Amman, Jan. 28 (Petra) – His Royal Highness Prince El Hassan bin Talal, accompanied by Her Royal Highness Princess Sarvath El Hassan, on Tuesday evening, attended the opening of a photographic exhibition and the launch of the book "Gaza, the Arab Gateway to the Sea: Memory and Art." The exhibition showcases rare photographs and archaeological findings from French-Palestinian missions conducted in Gaza between 1995 and 2019. The initiative was coordinated by archaeologist Jean-Baptiste Humbert, who has worked in the Middle East for more than five decades.
The event was organized by the Friends of Jordan Festivals association in cooperation with the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies and was attended by ambassadors accredited to the Kingdom, alongside cultural and diplomatic figures.
In his address, Prince El Hassan recalled his visit last year to the Rescued Treasures of Gaza: 5,000 Years of History exhibition at the Arab World Institute in Paris. He said many of the artifacts on display would not have survived had they not been transferred from Gaza two decades ago and preserved within the collections of the Geneva Museum of Art and History, noting that these works, like their Palestinian owners, remain displaced.
Prince El Hassan said Palestinians have been denied, for much of the modern era, the opportunity to develop a national archaeological excavation program that would enable them to narrate their own history. As a result, archaeology has evolved from a documentation of the past into an act of resistance against erasure and obliteration.
He also referred to observations by Scottish historian William Dalrymple on the widespread reductive portrayal of Gaza as merely a large refugee camp, stressing that Gaza is among the oldest continuously inhabited urban centers in the world. He said the city has never been a historical periphery, but rather a gateway linking Africa and Asia and connecting the heart of the Arab world to the Mediterranean and Europe.
Prince El Hassan reflected on the successive layers of Gaza’s urban development, spanning the Bronze and Iron Ages, the Assyrian, Greek, Roman and Byzantine eras, and later the Islamic, Crusader, Mamluk and Ottoman periods, describing this continuity as an ongoing historical dialogue.
He also highlighted the port of Blakhiyeh in Beit Lahia, where previous excavations uncovered Roman-era features reflecting Gaza’s role as an open and interconnected Mediterranean city, prior to its destruction during the war on Gaza in 2023.
Prince El Hassan stressed that the exhibition and its accompanying publication call for remembering Gaza as a repository of memory, identity, and human history, rather than reducing it to a scene of war, and urged the protection of its cultural heritage as part of humanity’s shared legacy.
//Petra// AJ
