Combatting the destruction of world cultural heritage through education

1 June 2015

On the ‘Mobilisation for heritage: Iraq, Syria and other countries in conflict’ day organised by the United Nations University and UNESCO on 6 May of this year, intellectuals, archaeologists, writers and poets swung into action in an effort to respond to the wanton destruction of World Heritage in the Near East.

During their speeches, the contributors repeatedly insisted on the need to teach the populations of the countries concerned prevention strategies, and to oppose acts of barbarism. Father Najeeb, an Iraqi Dominican from the Mosul area who, at risk of life and limb, saved thousands of ancient manuscripts (facsimiles of which are currently on display at the Archives Nationales) runs training courses on Iraqi heritage for young people living in the refugee camps in Kurdistan. Leïla Sebaï, a Tunisian archaeologist, has gone one step further by stating that that a lack of education can lead to such acts of barbarism. And Bruno Favel, Chair of the Steering Committee for Culture, Heritage and Landscape of the European Council concluded: ‘It is imperative to reintroduce into school textbooks (in France) the topic of pre-Islamic civilisations’. At a time when the teaching of Greek and Latin in secondary schools is under threat and ancient history courses have been whittled down to practically nothing, this remark is more relevant than ever!

Today, the teaching of ‘dead’ languages is simultaneously conceived of as an introductory course on civilisation and an ancient language course. The students ‘stroll’ around ancient Rome and Athens, discover the quotidian life of the Greeks and Romans, rub shoulders with their heroes, and enthuse over the mythological adventures of numerous gods and goddesses endowed with supernatural powers. This kind of teaching, far from being discriminatory, places culture within the reach of all. It raises an awareness in the young, irrespective of their background or origin, of the common roots of their multimillennial history.

The birth of writing and of Mesopotamia are the subject of a lesson in the history syllabus devised for the sixth grade. As an Assyriologist, this enables me to provide the students a chance to gain an insight into the richness of the Mesopotamian civilisation. Teachers of Greek and Latin are also seeking to make interventions in their classes in order to address a question posed by their students: what is the point of learning dead languages? There are several answers to this question: to decipher and translate texts left by ancient people, so as to make it possible to reconstruct their history, a history that we share; to gain a better understanding of today’s languages, which are the descendants of ancient languages, and so on. The students are invited to follow the same study path pursued by young scribes at the beginning of the second millennium BCE, who attended school to learn to write Babylonian, the everyday language, and Sumerian, the dead language employed for written culture and for mathematics.

These ‘scribal schools’ regularly attract classes within mainstream schools in Priority Education Zones (ZEP). The pupils learn the difference between spoken language and writing: the former is used for verbal communication, whereas latter is the ‘code’ used to write down the language. One and the same script can serve to write down several languages, and one and the same language can be inscribed using different writing systems. The pupils who speak a foreign language at home are often the quickest to suggest examples. Once they have learnt how to use a stylus on a piece of clay to inscribe cuneiform signs formed by a combination of vertical, horizontal and slanting wedges, the pupils who have at their disposal a Palaeo-Babylonian syllabary are asked to transcribe their given name in cuneiform syllables. Leaving aside orthography, each student then has to discover the signs whose sounds most closely represent those which enable them to write their forename phonetically. Given that the cuneiform syllabary was conceived to represent a Semitic language, the pupils with French names sometimes find it very difficult to transcribe their given name using this writing system. On the other hand, the pupils with names of Semitic origin have at their disposal all the sounds necessary to form their name. In this way, each pupil becomes aware of the potential obstacles that their neighbour, who speaks a different language or uses a different writing system, encounters when adapting to a new language or script: the young person learns about differences and becomes aware of otherness. Next, the pupils learn to write numbers and make calculations using the sexagesimal system (i.e. base 60), just as the young Babylonians did. To multiply in base 60, the young scribes had to learn multiplication tables. Today’s pupils have to compile a multiplication table in accordance with the sexagesimal cuneiform system; they discover how easy the exercise is once they have understood that our way of measuring time is derived from the Mesopotamians’ base 60 calculation system: they just have to look at their watch to multiply a number using the sexagesimal system. Explaining the origins of the mathematical techniques used today, such as base 60 to measure angles and time, opens new horizons for young people and helps them to assimilate abstract ideas more readily.

The young are naturally curious; they should not be deprived of the pleasure of discovery!