The British Museum has removed the word Palestine from displays about the ancient Middle East following complaints.
Maps and information boards about ancient Egypt and the seafaring Phoenicians labelled the eastern coast of the Mediterranean as Palestine, and some peoples were described as being “of Palestinian descent”.
However, the museum received complaints that it was using the term “retroactively” to describe regions and civilisations that had existed before it was coined.
Curators conceded that the word was not “meaningful” as a historical geographic term, a decision that comes amid ongoing debate about ancestral claims to land in the region.
Some Egypt displays have now been changed to remove references to Palestine, and there are plans to ensure that the term does not appear anachronistically in other information panels.
The changes have been made following audience research, and after concerns were raised by UK Lawyers for Israel, a voluntary association of lawyers.
In a letter to Nicholas Cullinan, the museum’s director, the group claimed: “Applying a single name – Palestine – retrospectively to the entire region, across thousands of years, erases historical changes and creates a false impression of continuity.
“It also has the compounding effect of erasing the Kingdoms of Israel and of Judea, which emerged from around 1000 BC, and of re-framing the origins of the Israelites and Jewish people as erroneously stemming from Palestine.
The chosen terminology in the items described above implies the existence of an ancient and continuous region called Palestine.”
The region around the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean has had a number of names. One of the earliest and most prominent is Canaan, with the Canaanite people referred to in ancient texts from around 1500 BC.
The area was often controlled by smaller powers, including the Philistines, and a 1200 BC Egyptian inscription contains one of the earliest mentions of a kingdom called “Israel”.
Several centuries later, an Assyrian text mentions “Judah” for the first time.The Greeks later referred to the land of the Phoenicians, around what is now Lebanon. The historian Herodotus is believed to have made the first textual mention of Palestine in the fifth century BC.
This word was later used to denote the province in the Roman and Byzantine empires. The area was Arabised following the Muslim conquest in the 7th century.
Palestine became a common and neutral geographic term for the southern area of the Levant in the later 19th century, but the museum has now accepted that the term has lost its original neutrality.Concerns were raised about the museum using the word, which has a specific and highly politicised modern meaning, in an Egyptian display covering the period from around 1700 to 1500 BC.
Concerns were raised about the museum using the word, which has a specific and highly politicised modern meaning, in an Egyptian display covering the period from around 1700 to 1500 BC.The exhibition described the Hyksos people – from the Nile Delta – as being of “Palestinian descent”.
A map covering the New Kingdom was flagged for using the same geographic term and describing Egyptian forces as having “dominance in Palestine”. The Phoenician civilisation was also described as being based in Palestine.
It is understood that the “Palestinian descent” has been changed to read “Canaanite descent” in the Hyksos panel.
Further changes have been promised as part of the Museum’s master plan for redisplay and reconstruction, and they will be implemented in the coming years. Panels are being reviewed case by case.A British Museum spokesman said: “For the Middle East galleries for maps showing ancient cultural regions, the term ‘Canaan’ is relevant for the southern Levant in the later second millennium BC.
“We use the UN terminology on maps that show modern boundaries, for example Gaza, West Bank, Israel, Jordan, and refer to ‘Palestinian’ as a cultural or ethnographic identifier where appropriate.”
