Michael Wood on Gaza's astonishing cultural heritage

• Alternate history: What if Alexander the Great had lived longer?

Back then I stayed in the Marna Guest House. Opened in 1946, it was run by Alia al-Shawa, a warm hostess from an old Gazan family. There was a sunlit terrace, a garden with a huge plane tree, and an old well of good water for which Gaza was once famous.

That first evening I had a dinner with Gazan scholars including Dr Moain Sadek, who had studied in Germany and had just become head of Gazan Antiquities; he has since written distinguished studies on Gazan archaeology and architecture. We talked about the city’s long history: first settled in the fifth millennium BC, Gaza has always been a crossroads between Egypt, the Near East and Anatolia. It was sacked and ruined many times – including bombing by the British in 1917 – but always rose again.

After dinner we walked in the garden. “In the west, when you think of Gaza, you think of violence and war, poverty and despair,” observed Dr Sadek. “But there’s another Gaza – rich in ancient heritage, openness to the world and a determination to preserve the culture of the past amid all the destruction.” After all, he smiled, “the cradle of civilisation – the Fertile Crescent – runs through the orchards of Gaza”.

That night, I curled up with a book on the history of Gaza from the house library. Published in 1963, it was part of a series called The Centers of Civilisation, which was “devoted to the cities that from earliest times to the present have exercised a radiating influence upon the eras in which they flourish”: Bukhara, Constantinople, Athens, Fez, Florence, Kyoto – and a volume on Gaza.

In the fifth and sixth centuries AD, a group of writers and thinkers worked at the famous School of Gaza that attracted students from all over the classical world, their links reaching as far as Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria. Indeed, the writer Aeneas of Gaza claimed that, when the Academy in Athens was shut down by Justinian in AD 529, some teachers migrated to Gaza. There, the classical tradition was transformed in the new world of Late Antique Eastern Christianity. Members of the Gazan schools mixed with the local cultures of philosophers, rhetoricians, hermits and monks from nearby monasteries.

The current destruction in Gaza is more thorough than any ancient siege sung about in the city laments of Iraq or the Book of Lamentations

Classical theatre was still popular in sixth-century Gaza. The public baths were adorned with paintings of the Theseus myth and scenes from the Iliad. The Christian philosopher Procopius of Gaza (from whom 169 letters survive) had a remarkable library comprising not only Christian literature but also an unbelievable range of works by the ancients, from Homer to Euripides, in the belief that culture also depended on the pagan classics. When the Syrian Theodore of Tarsus became archbishop of Canterbury in the seventh century, he arrived with Procopius’s biblical commentaries in his baggage.

That’s just a snapshot of just one chapter of Gaza’s rich story. Travelling the world making films over the past 40 years, I have seen the devastation of war in old Mosul, Kabul, Aleppo before the fall – the barbaric work of the modern sackers of cities. The current destruction in Gaza is more thorough than any ancient siege sung about in the city laments of Iraq or the Book of Lamentations. The loss of life now is horrendous. But also important over the past 70 years has been Gaza’s continued enforced isolation from the world, and the world from Gaza. Its role as a vibrant, historic Levantine city has been shut down. Only when that isolation comes to an end will it be able to reconnect with the Mediterranean world to which it belongs, and to which it has contributed so much. Let’s hope that Gaza, now in the nadir of its fortunes, will rise again.

This article was first published in the October 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine