Heritage management legislation dictates whether artifacts and other cultural heritage can legally be bought, sold, exported, or restored. The emergence of such legislation reflects a common desire to acknowledge, protect, and lay claim over the cultural heritage of a given region or state. In many ways, the Ottoman Empire has been treated as an exception to this logic, with much contemporary scholarship crediting Western intervention or influence with the establishment of laws governing heritage management. This relies on an assumption of “Ottoman indifference” towards cultural heritage, which implies a lack of heritage consciousness or cultural governance towards material heritage. In many ways, this assumption has supported the European agenda of acquiring artifacts and antiquities from Ottoman lands, which constituted the ostensible ‘saving’ of these otherwise unappreciated objects.

The assumption of Ottoman indifference proliferated throughout the 19th century and persisted well into the 20th century, affecting Ottoman successor states’ (such as Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and Iraq) claims over their national resources. An exception to this would be the Ottoman territory of present-day Greece, for which there is little comparable assumption of ‘indifference’. (This is arguably because Greece, as a European country, is assumed to feature the same degree of heritage consciousness as other European countries, namely the UK, France, and Germany, which, as ‘subjects’, imposed an Orientalising gaze on Ottoman ‘objects’ in the Levant and West Asia).

Rhetoric of Ottoman indifference has inaccurately homogenised an empire of overwhelming breadth and cultural diversity, assuming that every inhabitant of the Ottoman Empire, across all three continents and at every level of administration, was completely indifferent to antiquities and material heritage. Anderson (2015) provides compelling evidence that undermines this assumption, with particular emphasis on Greece and the Balkan region of the Ottoman Empire. Focusing instead on the Levant and West Asia, the case studies of ruin poetry and relics discussed in this article illustrate a heritage consciousness and cultural governance in the provincial contexts of present-day Syria and Iraq. This research challenges existing scholarship by arguing for the presence of heritage consciousness in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and against the primary role that has been given to European intervention in inspiring heritage management legislation.

First, it’s important to clarify terminology and language. The term ‘heritage consciousness’ is used to indicate an awareness and appreciation of historic material culture for purposes other than economic. To be clear, cultural heritage and the ways it was managed in the early modern Ottoman Empire differ greatly from contemporary notions of heritage management, so ‘heritage consciousness’ as a concept applies generally to anything that evidences an appreciation of cultural heritage.

The early modern period, from the 16th to the 18th century, also predated theoretical concepts such as the notions of leisure, Orientalism, and modernisation, all of which, as phenomena, shaped the governance of cultural heritage, though the concepts for discussing them as such did not emerge in academic discourse until later. That means that these terms must be used with care when applied (anachronistically) to the early modern period. It is also relevant that ‘modernisation’ in particular, more often than not defined in and by the West and applicable in colonial or imperial contexts, is often cited as the motivating factor behind many of the Ottoman Empire’s developments of the 19th century, including heritage management legislation.

Yoltar-Yildirim (2013), Hanioğlu (2008), and Anderson (2015) contend that heritage consciousness emerged in the 19th-century Ottoman Empire as a response to similar trends occurring in Europe. The truth is, however, that heritage consciousness, much like other ‘modern’ developments, emerged in the Ottoman world as necessity called for it; we have evidence of the contemplative appreciation of cultural heritage dating back to the 6th century, at least. Through the use of spolia (architectural fragments), relics, religious shrines, and ruin poetry, inhabitants of present-day Syria and Iraq took steps to manage and respect cultural heritage in a manner different from Europe. Further, the synchronous emergence (in the 19th century) of a formalised heritage management practice in both Europe and the Ottoman Empire indicates not the influence of the former on the latter, but simply the inevitable manifestation of similar mentalities that long existed in both regions. In both cases, this is particularly clear through the historical romanticisation of ruins.

The romanticisation of ruins is a classic, enduring trope in Arabic poetry, dating at least to the 6th century. In these poems, ruins are seen as a representation of human achievement from the distant past as much as an element of the contemporary landscape. This genre of poetry offers insights on how cultural heritage has provided inspiration for the appreciation and contemplation of the past, wherein landscape and memory intersect, the former providing a vehicle for considering notions of sustainability, legacy, and the transient nature of human life. While not typically part of what is considered ‘heritage management’, the values that inspire ruin poetry are the same as those which inspire the governance of cultural heritage.

This article does not seek to argue that our modern conception of heritage consciousness emerged entirely in the Arab provinces during the early Ottoman period. Instead, my aim is to undermine previous assumptions of i) heritage consciousness as the result of foreign intervention and ii) homogenised Ottoman indifference to heritage, with an emphasis on the empire’s peripheral provinces. I aim to show residents of early modern spaces in the Ottoman provinces with a less apathetic attitude to cultural heritage than is widely assumed.

