Facing the Past: Ancient Skulls and National Identity in the Middle East

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the cranial or cephalic index was a widely used calculation for racial classification. This particular measurement, which could be applied both to skulls and to the heads of living people, allowed the comparison of members of ancient and biblical civilizations to modern inhabitants of the same territories. Human remains excavated from archaeological sites across the Middle East prompted transregional interest in racial origins: who were the closest living descendants of (and therefore legitimate political-cultural heirs to) the Phoenicians, Indo-Aryans, and other celebrated pre-Islamic civilizations? Here, I analyze anthropometric studies in Lebanon and Iran in the first half of the twentieth century, showing how this preoccupation with ancient origins collided with intersectional and contested meanings of race and nation. In both countries, nationalist intellectuals and politicians used the cephalic index as a scientific tool, both to bolster the international legitimacy of their sovereignty claims and to promote particular narratives of national history. In Lebanon, anatomists and archaeologists argued over the racial classification of different Christian and Muslim sects as part of a highly politicized debate about Phoenician versus Arab ancestry. Meanwhile, Iranian scholars exhumed the remains of national heroes like Avicenna, measuring their skulls to prove their “Aryan” racial identity and reconstruct their physiognomy for sculptural monuments and portraits. Phoenicianism and Aryanism remain powerful racial-national discourses in contemporary Lebanon and Iran, where they continue to shape scientific interpretations of recent ancient DNA studies and forensic facial reconstructions of human remains.