Donald M.

Reid

The Symbolism of Postage Stamps:

A Source for the Historian*

Small things can start us off in new ways of thinking, and I was started off by the
postage stamps of our area. The British administration gave us beautiful stamps.
These stamps depicted local scenes and local things; there was one called ’Arab
Dhow’. It was as though, in those stamps, a foreigner had said, ’This is what is
most striking about this place’. Without that stamp of the dhow I might have
taken the dhows for granted. As it was, I learned to look at them. Whenever I
saw them tied up at the waterfront I thought of them as something peculiar to
our region, quaint, something the foreigner would remark on, something not

quite modern, and certainly nothing like the liners and cargo ships that berthed
in our own modern docks.
1
The speaker is an East Indian merchant in one of V.S. Naipaul’s novels.

Numismatics has long been recognized not only as a hobby and an

investment but also as a scholarly discipline of considerable value
to the general historian. Philately, in contrast, has never been
regarded as a scholarly discipline. Philatelists spend hours
cataloguing minor printing variations on particular issues, talk
mostly to each other, and publish in stamp magazines that are not
indexed in the Readers Guide, Historical Abstracts or Social
Sciences Index.
Most historians have a bias in favour of written documents.
Except for art historians they tend to dismiss visual evidence of the
type that stamps might provide as mere ’illustrations’ of points
already made on the basis of written sources. This is unfortunate,
for stamps are excellent primary sources for the symbolic messages
which governments seek to convey to their citizens and to the
world.
But after all, it might be objected, postage stamps are unimpor-
tant because they are all but invisible. Few people can describe the

Journal of Contemporary History (SAGE, London, Beverly Hills and New Delhi),
223-

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stamp on a letter they received the day before, just as surprisingly

few can say whose portrait appears on a $10 bill. Few but
philatelists consciously examine stamps, but that is partly because
we subconsciously take much of their symbolism for granted.

Successful revolutionaries have never doubted the urgency of

obliterating a deposed ruler’s portrait on the stamps (Egypt, 346)2 and
of following up quickly with new issues which exploit revolutionary
symbols.
The time would seem ripe to incorporate the evidence of stamps
into the mainstream of history. Historians are borrowing from
other disciplines and exploiting as sources everything from oral
recollections to cartoons.3We have history ’from the bottom up’ as
well as ’from the top down’, and we want to understand the
cooperation and conflict which link the bottom to the top. Art
historians are taking folk art and popular art seriously. Symbolic
anthropologists are probing literate as well as non-literate societies,
and political scientists and linguists are developing sophisticated
communications theories. Some would even establish semiotics as a
separate academic discipline.
A well-known question in communications theory asks
’Who/says what/in what channel/to whom/with what effect? 4 If
we add ’by means of what symbols?’, we have a useful framework
for this study. The channel in this case is postage stamps, and the
’who’ are the stamp-issuing governments. The level of officials who
initiate, approve, and reject stamp designs varies with time and
place, as do the interest groups who make up the ’who’ of a govern-
ment. Stamps resemble government buildings, monuments, coins,
paper money, flags, national anthems, nationalized newspapers,
and ambassadors as conveyors of official viewpoints. This article
will concentrate on the ’says what?’ and ’by means of what
symbols?’ while suggesting how further research might illuminate
other parts of the question.
Let us first discuss the types of historical evidence to be found on
postage stamps, then sketch in the English origin and subsequent
diffusion of stamps. We will then turn to Middle Eastern case
studies to show how historians can make use of the symbolic
messages which stamps convey.

Stamps can provide the historian with evidence on at least three

levels.sFirst, they are physical objects made up of paper, ink, and

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glue. They may be produced by half a dozen different printing

processes on various types of paper, with or without watermarks.
There is worthwhile evidence here for the historian of printing
technology or paper manufacturing, but this first level of evidence
is of only marginal use to the general historian and need not detain
us here. On a second level, stamps supplement written records in

providing evidence of postal service in issuing countries. The

introduction of airmail and special delivery stamps ordinarily
indicates the initiation of these services in a particular country. A
country’s first stamp usually reflects the initiation of a ’modern’
postal system at least partially patterned on that of England.
Institutional histories of national postal systems exist how -

many historians read them? - but ’the postage stamp revolution’

