ABSTRACT

Identity is a key precondition for foreign policy. Maintaining boundaries (territorial as well as social) is a question of identity maintenance, as well as a question of security. The chapter looks at one of the world's oldest surviving artefacts, the more than five-thousand-year-old so-called Narmer Palette. The Narmer Palette may or may not depict an event, which may or may not be the unification of upper and lower Egypt. The chapter then looks at a 3,200-year-old narrative relief and traces the theme through a genre that has been particularly historically stable, namely monuments. At present, seemingly universal monumental buildings seem to be all the rage. Monumental representations of the other as suborned are still all around us, but new monuments tend to find other ways of celebrating the Self. There are variants, however, such as the 1888 Columbus Monument in Barcelona, where grateful child-like natives may be seen kneeling down to sundry Christian cultic specialists.