In 2013, an Armenian diaspora campaign succeeded in persuading the British Museum to rename its 'Ancient Turkey' gallery 'Anatolia and Urartu (7000–300 BC)'. The campaign gathered over 12,000 signatures, involved a formal lobbying letter from the Federation of Armenian Associations in Europe (FAAE), and was supported by the then-Armenian Ambassador to the United Kingdom.¹ Not a single Turkish institution, Turkish academic body, or member of the Turkish community in the UK was consulted.

We are asking the British Museum to reverse this decision - or at minimum to submit it to a genuine independent academic review - and to correct the systematic mislabelling of Turkic, Seljuk, Ottoman and Azerbaijani artefacts across its collection. We set out below why the arguments made in the original Armenian petition do not withstand scrutiny, and why the broader labelling failures demand urgent correction.

¹ Armenpress (August 2016): 'Ancient Turkey Hall Renamed Anatolia and Urartu in British Museum.' PanArmenian.Net (2016): corroborating report. Batikyan, Z., public Facebook post, 2016.

PART ONE: Rebutting the Armenian Petition - Point by Point

The original Armenian petition made four main arguments. We address each in turn.

PART ONE: Rebutting the Armenian Petition
Argument 1
❌ Claim: “Turkey did not exist prior to the 15th century; therefore ‘Ancient Turkey’ is invalid.”

✓ Evidence:
This argument reflects a misunderstanding of geographical naming conventions in historiography. Academic practice frequently applies modern geographic labels retrospectively (e.g., Ancient Near East, Ancient Iran, Ancient Syria) to aid accessibility (Bryce, 2005; Kuhrt, 1995).

Moreover, the relationship between Urartu and later Armenian identity remains debated, with leading scholars emphasizing discontinuity rather than direct equivalence (Zimansky, 1995; Sagona & Zimansky, 2009). Thus, rejecting “Ancient Turkey” on the basis of anachronism would logically invalidate many accepted academic terms, including “Ancient Armenia.”

Argument 2
❌ Claim: Objects from modern Armenia were mislabelled as “Ancient Turkey.”

✓ Evidence:
This is a valid object-level curatorial issue, not a justification for renaming an entire gallery. Museum best practice distinguishes between object provenance and gallery-level geographic framing (Cuno, 2011; Peers & Brown, 2003).

Corrective action should involve precise relabelling of specific artefacts, not wholesale renaming that affects thousands of unrelated objects.

Renaming a whole gallery because some objects within it may be more precisely attributed elsewhere is an overreaction that harms the accurate representation of the thousands of objects that do originate from the territory of present-day Turkey.

Argument 3
❌ Claim: Naming conventions are inconsistent across the museum.

✓ Evidence:
This critique is partially valid. However, replacing “Ancient Turkey” with “Anatolia and Urartu” introduces a selective historical framing, privileging one polity (which they think is connected to Armenia) over others such as the Hittites, Phrygians, and Lydians (Bryce, 2005).

Scholarly consensus supports systematic consistency, not reactive renaming driven by advocacy campaigns (Smith, 2022).

Argument 4

❌  Their claim: Author Christopher J. Walker was quoted in the petition, describing 'Ancient Turkey' as 'a coinage that will please Turkish individuals and organisations of extremist or ultranationalist sympathies, who periodically launch murder raids on non-Turkish individuals and communities.'

✓  The evidence: This statement is inflammatory, ethnically derogatory, and wholly inappropriate as justification for a curatorial decision at a national public institution. Attributing murderous violence to all Turks who use a standard geographic term - a term used in academic journals, archaeological field reports, and the Museum's own publications - is not a scholarly argument. It is prejudice. The British Museum should never have allowed such a statement to influence an institutional decision.

Summary: The Armenian petition argued, correctly, that some labels were imprecise. The solution to imprecision is more precise labelling - not a politically motivated renaming that erases Turkic cultural heritage from the gallery title entirely, carried out without consultation of the affected community.

PART TWO: Broader Issues in Turkic Attribution

Seljuk and Ottoman Context
The Seljuk Empire is widely recognized as a Turkic polity that reshaped the political and cultural landscape of the Middle East and Anatolia (Peacock, 2015; Bosworth, 2010).

Similarly, Ottoman material culture, including İznik ceramics, is consistently identified in major museum collections (e.g., the Met, Louvre) as Ottoman (Carboni & Masuya, 1993). The absence of such attribution in comparable contexts represents a deviation from international curatorial norms.

