Ruins for a renaissance: decline, rebirth and cyclical history in the Arab Mediterranean

The description of remnants (āthār) and ruins (aṭlāl) is a recurrent and distinct motif in in the tradition of adab, one that evokes a variety of themes such as contemplation of loss, melancholy, and the fow of time. But what does it mean to observe, describe and collect the past as a social and cultural practice? Can we trace the recurrent motive of the ruins in Arabic literature as a manifestation of a form of adab which always reinvented itself in new forms? In order to respond to these questions, this article focuses on fictional and non-fictional representations of ruins in texts circulating between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century in the eastern and southern Mediterranean. The article argues that the theme of decline, typically attached to the depiction of ruins, transformed into the theme of cultural revival, at a time when the undetermined and universal ruin was appropriated and defined as national heritage. The article focuses mainly on sources in Arabic, but it also puts these sources into conversation with coeval works in French and Italian. Comparing visions of antiquities, which were part of a landscape of mutual infuences and translations, reveals how a shared régime d’historicité took shape during the long nineteenth century from the encounter of eclectic traditions of conceiving the fow of time and its traces.