receives scant attention in general histories. E.J. Hobsbawm does
not mention postal services or stamps in ’The World United’, a
chapter in his Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (New York 1979). Postal
services receive a scant three sentences in the tenth volume of the
New Cambridge Modern History, The Zenith of European Power
1830-1870.6 The steamship and the locomotive - which made the
’postal revolution’ possible and the telegraph receive the
-

emphasis instead. By 1872 one could telegraph diplomatic

dispatches, news, and stock market quotations from London to
New York, Bombay, Tokyo, or Adelaide. This achievement,
however, should not overshadow the importance for ordinary
correspondence of aworld-wide mail network which by 1872 could
deliver a letter to most places on the globe in days or weeks instead
of months.
A third level of evidence, our central concern here, is stamps as
bearers of symbols, as part of a system of communications. In
some ways the postage stamp channel of communication resembles
that of coins. Historians have exploited coins far more effectively
than stamps for historical evidence, presumably because coins go
back 2600 years and are available for times when written evidence is
scarce. Before the age of Gutenberg, coins were uniquely useful as
instruments of propaganda.~Identical coins would pass through
millions of hands, conveying a message to the literate and the
illiterate alike. The ancient Greeks kept the same coin types for
many years, whereas the Romans changed the symbolic messages
on their coins frequently. Muslim rulers so appreciated the

propaganda value of coins that striking coins in one’s name became

one of two basic symbols of sovereignty, the other being having the

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Friday prayers said in one’s name.

For modern times, the symbolism of stamps is more useful to the
historian than that of coins because stamps are more varied and less
conservative. In the Middle East, coins are less likely than stamps
to depart from earlier Islamic convention by showing rulers’
portraits and foreign languages. Ottoman sultans and Syrian
presidents never appeared on their countries’ coins, but both
showed up on stamps. Syrian stamps and coins both used French
alongside Arabic during the French mandate in the 1920s and
1930s, but only the stamps kept French after independence.
Egyptian stamps have been bilingual for more than a century, but
except for a few recent commemoratives, Egyptian coins bore a
second language only briefly during the British protectorate
(1914-22).
Such differences may arise partly because stamps diverge from
coins in the ’to whom?’ part of the communications questions.
Coins are usually intended primarily for domestic use, stamps for
both domestic and foreign. Stamps penetrate only where there are
post offices and literate people. Official and commercial
correspondence accounted for most postal messages for pre-
modern China, early modern Europe, and the nineteenth-century
Middle East.8Coins circulate more widely domestically, going
wherever there is a money economy.

Great Britain issued the world’s first postage stamp - the ’penny
black’ bearing the portrait of young Queen Victoria in 1840.9 In -

1837 Rowland Hill, an English reformer, published a pamphlet

which made the case both for the postage stamp and for sweeping
postal reforms. The heavily-subsidized British post office had a
clumsy system of expensive charges based on distance and the
number of pages in a letter. It relied on payment by recipients, who
were often unable or unwilling to pay. Sending an ordinary letter
from London to Edinburgh cost more than a shilling. Hill argued
for a low uniform rate based on weight a penny for half an -

ounce - for delivery anywhere in the country, and for prepayment

as evidenced by an affixed stamp. The post office put his recom-
mendations into effect in 1840.
The stimulus of foreign competition and the long campaign of
imperial enthusiasts finally made this penny rate empire-wide (with
a few exceptions) in 1898. Two Canadian stamps celebrate this

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inauguration of Imperial Penny Postage with a world map showing

British possessions coloured red (85-86).1° The map and its
accompanying slogan ’We hold a vaster empire than has been’
admirably sum up the spirit of the age. In 1941 France belatedly
struck the same note with a stamp showing a world map of her
possessions (B 115).
Whether one views modern history through the lenses of the
White Man’s Burden, modernization theory, or the model of a
capitalist-dominated world market, the connection between the
spread of the ’postage stamp revolution’ and English imperialism is
clear. In 1840 in England, the right combination of a rising
industrial middle class, a reform-minded government, and a
determined postal reformer had finally come together. Abroad in
the same year, English soldiers were fighting in Afghanistan,
China, and the Levant; one of the results would be to force China
and Muhammad Ali’s Egypt open to direct trade with English
merchants. In 1840 Englishmen were also founding Wellington,
New Zealand, and the British parliament passed the Union Act
uniting the restless Canadian provinces. Victoria and South
Australia had just been organized, and the Boers had completed
their Great Trek into the South African interior. England was
doing a brisk trade with Latin America, her own colonies in the
West Indies, and her former colonies in the United States.
The envelope which artist William Mulready designed to
accompany the first postage stamp symbolized this vast imperial
network. 11 From a rocky island with a lounging British lion,
Britannia dispatches four winged messengers. Arabs with camels,
East Indians with elephants, and Chinese appear on the left; on the
right American Indians conclude a treaty with Quakers while
Caribbean blacks pack casks of sugar. A reindeer sled, sailing
ships, and family groups eagerly reading letters round out the
scene.

