920s. Following his retirement and the rapprochement in Greek-Turkish relations, he accepted an invitation to organize the collection of Benaki Museum in Athens. This article aims to explore the transfer of knowledge in the fields of archaeology and museology through the life and career of Theodore Macridy Bey. His case is particularly interesting given that he participates in knowledge transfer in more than one fields, i.e. archaeology and museology and in more than one countries. Following the model suggested by Basalla in his seminal article, Macridy emerges as a typical representative of “Phase II”, i.e. “colonial science.” Through his links with the German and French academic circles in the fields of archaeology and museology he made a major contribution to the development of such sciences in the Ottoman Empire. His multiple identities as Ottoman citizen of Greek origin, his excavation activities in multiple sites of the Ottoman Empire in the beginning as escort of European archaeological missions and later on behalf of the Ottoman state, his administrative positions as vice director and director of the Archaeological Museum of Constantinople, and his activities in Athens in the end of his long career make him a bright example of a “colonial scientist.” This study will be based on primary and secondary sources on Macridy, the history of archaeology and museology in the Ottoman Empire in English, French, Greek and Turkish.

Recently, a majority of Islamic art museums have reorganized their displays or been newly constructed. Simultaneously, a number of these institutions have extended their role as con-servators of objects to include immaterial forms of culture. Programs presenting performing arts, including dance, music, and comedy have been established. This has resulted in exhibi-tions featuring compositions dedicated to specific objects and investigating the reciprocal im-pacts of music on art, and of art on music in Islamic cultures. This gives rise to several ques-tions: How does performance complement the museum’s framing of objects, their history, and their materiality? And how can such a dialogue of tangible and intangible forms of culture inform the methodology with which objects and the institution of the museum are ap-proached? Using the Aga Khan Museum (AKM) in Toronto as a case study, this paper assesses these shifts to investigate how the museum frames its objects in the dichotomy of art and material culture in order to illustrate a methodological path theorizing the museum as a performance of culture. The AKM, opened in 2014, is part of a complex institutional network and asserts to present an encyclopedic collection that foregrounds the pluralism of Islamic societies from the 8th to the 19th century. It has also established an extensive performing arts program. The paper seeks to examine in what way the understanding of the AKM and the meaning of its objects change if these are theorized through their performativity rather than through more tradi-tional art historical methodology. The paper argues that in the museum, objects become part of an institutional dynamic in which a culture is constituted through the attempt to represent and narrate it. Thus, museum objects (and performing arts) are not mere ambassadors of culture, but in the context of dis-play practices and their interaction with visitors they bring forth the social and cultural reality to which they are referring. To illustrate this, the paper assesses how the AKM engages the museum through a framework of performativity, focusing on the way it represents and thus constitutes Islamic culture by creating multisensory spaces of experience and spatial narra-tives based on objects, performances, and architectural settings. In the debate of art versus material culture, the paper’s goal is to investigate how such a perspective can contribute to reconciling disciplinary divisions between art history and anthropology through suggesting the performativity of objects as an alternative to formalist versus contextualizing approaches.

The ongoing conflict in Syria drew considerable attention towards the urgent need to protect world heritage sites. During the eight years of war, hundreds of cultural heritage locations are affected ranging from full destruction to slight damage, while archaeological work entirely halted. Recently, few reticent international endeavors restarted cultural heritage preservation projects and archaeological research in Syria. This collaboration between some members of the international community and the Syrian regime representatives implies the move towards restoring the status quo before the uprising in 2011. These attempts do not only hurt national archaeologists, who condemn the practices of the regime, but also deny them the opportunity to participate in owning their past. In the case of normalizing relationships with the regime, to protect cultural heritage sites. The following paper addresses the implications of resuming international archaeological projects in Syria while embracing the interchangeable, dysfunctional practices introduced by colonial and neo-colonial powers and later fortified by the strategies of nationalist ideology. Drawing on various academic publications, news articles, the first section of the paper uses quantitative and qualitative methods to identify the groups, who benefited from the Syrian cultural heritage until 2011. Furthermore, this section illustrates the consequences of submitting to neo-colonial agendas to formulate the goals and the spheres of Syrian archaeology. The next section of the paper explores the challenges of Syrian archaeologists, who aspired to play a vital role in protecting and preserving the cultural heritage sites before the uprising and how the conflict did not only damage their research area but correspondingly transformed their ambitions to rubble. Nonetheless, various national initiatives continue to work on salving and protecting cultural heritage sites and materials inside and outside the country. The last section of the paper argues the essentialness of addressing how to rectify the framework of archaeological practices in southwest Asia, before creating the future vision of cultural heritage institutions and policies. Consequently, the parties involved in this multifaceted platform will manage to avoid replicating comparable results to the past five decades, when only designated countries and privileged individuals had the advantage to maintain cultural heritage sites and to conduct archaeological investigations, while most of the national archaeologists are kept marginalized and powerless.