An important implication of this subject also addresses contemporary scholarship’s complicity in perpetuating a ‘denial of coevalness,’ or the assumption that all societies progress along the same timeline and peripheral regions are simply antiquated versions of core society that will ‘catch up’ given enough time. As a result, scholarship that challenges this assumption contributes to the decolonisation of literature, opening it up to histories-from-below and previously ignored narratives. This adds nuance to existing literature on the early modern period and the peripheral provinces of the Ottoman Empire - both understudied subjects with significant potential for expanding our understanding of Ottoman history.

In Syria, Damascus and Aleppo and were among the most prominent cities in the empire. Damascus, conquered in the early 16th century, quickly assumed its role as a primary seat of Ottoman power in the Levant, serving not only as a provincial capital but also as a cultural and social centre, well-situated on pilgrimage and trade routes. The Ottoman conquest and subsequent rule introduced new administrative units (eyalets and sanjaks), overseen by governors (vali, beylerbey) who exercised varying degrees of control. Over time, however, local elites emerged with strong influence and often considerable de facto autonomy. They also played a role in pilgrimage administration, responsible for leading the pilgrimage caravan and ensuring that pilgrims passed through maintained infrastructure. Such functions reveal an institutional investment in cultural geography and material traces, even before official ‘heritage laws’ were codified.

In Damascus, the al-ʿAzm family, for example, ruled for much of the 18th century as both local magnates and as administrators who commissioned architectural works, regulated trade, maintained order, and sometimes mediated between the province and the Sublime Porte. Their rule illustrates a provincial environment where local conditions permitted expressions of power, identity, and investment in material culture.

In Ottoman Iraq, too, governing regimes - particularly the Mamluk pashas - exercised significant local power. Baghdad and Basra were ruled by governors who paid tribute to the Sultan yet developed their own trade relationships, often independent in practice, of distant central authority. Basra’s position at the head of maritime trade into the Gulf and its contacts with European missionaries likewise exposed it to cosmopolitan currents even as it retained a strongly local political economy.

Though environmental challenges, disease, famine, and occasional conflict characterised the region, these pressures in many ways compelled elites and communities to engage with their material past, repairing, reusing, preserving, and commemorating ruins and relics. While formal legal protection or heritage management legislation (as understood in the modern sense) did not yet exist, governance structures and social dynamics provided forums for heritage awareness. The responsibilities of provincial governors included maintaining fortresses, mosques, schools, and public works; supervising pilgrimage routes; and sometimes regulating the removal or reuse of older monuments.

Another example of early modern heritage consciousness can be seen in the way relics were venerated. There has existed a long tradition within the Abrahamic religions of collecting physical evidence of prophets, saints, and divine messengers on Earth, revealing how objects of material culture have long been valued as such. For example, the twelfth-century pilgrim ‘Ali ibn Abi Bakr al-Harawi, on his travels to the pilgrimage sites of Iraq, related an anecdote from his time in Basra where he encountered a man who possessed a stone apparently featuring the footprint of the prophet Muhammad (PBUH). Al-Harawi acknowledged that the footprint may be fake, but the slim possibility that it may be real was enough for him to follow the man to Abadan, in present-day Iran, desperate to buy the artifact (which he eventually succeeded in acquiring). What kind of importance did this object have?

Did al-Harawi keep it because he believed it to be talismanic or amuletic? Or did he value it because it commemorated a great event - that of the Messenger of God walking on Earth? Similarly, he wrote that the Iraqi site Samarra contained artifacts and antiquities that indicated the importance of the site, suggesting that the significance of Samarra was embodied in the objects of material culture that could be found there. The antiquities themselves are awarded an endorsing quality that contributed to the valuation of the site as a whole, despite the fact that the site is appreciated as more than the sum of its parts.

These relics were often stored in places of worship and shrines, where pilgrims and other parishioners may appreciate them. In this way, we can think of shrines as proto-museums, or as precursors to the modern museum. From the time of the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Sultan Mehmed II was known for his cultural patronage; he supported the arts and sciences and collected art and religious relics which were stored in his palaces in the capital. But the relics were also displayed in an effort to shape Ottoman identity and present the state as the rightful ruler of its extensive domains. Thus, early modern Ottoman shrines and relics are indicators of heritage consciousness and a desire to align oneself with the accomplishments of the past, predating formal legislation.

In sum, the assumption of wholesale Ottoman indifference to artifacts, antiquities, and cultural period in the Arab periphery is challenged by evidence of locally grounded heritage consciousness. Ruin poetry, pilgrimage sponsorship, shrines, and relic practices show the valuation of the material past in diverse and meaningful ways. This recognition invites a rethinking of how scholars situate the rise of heritage in the Levant and West Asia, not as an import from Europe, but as an outgrowth of longstanding cultural sensibilities. Future studies should expand the geographical and chronological range of sources and explore intersections with early modern archaeological interest to further trace the emergence of heritage awareness in Ottoman domains.

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