English mails had come a long way since Henry VIII appointed
the first English Master of Posts. In the seventeenth century,
special mail packets crossing the Channel eliminated the wait for
the irregular sailings of merchant and naval vessels. The Seven
Years’ War provided the impetus for regular packet service to
English colonies in North America and the West Indies. The
Napoleonic wars and their aftermath did the same for service to
Malta, Corfu, and Rio de Janeiro. Steam packets began replacing
the less punctual sailings ships as carriers of British Empire mails in

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the 1820s. An English packet carried mail down the Pacific coast of
South America from 1841, and the West Indian packet began
stopping in Panama in 1848 for mails crossing the isthmus.
In the East, the 6000-mile London-Suez-Bombay route replaced
the 11,000-mile Cape route in the 1830s for most mail and
passengers (Great Britain, 812). By 1835 all the links were in place;
steamship from Bombay to Suez (Aden would be captured as a coaling
station in 1839), overland from Suez to Alexandria, and by steam
packet to Malta and on to London. The Suez Canal opened in 1869.
Steam packet service from India to Hong Kong via Singapore began in
1844. The by-passed Cape of Good Hope acquired regular service in
1857, Australia only in the 1870s. In 1875 steamer service to San
Francisco at last linked distant New Zealand satisfactorily to London
via the new American transcontinental railroad and trans-Atlantic
steamer.
A mail network had girdled the globe. In 1837 the news of Queen
Victoria’s accession had taken five months to reach the western
coast of Australia, less than half way around the globe.&dquo; By 1873
Jules Verne’s fictional Phineas Fogg could circle the entire world in
eighty days. In 1840 when the ’penny black’ came out, it would
have taken him (and the mails) perhaps eleven months - four
times as long. 13
We have concentrated on English overseas mail routes because
they were the most extensive and because postage stamps originated
in England and spread from there. To this day England has never
thought it necessary to identify her stamps with more than her
sovereign’s portrait. France, Germany, the US, and others were
also busily linking their formal and informal overseas empires
together by regular steamer mails.
Directly or indirectly, the rest of the world borrowed the postage
stamp and the reforms that went with it from England. The early
diffusion followed roughly the mail routes of the English packet
steamers and English mail links to the Continent. 14 Acting on the
urging of an alert consul in London, Brazil became the second
country to issue stamps in 1843. An Englishman resident in New York
printed a stamp for his private postal company in 1842, and local
American postmasters in New York and elsewhere followed in 1845.
The federal government put out its first stamp in 1847. Meanwhile
Zurich, which had followed Rowland Hill’s English campaign, issued
stamps of its own in 1843. Other Swiss cantons followed, with the first
confederal Swiss issue in 1850. Mauritius (1847) and Bermuda (1848)

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came unexpectedly perhaps, but obviously because they were

next,
stopovers the imperial network.
on

Except for Switzerland, the postage stamp thus reached North

and South America and the Indian Ocean before it crossed the
Channel - a reminder of Britain’s overseas connections and her
aloofness from the Continent. France, Belgium, and Bavaria
introduced stamps in 1849, with Spain, the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, Prussia, Hanover, Saxony, and Schleswig-Holstein
following in 1850. During the 1850s stamps spread through most of
Europe, to seven Latin American nations and to other British
possessions (including Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, and
the Cape of Good Hope). Between 1860 and the founding of the
Universal Postal Union in 1874, seven more independent Latin
American countries joined the parade, as did four new Balkan
states (Greece, Romania, Serbia, Montenegro). Other newcomers
of the 1860-74 period were neither Western states nor Western
colonies: Liberia (1860), the Ottomans (1863), Egypt (1866), Persia
(1870), Japan (1871), and Afghanistan (1871). Siam (1883) and
Ethiopia (1894) eventually followed. The English head of the
Chinese Imperial Customs issued stamps for the customs post from
1878. China had ancient official and commercial postal systems of
its own, however, and did not establish a Western-style national
post and issue its first stamp until 1897. By then nearly all colonies
and independent nations around the world had postal systems and
stamps modelled to some degree on England’s precedent.

