In “The Book of Isaiah in the Neo-Assyrian Period,” Michael Chan offers an overview of the centuries of Assyrian dominance in the Levant. He takes five exegetical case studies that demonstrate the historical and literary impact of that Mesopotamian power on Isaiah and his successors in the eighth and seventh centuries bce. In particular, he observes how Assyrian imperial propaganda was subverted by the prophets in various ways.

Chapter 5 explores how Harriet Martineau’s travel narrative Eastern Life, Present and Past and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem “The Burden of Nineveh” organize time through ruins from the eastern Mediterranean. Eastern Life, which was criticized for its unorthodox historicization of Christianity, imagines how ruins themselves experience human empires across centuries. The temporal form of the ruin, Martineau shows, is a capacious present in which the revolutions of human religions and empires become insignificant. Rossetti’s poem, which focuses on ancient Assyrian relics arriving at the British Museum, similarly surrenders human duration to the ruin’s own temporality. For Rossetti, the museum’s attempts to redefine the ruin within its own linear historicism necessarily fail because the ruin has already proven its endurance through many changing imperial narratives. Both Rossetti’s and Martineau’s texts depict ruin as a temporal form that outlasts any empire’s claims to significance, challenging the centrality of human experience in time.

Chapter 6 returns to William Thackeray’s Mediterranean travel writing to show how his humor fails to challenge the dominant heritage discourse in Jerusalem. Although Thackeray derides other Mediterranean sites for inauthenticity, he cannot profane Jerusalem, which means he cannot return it to human (and imperial) use, either by word play or physical contact. Anthony Trollope takes up this problem in his novel The Bertrams, in which he reconceives some places, like Alexandria, for modern use. These sites are wiped of their significance to British heritage discourse as ancient lands and rendered available for modernization. Jerusalem, though, proves too sacred, and thus too integral to British cultural heritage, to be colonized in the same way. Some holy sites thus endure as historical relics while others are rewritten as a “middle” East.

Part III centers on eastern Mediterranean places loosely designated as the “Holy Land” in British heritage discourse. Sites in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria were especially important within Christianity, generating new biblical historicisms in the face of geological deep time and a booming tourism industry. However, the same cultural heritage that underwrote British imperialism and articulated a mission to modernize the “East” maintained that some historically significant places should be preserved. This tension is central to the temporal forms of ruin and profanation, which I define in Part III. The desire to claim Eastern sites as the origin of Western culture conflicted with the simultaneous desire to distance current populations there as “Other.” Laying claim to the history of a place like Palmyra, an ancient Roman city in Syria still popular with Western observers, both complicated and facilitated the relationship with present life there.

A substantial collection of sources indicates that women constituted a considerable part of the travelers in the first centuries of the Roman Empire, a period in which traveling became increasingly popular with various social classes. These travelers have left traces of their experiences en route in personal letters on papyri and ostraca, in graffiti and on votive inscriptions. Classical scholarship has long ignored these sources, even though they offer us a unique insight into female experiences and self-representation. Recent excavations on and near the trade routes in the Eastern and Western Desert of Egypt, along which units of the Roman army were positioned in military outposts, protecting and controlling the area, have uncovered letters in which women – most of them of lower rank – discussed their concerns about traveling from and to the military camps of their husbands, fathers, or brothers. When combined with other sources such as papyri and graffiti, these documents give insight into the mobility of the female relatives of soldiers in Roman Egypt. They tell us something about the reasons why they decided to undertake journeys, the distance they covered (some while being heavily pregnant), where they stayed, and the dangers they encountered during the trip.

This chapter explores the complex networks and varied kinds of movement of people, ideas and objects that shaped artistic creativity in the early Byzantine empire. As part of a historiographic review, centers of cultural production, ethnicity, identity, style, and decorum are considered. Decades of largely futile attempts to locate the places of production of portable luxury media, especially silver, are presented. High-quality styles can be illusionistic, but can also be based on very different criteria. A more complex and nuanced model for understanding the process of creation is proposed. This chapter concludes with some remarks about Egypt’s significance in the empire, and what the visual record tells us about the distribution of artistic creativity.

After looking at the Mediterranean as a zone characterized by the movement of goods, people and ideas, this chapter examines the sea as the element from which hybrids arise, such as Skylla, Nereus, the Nereids and monsters of Hesiod’s Theogony. These hybrids give expression to the anxieties of Greek speakers on the move. Contact zones like Sicily stimulated a powerful response from Greek speakers, who were constantly faced with other people, other tongues and other habits. Hybridity emerges as a useful mechanism for envisaging otherness and rendering it manageable, either as monstrous threat or as something in a more muted register: similar, yet at the same time different. It is this polarity of similarity and difference that is the pendulum swinging through Archaic Greek culture. Two places of particularly rich cultural encounters, Naukratis and Samos, illustrate how the categories of exotic and hybrid overlap. Even more complicated is Cyprus, demonstrating the most intense cultural layering in the eastern Mediterranean. Here where EteoCypriots, Mycenaean Greeks, Assyrians and Phoenicians all mingle, hybridity was a recurring feature of the island’s culture.