On March 28, 2019, Qatar’s new National Museum will open after more than a decade of reconstruction and expansion. Built on the site of the original National Museum of 1972, this new iteration hopes to demonstrate the growth of the small Gulf state’s global and cultural ambitions, especially through its eye-popping (and architecturally challenging) design. But the new museum has an even more vital goal: to tell the state’s version of the national story, which emphasizes the independence and development of the state, the historical centrality of the ruling family, and the unity of the citizenry—even though there are plenty of differences based on sectarianism, ethnic origin, and cultural lifestyle—within this relatively small citizenry (Al-Hammadi 2018). The museum’s formidable goal will be to persuade residents of the validity of this particular unity narrative. It will do this not only through the physical layout of the galleries, as well as text panels that articulate this story, but also through an ambitious media plan. According to interviews with sources, this media plan includes commissioned documentaries and art films by world-renowned filmmakers and local talent; footage from foreign-produced films about Qatar, such as Beduiner, from the 1959 Danish anthropological expedition, or Sea Shell, a 1960 film by the Shell Oil Company; and media from native sources, such as Qatar Television’s “This Is Qatar” history series from the 1970s. This presentation will analyze how the new National Museum uses moving images to support its narrative of unity. It will consider how the images are placed and projected, how the images function within the context of the rest of the gallery exhibit, and how together they tell a story. But it will also examine how footage is selected from films to emphasize certain story points, distinct from the message of the originals. Contributing to the conversation about the relationship between modern museums and nation-building in the Gulf (e.g., Erskine-Loftus, Hightower, and Al-Mulla 2016; Exell 2016; Exell and Rico 2014; Exell and Wakefield 2016)—and drawing upon archival sources (including the Shell Film Unit Archives in London), interviews with the museum’s media content creators, and multiple visits to the museum site—this research will demonstrate how the media plan is “edited” to convey a narrative of unity so important to the Qatari state, especially during the ongoing Gulf diplomatic crisis.

Soon after Qatar’s independence, Sheikh Khalifa and the ruling elites wanted to erect a national museum. In 1975, the Qatar National Museum (QNM) was established, focusing on the geological origins of the Qatari peninsula, archaeological artifacts and life of the Bedu people. It was built using the old (1901) palace of Sheikh Abdullah Al Thani, son of Jassim, widely considered the founder of modern Qatar. But after a bloodless coup in 1995, Qatar started to develop a different branding strategy, led by the Hamad/Tamim duo, and the legacy of Sheikh Khalifa started to vanish. In 2002, the QNM was closed for renovation and in 2007 it was set to be substituted by another project – what ended up being the new National Museum of Qatar (NMoQ). It has been erected in the same place that the QNM, and the only piece that has been preserved is Sheikh Abdullah’s palace. The NMoQ, then, establishes a dialogue with Sheikh Khalifa’s legacy but also with the whole lineage of the Al Thani. In this paper I analyse the relation of the NMoQ with the previous QNM and, in particular, with Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim Al Thani’s palace, analysing if Qatari leaders develop a personalist apparatus through the institutions that they create, and if the idea of the nation has changed since independence. My main sources include the initial plans of these museums (including parts that were not included in the final execution), leaflets and press releases which create and spread a discourse around the museums, the collections they hold (particularly the distinctions between Bedouin/urban and old/modern), the treatment of heritage sites during the development of the QNM and the NMoQ (the way they restored Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim Al Thani’s palace and the use they made of it) and interviews with some people involved in both projects. Some early conclusions of these ‘creative preservation’, or ‘selective erasure’ processes are that Khalifa’s legacy has been mostly erased in parallel with a shift in tribal alliances with the ruling family, a phenomenon clearly related to a personalist approach to power of the Hamad/Tamim tandem.