The stamps of almost any country can yield significant information

for the historian in search of symbolic messages. Middle Eastern
stamps are noteworthy because of their mixture of Western and
indigenous traditions and because they can illustrate the
precolonial, colonial, and post-colonial eras which have
characterized the modern history of most of the third world. Let us
begin with the Ottoman Empire.
By the time the first Ottoman postage stamp came out in 1863,
the Middle East was enmeshed in an ever-tightening network of
European communications, trade, finance, and naval power. 15 Ali
Pasha and Fu’ad Pasha were keeping Sultan Abdulaziz in the back-
ground as they implemented far-reaching reforms intended to
revive the Empire’s flagging strength. Postal reforms in the Empire
were thus part of a broader reformist effort (known as the

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Tanzimat), as they had been in England in 1840.

Despite the efforts of Ali and Fu’ad, the Ottoman future looked
cloudy. Western merchants and missionaries, consuls and tech-
nicians, financiers and sailors the witting and unwitting advance
-

scouts of imperialism were everywhere. The Crimean War had

-

strained the Ottoman treasury and started it down the road to

European loans and eventual bankruptcy. Rivalries among the
great powers would stave off the complete partition of the Empire,
but even so the Ottomans were to lose virtually all their European
and African territories by 1914. Against this background the first
Ottoman postage stamp was an ambiguous symbol. Was it a sign of
progress and modernization? Or did it symbolize the Empire’s
helpless absorption into the periphery of a world market dominated
by the West?
Postal systems, of course, were nothing new in the Middle East.
The early Arab empire had inherited sophisticated postal networks
from the Romans and the Sassanids. In the ninth century the postal
department (diwan al-barid) of the Empire maintained mules,
horses, or camels at nearly a thousand staging posts at seven to
fifteen-mile intervals.l6 Later Muslim states organized their own
postal services. Under the Mamelukes (13th-16th centuries), Egypt
and the Levant again had a highly organized postal service for carrying
official dispatches.
Ottoman sultan Mahmud II (1808-38) established a new postal
system with service to Izmir (Smyrna) and Edirne (Adrianople), but
not until after 1840 did it begin to expand in a systematic fashion.
By the time the first postage stamp came out in 1863, the system
had fifty-eight post offices, but service was slow. Service from
Istanbul was fortnightly, with a delivery departing in alternate
weeks for the European and Asiatic provinces. 17
What designs would the Ottomans, the first non-Western govern-
ment to issue stamps, choose? Like Queen Victoria, Napoleon III
and other Western monarchs had put their own portraits on
stamps. A few hesitated to show their likenesses where they would
be defaced. Spain experimented with a cancellation designed to
frame rather than to obliterate her queen’s features, and Brazil
waited some twenty years before portraying her emperor. 18
Republics preferred deceased leaders (George Washington has been
popular on US stamps) or allegorical females (Helvetia for Switzer-
land, Ceres and others for France during her republican phases).
One might use a coat of arms like the Russians, a pictorial design,

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or simply a large numeral of value like Brazil at first and some

Swiss and German states.
Muslim tradition militated against a pictorial design and
especially against a royal portrait. After a few seventh-century
imitations of Byzantine and Sassanid numismatic portraits, Muslim
rulers nearly all abandoned portraiture on their coins until the
twentieth century. Aversion to such portrayals in official and
religious art apparently stemmed not from any clear Quranic
injunction but from a decision not to compete with highly-
developed Byzantine and Sassanid iconography.l9 Muslims poured
their artistic energies instead into abstract geometric designs -

whence our word arabesque - and decorative calligraphy. Calli-

graphy became the main decoration on Muslim coins down through
the centuries.
For exactly half a century (1863-1913) Ottoman stamps drew
mainly on this Islamic abstract tradition. With one major
exception, these sets were all locally printed in Istanbul. The
Ottomans employed three specialized motifs the crescent (some- -

