Maria de Fatima Rosa - Reception of Mesopotamia on Film

With regards to the production centers of the movies portraying antiquity and especially the ancient Near East, there are three major countries to highlight: France, Italy, and the United States of America – the ones which held the leadership of cinematic production during the earlier years, and which we will analyze in detail in Chapter 4. 57Concerning Mesopotamia in particular, it is possible to divide the cinematic productions in three large groups:

1) – The short movies produced from 1905 up until the middle of the 1910s, which consisted of silent films that had an estimated time of 6 to 15 minutes (predominantly Italian and French productions);

2) – The silent movies produced in the second half of the 1910s and during the 1920s, which were the first feature films ever produced on Mesopotamia and had a variable time duration (predominantly American productions); 58

3) – The movies produced from the 1950s until the present time, consisting of sound feature films. Within this category there is a higher prevalence of productions made during the 1950s and 1960s (predominantly Italian and American productions). Also, after the 1960s, the majority of the movies do not constitute recreations of Mesopotamia or of its legends, but are instead pictures that refer to an aspect of it and that might be set in a whole different time (normally contemporaneity). Thus, it would be possible to subdivide this third group into two categories: Mesopotamia on film and Mesopotamia in film. 59

If we examine in detail these three groups, there seems to be a hiatus from the mid-1920s until the 1950s. One of the reasons that may explain the disappearance of films about the ancient Near East, and in particular about Mesopotamia after the 1920s, is the rapid decline of the filmic genre that consisted of historical adaptations and reconstitutions. This genre almost ended with the advent of sound, having already entered in decline previously. 60

On the other hand, the prevalence of films during the 1950s and 1960s and its almost disappearance after may be intrinsically connected with the appearance of television, which would slowly replace cinema as the preferable media of the public. It may also be connected to the decay, for instance in Italy, of the peplum genre, substituted by the Spaghetti Western. 61Mesopotamia and antiquity were only truly recovered on screen in the beginning of the twenty-first century, when the peplum genre was resuscitated. Examples of this resurrection are, as we have seen, the movies Gladiator (2000) and Alexander (2004). 62

It is impossible to speak about Mesopotamia and the way it was perceived by the so-called “Western civilization” without mentioning the concept of Orientalism. But even before we understand what is meant by this concept, highly analyzed within Culture Studies by the eminent professor of literature Edward Said, 63we must understand how the division between these two constructs was characterized, placing the West on the one side and the East on the other. The term Orient emerged as a European conception to designate primarily Asia but also a part of North Africa. 64By the geography it covers it is possible to understand that when it first appeared it carried a strong political connotation. Likewise, the terms Middle East and Near East , in the beginning interchangeable, appeared in the course of the nineteenth century and in the beginning of the twentieth century, in order to fragment this great Orient into different parts where distinct geopolitical interests were played commanded by the European and North-American authorities. 65Although the term Near East , which described the region that was closest to Europe and with which it had to deal with more thoroughly, has fallen into disuse in political contexts and in the media, it is still applied today, especially in academic contexts, to designate this geographical area during the pre-Islamic period. 66Hence our use of the term in the present volume.

A clear distinction was then drawn within this region having time as a divider, its frontier being the advent of Islam. In this sense, the Middle East , which during the twentieth century commonly referred to the region whose center was the Persian Gulf, remained a term to reference that geographical area since the seventh century AD until the present time, and, in contrast, the term Mesopotamia was adopted to designate the same area before it. So, Mesopotamia – today’s Republic of Iraq and small areas of Syria, Turkey, and Iran – was associated with dead civilizations, the Assyrians and the Babylonians, and the empires and communities that followed its demise and which contacted with it, the Persians, the Jews, the Hellenes, and the Romans, who, in a way, were the antecedents of European/Western culture itself. As Bahrani states, “This revival of a name applied to the region in the European Classical tradition came to underscore the Babylonian/Assyrian position within the Western historical narrative of civilisation as the remoter, malformed, or partially formed, roots of European culture which has its telos in the flowering of Western culture and, ultimately, the autonomous modern Western man,” 67In fact, the European classical traditional term Mesopotamia , resuscitated in the twentieth century, was first used in Alexandrian times to name one of his satrapies, as referred to by Arian in Anabasis of Alexander . 68Oddly enough, Mesopotamia is a foreign concept and one that is in its genesis geopolitical and Western . Notwithstanding, the Mesopotamians themselves sometimes referred to their own land as the māt bīrītim or as the bīrit nārim , according to some judicial documents, 69that is, “the land in between” or the “between the river” respectively, concepts somewhat similar to the one the Greeks applied to the region. 70If we take into account that the Tigris and the Euphrates structured and embodied the area, consisting of two living arteries, this fact is not surprising. The māt bīrītim would thus comprehend present Iraq and some parts of Syria.

Over time, the culture of the first civilization set in the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates – comprised by Sumerians, Assyrians, and Babylonians – which invented the wheel, writing, laws, astrological observations, and so many other technologies, 71would be absorbed by the classical actors and the Jewish population and through them would become the core of European culture. Indeed, the Greeks, to whom the foundations of western European culture are normally attributed, had “significantly ‘ mesopotamianized ’ already long before the conquests of Alexander.” 72Interestingly, despite being reviled both by their classic heirs and by the biblical account, Assyrians and Babylonians were studied and their history thoroughly debated 73because they were in fact the other that composed the self , that is, the past cultural legacy comprised of the first creations at the dawn of time that passed from the cradle of civilization to its neighboring regions like a civilizing torch. 74And this idea takes us back to Orientalism . Since the Mesopotamian past was understood as constituting the most remote roots of Europe itself and of the Western civilization, it was claimed by these as an integral part of its mythical origin. Therefore, when Mesopotamia was first unearthed and rose from the oblivion, during the nineteenth century, it became intrinsically inseparable from the orientalist notions that were launched upon it – the West was not a mere passive agent of its discovery but an active part in its appropriation. In other words, Mesopotamia and the scientific discipline of Assyriology 75were born hostages of the era of colonialism and imperialism and deeply imbibed in a Eurocentric logic. Europe was not only committed to colonizing the present but also the past itself.