Human/snake hybrids played a significant role in the Athenian imagination: the snake’s connections with the earth expressed the Athenian claim to autochthony. This claim was complicated. For some aristocratic gene, autochthony marked them as superior to more recent arrivals, but the foundational myth of Athens, involving Hephaistos’ attempted rape of Athena, was tinged with incest and pollution, indicating some ambivalence towards autochthony. Traditions of snake-bodied kings reflected a conception of the past that was conceptually both near and far from the present. The hybridity of the snake-figured ancestor connected them to a deep past but also bridged the gap that separated the present and connected past from the plupast. This was a particular concern in the sixth century, as new notions of Athenian identity were taking shape. Bluebeard, the famous pedimental sculpture from the Archaic Akropolis, embodies this. Bluebeard can be identified as the Tritopatores, ancestral deities of the Athenians. These hybrids signify the continuous irruption of the deep past into the current world, a condition that produced a creative tension between order and chaos.

During the 1970s, Iran’s relationships across Africa developed, both in terms of the number of ambassadors accredited to African countries, and in terms of the volume of trade and extent of political dialogue. At the beginning of the decade, Iran had diplomatic relations with just five countries in the whole of Africa – Algeria, Ethiopia, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia – but by the middle of the 1970s it had established formal ties with over thirty-five nations. This chapter investigates the nature of Iran’s diplomacy in Africa and why it was so successful during the 1970s. It questions why the shah was appealing to the independent states of Africa, and what strategies the regime employed to project an image of the shah as the leader of a country that had historically been an important global power and a civilising force in the world, and which aspired to continue to influence world affairs in a positive way. At the same time, after the British withdrawal from the Persian Gulf in 1971, the shah sought to expand Iran’s sphere of influence beyond its immediate neighbourhood towards the Indian Ocean.

The threat of Nasserism shaped the shah’s regional strategy in the 1950s and 1960s. This chapter explores the development of the shah’s policy of building relations with moderate allies in the Arab world who could help to contain and balance the radicalism of Nasser. The shah found two allies in North Africa: Tunisia under President Habib Bourguiba and Morocco under King Hassan II. Bourguiba and King Hassan were, like the shah, moderate rulers, with strong ties to the West, who shared the same concerns over Egyptian ambitions and the threat that Nasserism posed to regional stability. One of the strategies the shah developed, for which he sought the support of King Hassan in particular, was to challenge Nasser’s claims to leadership in the Islamic world, by attempting to form a separate grouping of Islamic countries. The ultimate manifestation of this was the Islamic Summit Conference, held in Rabat in 1969, in which King Hassan and the shah played leading roles.

This chapter explores the relationship between Iran and Egypt during the 1950s and 1960s, placing it in a regional context. The two countries forged close ties during the 1930s, when the Iranian crown prince, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, married Egyptian Princess Fawzia Faud. Shared histories of colonial interference shaped the friendship between Egypt and Iran during the oil nationalisation crisis, yet in the years after the 1952 coup in Egypt, which brought down the monarchy and ultimately brought Nasser to power, Egypt and Iran’s paths diverged. At the Bandung Conference in 1955, while Nasser was inspired by the prospects of Afro-Asian solidarity, the shah’s government was concerned with the need for moderation, and to maintain close ties to the West. One year later, after the nationalisation of the Suez Canal, Nasser became the leading voice of pan-Arabism, which the shah viewed as a major threat both to regional security and to his reign. This divergence in perceptions of their places in the Global South ultimately led to a break in relations between Iran and Egypt. This chapter examines in detail the events that led to this fracture, and the ultimate emergence of Nasser as the shah’s main adversary.

This chapter illustrates how the categories ‘migrant’, ‘repatriate’, and ‘refugee’ acquired meaning between diplomatic relations and physical displacement. It argues that departure and arrival reified the networks on which the Italian community had been founded in Egypt, as well as the categories of political membership that defined it. Between 1952 and 1956, the Italian government avoided repatriation out of fear that the displaced population would disrupt the postwar economy. The absence of state policy aimed to forestall the creation of a political community of ‘refugees’ or ‘repatriates’. State actors viewed intergovernmental institutions, instead, as opportunities to manage displaced Italians. When the pace of departures quickened after 1953, the Italian government housed ‘repatriates’ in temporary refugee camps and converted Emigration Centres. Seeking to locate themselves in this Cold War Mediterranean, Italians from Egypt institutionalised their associations in and around the camps and holding centres. Pressure from these groups culminated in the extension of refugee status to Italians from Egypt and the consolidation of a political community.