times accompanied by a star), a coat of arms, and the tughra on

their stamps along with more general calligraphic and arabesque
designs (e.g. Turkey, 43, 97, 147). The tughra, a highly stylized
rendition of the sultan’s name, had long been affixed to official
documents and put on coins. The motif goes back to pre-Islamic
central Asia, where Turkish chiefs used the bow and arrow as
symbols of authority and sent their personal arrows with
messengers to authenticate their missions .20 After the Seljuk Turks
invaded the Middle East in the eleventh century and absorbed the
Arab-Iranian scribal tradition, the written tughra replaced the bow
and arrow. Crescents had figured in Byzantine and Sassanid art,
and the conquering Arabs had picked them up. The stress on
sighting the crescent moon to mark the start of the Hajj (the
pilgrimage to Mecca) and the Ramadan fast may have drawn
Muslims to the crescent symbol, and crescent finials later topped
the minarets of mosques. The crescents on Ottoman flags had no
standard form at first; they appeared along with or as an
alternative to suns, stars, weapons, and religious slogans.
It was Europeans who decided that the crescent was the Ottoman
or Islamic symbol par excellence, as the French informed an
astonished Ottoman ambassador to the court of Louis XV. The
Ottomans began to concur only after Selim III (1789-1807) had
established a red flag with a white crescent and star as the banner of

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his reformed military units (the Ni,zam-i Jedid). This banner later
became the Ottoman flag, and it survives as Turkey’s flag today.
Numerous other Muslim countries have followed the Ottomans in
showing crescents and stars on their flags, coins, and stamps.
European heraldry may well have influenced the form of the
third motif, the coat of arms, on Ottoman stamps (96). Weapons
had frequently appeared on earlier Islamic flags, however, and
crossed swords still accompany a Quranic slogan on the Saudi flag.
The exclusive use of the Turkish language and Turkish-style
numerals (to call them Arabic numerals here would be confusing)
on Ottoman stamps up to 1876 also underlines the continuity with
the Islamic-Ottoman past. The inscriptions translate ’The Ottoman
Empire’ and ’Postage’ (the latter being the Western-derived posta,
however, rather than the Arabic barid).
In 1876 the Ottomans added a French inscription (Emp.
Ottoman) and a Western-style numeral to a set of stamps in order
to cooperate with the newly-established Universal Postal Union
(69). The Ottoman Empire and Egypt had been the only non-
Western states among the twenty-two who set up the Union at a
congress in Berne in 1874.21The design of 1876 still featured the
crescent and calligraphy in the Arabic script, but its relative
simplicity may have been a concession to Western tastes. The
Ottomans needed all the Western support they could get in 1876,
for they faced rebellion in the Balkans, a looming war with Russia,
bankruptcy, and upheaval in Istanbul itself. Ottoman reformers
promulgated the short-lived constitution of 1876 partly with
Western public opinion in mind. Abdulhamid II disbanded the
parliament and suspended the constitution in 1878, however, and in
1890 French faded into the background on Ottoman stamps until
1913. (Only the Western-style numerals and Latin letters indicating
the unit of currency remained.)
An entirely different category of stamps provides graphic
evidence of Western encroachment on Ottoman sovereignty.22 Like
the Chinese, the Ottomans could not prevent the establishment of
foreign post offices which issued their own stamps - on their
-

soil. In Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine,

such foreign post offices proved to be a harbinger of later Western
conquest.
The Ottomans had seen no harm in allowing the Austrians and
Russians to establish postal services for their diplomats back in the
eighteenth century, but the practice got out of hand as Ottoman

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power weakened. By the time the treaty of Lausanne recognized

Turkey’s independence in 1923, ten powers had had post offices on
Ottoman soil: Austria, Russia, England, France, Germany, Italy,
and briefly, even Egypt, Greece, Romania, and Poland. Here, as in
China, the foreign post offices cut into revenues that would other-
wise have gone to the national post office. The Ottomans tried to
abolish these foreign systems when the Empire joined the Universal
Postal Union, but the powers turned a deaf ear. Later the
Ottomans tried to lure users away from the foreign posts with
discounts on bulk purchases of Ottoman stamps. The outbreak of
the first world war at last furnished the opportunity to close the
remaining foreign post offices and abolish the Capitulations, which
had given foreigners and their local prot6g6s sweeping immunities.
The Ottomans did not even spare the postal service of their German
ally. The victorious allies briefly revived postal services and
Capitulatory claims in Istanbul after the war, but the Treaty of
Lausanne disposed of these for good.

