This volume presents innovative studies of how the emerging disciplines of archaeology and ancient history shaped the modern Middle East, and how they were in turn shaped by competing visions and agendas of empires and new nations. The Middle East was a region constructed through its putatively unique relationship to the whole world's past-and its special relevance for the destiny of empires and nations. Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European empires fought for influence and control over this 'cradle' of civilization, empire and monuments, and local powers and people in the Middle East worked with and against these historical and heritage frameworks in their own quests for self-determination.

In this volume, contributors from the fields of history, archaeology and heritage explore how historical consciousness about the Middle East was contested in the nineteenth and early twentieth century through excavation and interpretation of the past. Chapters span West Asia and North Africa, covering Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Egypt and Tunisia, and the imperial history of Britain, France, Germany and the Ottoman Empire. The result is an original contribution to our understanding of the origins and influence of Middle Eastern archaeology, which resonates today in contemporary discussions on heritage discourses and practices.

Guillemette Crouzet is a Postdoctoral Fellow in History at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Her research interests include European empires and the Middle East, with a particular focus on the Indian Ocean World. She is the author of the award-winning book Genèses du Moyen-Orient. Le Golfe Persique à l'âge des impérialismes (c.1800-1914) (2015), which also published in English as Inventing the Middle East: Britain and the Persian Gulf in the Age of Global Imperialism (2022).

Eva Miller is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in History at UCL, UK. She is the author of Early Civilization and the American Modern: Images of Middle Eastern Origins in the United States, 1893-1939 (2024).