This chapter examines how a shared experience of isolation during the Second World War clouded a sense of the future for civilian internees. It focuses on how various historical processes collapsed into the spacetime of confinement for most working-age Italian men in Egypt. British authorities had planned a complete shutdown of the Italian community during Italy’s 1935 Ethiopia campaign, when they perceived the large-scale participation in fascist institutions as a ’fifth column’ threat to their authority in Egypt. After June 1940, Anglo-Egyptian authorities closed Italian institutions, froze bank accounts, restricted movement, and forbade the signing of contracts with Italian nationals. Italian institutional life, which had become central to the population during the after 1919 was abruptly brought to a halt. While the buttressing of the Italian population collapsed during the war, many of its political structures remained intact. In this chapter, the camp is seen as a temporal isolation chamber, one that delimited the horizons of the internees during the war and then moulded a shared experience that would inform their relationship with the post-fascist Italian state after the war.

This chapter examines the departure from Egypt from the perspective of oral history and personal collections. It shows how repatriated Italians remembered their departures, and their reception and integration in Italy. It looks at how those acts of remembering connected with histories of migration from and to Italy. In doing this, it reorients our understanding of imperial nostalgia, by considering the ways by which historical experiences are knotted into the present. Repatriated Italians are the protagonists of this chapter. They narrate how departure and arrival evoked different understandings of the origins of Italian communities in Egypt and how national and regional political constellations were perceived to have transformed in the Mediterranean. Considering the effects of ‘events’ in shaping decisions to leave Egypt, the chapter examines experiences of departure and arrival. It focuses on how the abandonment of belongings and the reception as ‘refugees’ shaped forms of political membership for repatriated Italians in relation to other migrant departures to and from the Mediterranean.

This chapter draws together the book’s overarching narrative by examining the regional transformations inscribed in the social and material architecture of the Italian care home, the Casa di Riposo, in Alexandria, Egypt. The institution was founded in 1928, at the height of the community’s importance in regional politics. Designed to house over 250 individuals, its inhabitants were fewer than 20 at the time of writing. Within its halls, it contains a locked and abandoned museum, aptly named ’The Time Machine’, which displays the accumulated objects of departed Italians. Walls grew around the building in proportion to Alexandria’s expanding population. During moments of political revolt since 2011, demonstrators’ calls for new futures reverberated in the Casa di Riposo’s emptying halls. Using the Casa di Riposo as an analytical lens, this conclusion suggests that imperial afterlives, even in states of absence and entropy, demonstrate the contested nature of historical temporalities in shaping migration, empire, and decolonisation in the modern Mediterranean.

The Introduction proposes that a microhistorical lens on the departure of over 40,000 Italians from Egypt after the Second World War helps us to understand how historical temporalities and political membership shape migrant departures. It takes as its starting point the question of the memory of Italian departures from Egypt among Egyptian migrants in contemporary Italy. It frames the book’s argument in relation to ideas about historical time and conflicting notions of the Italian population in Egypt as ’out of time’, demonstrating that a history of temporalities which focuses on the future, present, and past can shed new light on processes of migration in the Mediterranean. It then articulates how political membership, as an encompassing concept functioning within these temporal frameworks, illustrates the construction of the categories normally ascribed to migrants and migrant communities in and beyond the Mediterranean. Finally, it draws these theoretical and methodological threads together to rethink periodisations of European and Mediterranean empires and decolonisation.

This chapter examines the sense of uncertainty fostered by postwar geopolitics. It looks at how the political orientations shaped during the interwar period were dislocated from postwar Italo-Egyptian relations and from emergent Mediterranean constellations. The fall of the fascist government in Rome in 1943 and the creation of the Egyptian republic in 1953 made uncertainty a defining condition of life for Italian residents in Egypt after the war. Their experiences no longer resonated with the political aspirations of the post-fascist state, nor did they align with Egypt’s accelerating movement towards national sovereignty. The material and symbolic exchange of two deposed kings – Vittorio Emanuele III in 1946 and Faruk in 1953 – and the establishment of the Italian and Egyptian Republics paved the way for new industrial and economic ties. Political-economic relations tightened around this kinship of exchange, and the Italian state sought to reinforce Egypt’s military government. Yet, as this chapter demonstrates, many Italian residents fell into greater duress, coming to understand departure as their only possible future.

This chapter shows how extraterritorial jurisdiction facilitated the coexistence of nationalist and imperialist projects in colonial Egypt. The safeguards proffered by Ottoman-era extraterritoriality had been either adapted to European colonial administrations or cancelled by the early twentieth century. In Egypt, they remained in effect until 1937, playing a formative role when Mussolini announced an aggressively imperialistic project in the Mediterranean in 1933. Cultural institutions, state schools, and Italian consulates became crucial sites of encounter and propaganda dissemination for the regime. Rome’s focus on building a national community coincided with a steady rise in unemployment among Italian subjects. Italians in Egypt became dependent upon Italian state structures just as the they became vital to Rome’s propaganda in the region. Notwithstanding the efforts of the fascist government to convince Egyptian nationalists that Italy’s imperial ambitions posed no territorial threat, the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty set the stage for the end of extraterritoriality and discourse around ’repatriation’ emerged to mitigate tensions between nationalist and imperialist projects.