The State of the world heritage

While we were preparing this issue we often found ourselves thinking of the words uttered by André Malraux on 8 March I960, at a ceremony held at Unesco Headquarters in Paris to mark the launching of the first International Campaign for the Preservation of the Monuments of Nubia. Malraux's address on that occasion said admirably all that needed to be said about the emergence of humanity's new sense of responsibility for the invisible masterpieces of its heritage. It would have been impossible not to refer to this text in our introduction to the present issue. On rereading it we decided it would be best to let Malraux speak for himself.

Bahgat Elnadi and Adel Rifaat

A text by André Malraux 

"... 'Beauty' has become one of our age's most potent mysteries, the inexplicable quality which brings the Egyptian masterpieces into communion with the statues of our own cathedrals, or the Aztec temples, or the Indian or Chinese grottoes; with the paintings of Cézanne and Van Gogh, with the greatest dead and the greatest living artists; with, in short, the whole treasury of the first world civilization.

"This is an immense regeneration, of which our own Renaissance will soon seem a diffident prefiguring. For the first time, men have discovered a universal language of art. We feel its influence acutely, even if we only partly understand its nature. This tremendous storehouse of art, of which we are now becoming conscious, draws its force no doubt from its being the most signal victory of human effort over death. To the impregnable 'nevermore' that governs the history of civilizations, this art opposes its own mysterious grandeur.

"Of the force that brought Egypt into being out of prehistoric night, nothing now remains; but the impulse which engendered these giants which are threatened today still speaks to us as clearly as the genius of the master-craftsmen of Chartres, or the genius of Rembrandt. The emotion we share with the creators of these granite statues is not even one of love, nor a common feeling for death nor even, perhaps, a similar way of looking at their work; yet before their work, the accents of anonymous sculptors forgotten during two thousand years seem to us as much untouched by the succession of empires as the accents of mother love.

"This is what brings throngs of Europeans to exhibitions of Mexican art; of Japanese to exhibitions of French art; and millions of Americans to see Van Gogh. This is why the commemorative ceremonies of Rembrandt's death were inaugurated by the last kings of Europe, and the exhibition of our own stained glass by the brother of the last Asian emperor. This is why, Mr. Director-General, so many sovereign names are associated with the appeal you are launching today. 

"One could not too highly praise your having conceived a plan so magnificent and so precise in its boldness one might say, a kind of Tennessee Valley Authority of archae¬ ology. It is the antithesis of the kind of gigantic exhibitionism by which great modern states try to outbid each other. Nor should the well-defined object of your scheme conceal its profound significance. If UNESCO is trying to rescue the monuments of Nubia, it is because these are in imminent danger; it goes without saying that it would try to save other great ruins Angkor or Nara, for instance if they were similarly threatened.

"On behalf of man's artistic heritage, you are appealing to the world's conscience as others have been doing, this week, for the victims of the Agadir earthquake. 'May we never have to choose,' you said just now, 'between porphyry statues and living men!' Yours is the first attempt to deploy, in a rescue operation, on behalf of statues, the immense resources usually harnessed for the service of men. And this is perhaps because for us the survival of statues has become an expression of life.

"At the moment when our civilization divines a mysterious transcendence in art and one of the still obscure sources of its unity, at the moment when we are bringing into a single, family relationship the masterpieces of so many civilizations which knew nothing of or even hated each other, you are proposing an action which brings all men together to defy the forces of dissolution. Your appeal is historic, not because it proposes to save the temples of Nubia, but because through it the first world civilization publicly proclaims the world's art as its indivisible heritage. In days when the West believed its cultural heritage had its source in Athens, it could nonetheless look on with equanimity while the Acropolis crumbled away.

"The slow flood of the Nile has reflected the melancholy caravans of the Bible, the armies of Cambyses and Alexander, the knights of Byzantium and Islam, the soldiers of Napoleon. No doubt when the sandstorm blows across it, its ancient memory no longer distinguishes the brilliant notes of Rameses' triumph from the pathetic dust that settles again in the wake of defeated armies. And when the sand is scattered again, the Nile is once more alone with its sculpted mountains, its colossal effigies whose motionless reflection has for so long been part of its echo of eternity.

"But see, old river, whose floods allowed astrologers to fix the most ancient date in history, men are coming now, from all parts of the world, who will carry these giants far away from your life-giving, destructive waters. Let the night fall, and you will reflect again the stars under which Isis accomplished her funeral rites, the star of Rameses. But the humblest worker come to rescue the statues of Isis and Rameses will tell you something you have always known but never heard from men before: that there is only one action over which indifferent stars and unchanging, murmurous rivers have no sway: it is the action of a man who snatches something from death."

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