British Museum Label Changes Spark Dispute Over “Palestine” in Ancient Levant Galleries
A quiet rewrite of gallery text at the British Museum has become the latest flashpoint in a widening argument about language, historical framing, and the institution’s political entanglements.
The controversy centers on interpretation panels in the museum’s Ancient Levant gallery, where artifacts span roughly 7500 BC to 332 BC and trace cultures across a region that includes present-day Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and parts of Syria. The dispute surfaced publicly last month after the Daily Telegraph reported that the museum had altered labels in the Ancient Levant and Egyptian galleries following concerns raised by UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), a voluntary association of lawyers.
The British Museum has rejected the claim that it has scrubbed the word “Palestine” from its displays. In a statement issued March 3, the museum said: “It has been reported that the British Museum has removed the term Palestine from displays. It is simply not true. We continue to use Palestine across a series of galleries, both contemporary and historic.”
At issue is not a single label but a set of interpretive choices that, in the current climate, carry outsized symbolic weight. The Ancient Levant gallery includes wall texts and a map, and it draws on material excavated at sites such as Tell Halaf, an Iron Age settlement in northeastern Syria, and Tell Umm Hammad, a Bronze Age site in Jordan. The displays emphasize long-distance exchange and maritime trade, including the networks associated with seafaring groups such as the Phoenicians.
One panel in particular has drawn scrutiny. In an earlier version of an introductory text titled “The Phoenicians,” the museum used the term “Palestine” in a sentence describing territorial control in the early first millennium BC: “By the beginning of the first millennium BC the Israelites occupied most of Palestine except for the southern coastal strip, which continued to be held by the Philistines.”
In the revised panel, “Palestine” no longer appears. The updated text instead frames the Phoenicians through geography and endonyms, describing them as people living on the “Syro-Lebanese coast,” and noting that they were known locally as “Canaanites.” The panel then situates Phoenician activity broadly between 1200 BC and 300 BC.
According to information reviewed by The Art Newspaper, the Ancient Levant wall labels were amended in early 2025, following staff changes in the museum’s Middle Eastern department. Multiple former curators and individuals affiliated with the museum told the publication that the updates were intended to reflect more recent scholarship, including a preference for naming ancient peoples using terms current in their own time, and to refresh interpretive material that had become dated.
That timeline matters because UKLFI’s letter to British Museum director Nicholas Cullinan arrived later. The group wrote to Cullinan on February 6, 2026, after what it described as “a number of approaches from individuals who were concerned about what they believed to be historically inaccurate or anachronistic descriptions” in the Ancient Levant and Egypt galleries. The Art Newspaper reports that it corroborated Cullinan’s alleged assertion that the label changes predated UKLFI’s letter. Cullinan’s remarks have circulated secondhand via a post on X by historian William Dalrymple; the museum itself has not expanded publicly beyond its March 3 statement.
Even if the edits were not prompted by outside pressure, several scholars interviewed by The Art Newspaper questioned the wording of the new labels, underscoring how difficult it can be to balance scholarly precision with terms that have modern political resonance.
The label dispute is also being folded into a broader critique of the museum’s relationships and programming. A letter published March 10 linked the current argument to what it described as the “museum’s complicity in Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” citing, among other points, the British Museum’s hosting of a private event organized by the Israeli embassy in London. The museum held the event on May 13, 2025, marking the anniversary of the founding of Israel.
The same letter also criticized the museum’s partnership with BP, alleging the company supplies fuel to the Israeli military. BP did not respond to a request for comment.
For museums, interpretive text is often treated as a matter of curatorial housekeeping. But as institutions face intensifying scrutiny over sponsorships, diplomacy, and the politics of naming, even a single word on a wall can become a proxy for much larger questions: who gets to define the past, and what responsibilities a museum assumes in the present.