 
Turkic Dynasties in Iran
Scholarly literature confirms that multiple dynasties ruling Iran were of Turkic origin or relied heavily on Turkic military elites, including:

-Ghaznavids (977–1186 CE): 'A Persian-speaking and Muslim Turkic dynasty that ruled Iran from 977 to 1186.' (Bosworth, 1963)
-Great Seljuks (1037–1194 CE): Of Oghuz Turkic origin. (Peacock, 2015)
-arakoyunlu and Akkoyunlu (15th century): Azerbaijani Turkic dynasties. Their artefacts in the Museum appear as 'Iranian' without Turkic attribution. (Woods, 1999)
-Safavids (1501–1736 CE): Founded by Turkic-speaking Qizilbash forces. Wikipedia states: 'The main group that contributed to bringing the Safavids to power were the Qizilbash, a Turkic word meaning red-head, Turkoman tribes(Newman, 2006; Mitchell, 2009)
-Afsharids (1736–1796 CE): 'A Turkic-Iranian dynasty that ruled Iran from 1736 to 1796.(Axworthy, 2006)
-Qajars (1789–1925 CE): Cambridge History of Iran: 'Like virtually every dynasty that ruled Persia since the 11th century, the Qajars came to power with the backing of Turkic tribal forces.'(Floor, 2001)
Scholars emphasize that political power, patronage, and identity in these dynasties were deeply intertwined with Turkic structures, even where Persian language and culture remained dominant (Newman, 2006).

Failure to reflect this complexity in museum labels results in partial historical representation.

The Double Standard
Museums routinely identify Greek, Egyptian, Persian, and Armenian cultural contexts with specificity. Applying different standards to Turkic heritage creates an inconsistency that is not supported by academic practice (Peers & Brown, 2003; Cuno, 2011).

Artefacts currently labelled 'Iranian', 'Safavid' or 'Persian' in the Museum's collection were, in large part, produced under Turkic patronage. This context is not a footnote - it is, in many cases, the primary political and cultural reality of the object's creation. It does not appear on a single label.

PART THREE: The Process Was Fundamentally Unfair

Regardless of the merits of either side's historical arguments, the process by which the 'Ancient Turkey' gallery was renamed was wrong.

A petition of 12,000 signatures - however impressive - is not a scholarly instrument. It reflects the size and organisation of a diaspora, not the weight of historical evidence. If the British Museum had applied the same standard consistently, any well-organised community could rename any gallery to suit its preferences.

The renaming was carried out without notifying Turkish institutions, without consulting Turkish academic historians, and without any public process of review. The Turkish Embassy in London, the Turkish Ministry of Culture, and the Turkish community in the UK were entirely absent from the decision.

We are not asking for Turkish lobbying to override Armenian lobbying. We are asking for the British Museum to base its naming decisions on scholarly consensus - arrived at through an open, transparent, multilateral academic process - rather than on whichever diaspora community organises the largest petition.

WHAT WE ARE ASKING FOR

1. A formal independent academic review of the gallery's current name 'Anatolia and Urartu', involving historians from Turkish, Armenian, British and international institutions, with findings made public and binding on the decision.

2. An internal audit of object labels across the Islamic World, Byzantine and Near Eastern galleries to identify artefacts produced under Turkic dynasties that are currently attributed without acknowledgement of their Turkic origin or patronage context.

3. The establishment of a joint Turkish-British academic working group - drawing on historians from Istanbul University, Hacettepe University, METU and the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts (TIEM) - to advise on revised labelling standards.

4. A commitment that future gallery naming and labelling decisions will be based on scholarly consensus and transparent multilateral consultation - not on petition campaigns or diplomatic lobbying.

The British Museum holds millions of objects taken or purchased from Ottoman and Anatolian territories. The very least it owes to the descendants of those civilisations is accurate attribution and a fair process. History belongs to everyone - not just those with the loudest lobby.

---

Sources

All sources cited are publicly available. Armenian petition text sourced from Change.org and FAAE public records.

Axworthy, M. (2006). The Sword of Persia: Nader Shah. I.B. Tauris.
Bosworth, C. E. (1963). The Ghaznavids: Their Empire in Afghanistan and Eastern Iran. Edinburgh University Press.
Bosworth, C. E. (2010). The New Islamic Dynasties. Edinburgh University Press.
Bryce, T. (2005). The Kingdom of the Hittites. Oxford University Press.
Carboni, S., & Masuya, T. (1993). Persian Tiles. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Cuno, J. (2011). Museums Matter: In Praise of the Encyclopedic Museum. University of Chicago Press.
Floor, W. (2001). Safavid Government Institutions. Mazda Publishers.
Kuhrt, A. (1995). The Ancient Near East c. 3000–330 BC. Routledge.
Mitchell, C. (2009). The Practice of Politics in Safavid Iran. I.B. Tauris.
Newman, A. J. (2006). Safavid Iran: Rebirth of a Persian Empire. I.B. Tauris.
Peacock, A. C. S. (2015). The Great Seljuk Empire. Edinburgh University Press.
Peers, L., & Brown, A. (2003). Museums and Source Communities. Routledge.
Sagona, A., & Zimansky, P. (2009). Ancient Turkey. Routledge.
Smith, A. T. (2022). “Unseeing the Past: Archaeology and the Legacy of the Armenian Genocide.” Current Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.1086/722380
Woods, J. E. (1999). The Aqquyunlu: Clan, Confederation, Empire. University of Utah Press.
Zimansky, P. (1995). “Urartian Material Culture as State Assemblage.” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 299/300, 103–115.