The turning point in Ottoman stamp design came not with the
Revolution of 1908 an event celebrated on stamps with over-
-

prints -

but in 1913 while the Empire was embroiled in the

disastrous First Balkan War. The new stamps can remind us that
Mustafa Kemal’s (Ataturk’s) dramatic reforms were often based on
less visible foundations laid by the Young Turks between 1908 and
1918.
In March 1913 a set of stamps showing the Istanbul post office
swept aside the tradition of avoiding pictorial designs (237-46).23
The tughra and the crescent survived, but henceforth mainly as
subordinate themes. Six months later, the Ottoman celebrated the
recovery of Edirne in the Second Balkan War with a set portraying
that city’s mosque of Selim II (251-53). A full set of pictorials in
January 1914 (254-70) gave religious conservatives a greater shock
by boldly portraying Sultan Mehmed V Reshad (270). In this regard
the Ottomans stood midway between Persia, where a vigorous
tradition of pictorial painting had long flourished and where the
shah had appeared on stamps as early as 1876, and conservative
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The latter two would wait until the
1960s to show their rulers on stamps.
The 1914 Ottoman set has some of the flavour of the ’colonial-
picturesque’ style which we will discuss more fully below: it has

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elaborate Arabesque frames, scenic landmarks as subjects, was

printed in London, and revives the prominent use of a second
language (French). But the designer in this case was Turkish, and
the selection of scenes reflects an Ottoman patriotism. Only two of
the twelve monuments shown are pre-Ottoman and pre-Islamic (the
column of Constantine and the Egyptian obelisk erected by
Theodosius). Ten stamps show Ottoman monuments, two have
vistas of the Bosporus, and another a palace park. Another shows
the cruiser Hamidiye. Having broken the Greek naval blockade and
shelled the Greeks in the Aegean, the ship provided the only bright
spot in the war for the Ottomans.
Turkish conservatives, offended at the abandonment of the
Islamic abstract style, might have felt better if they had compared
this patriotic set with the stamps the British-dominated Egyptian
government released the very same month (50-59). Six of the ten
stamps in this colonial-picturesque set show Pharaonic antiquities.
Another stamp, with feluccas on the Nile, brings Naipaul’s ’Arab
dhows’ to mind. One stamp celebrates the Aswan dam, a symbol of
British engineering and perhaps of the British claim to have won
the hearts of the peasants by bringing agricultural prosperity. The
Cairo citadel and a nineteenth-century palace were the only other
non-Pharaonic monuments. There was no question of course of
portraying Khedive ’Abbas II, the nominal ruler whom Lord
Cromer had so humiliated. It was Europeans, not Egyptians, who
had first identified Pharaonic monuments as Egypt’s appropriate
national symbols. By glorifying Egypt’s Pharaonic past,
Westerners implicitly denigrated her Islamic past and present.
Archaeology and Egyptology began as Western sciences; only in the
twentieth century did pride in the Pharaonic past take root among
Egyptians.
After the fateful Ottoman entry into the first world war on the
side of the Central Powers, the Ottoman post office ran out of
stocks of the 1914 pictorial set, the plates of which were inaccess-
ible in London. The post office resorted to overprinting old stocks
of superseded issues with a crescent and star and an Islamic
calendar date. The Ottomans were at war with France, so French
disappeared from the stamps. Even though new Ottoman stamps
were later printed in Vienna, the language of the empire’s German
and Austrian allies did not take the place of French on the stamps.
War-time patriotism had returned the Ottomans to their pre-1876
practice of using only Turkish on their stamps, but they did not go

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back to the Islamic abstract style. Pictures were too useful as

instruments of propaganda. Among the stamps of 1916-18 (420-39,
546, 549-50), three boast of the Ottoman victory over the allies at
Gallipoli, and three others have military themes. Seven show land-
marks of Istanbul. Except for Hagia Sophia - which as a con-
verted mosque is a Muslim rather than a Christian symbol here -

only one stamp shows pre-Islamic monuments; it depicts the

pyramids of Egypt (430).
If the pyramids had different iconographic meanings for the
British and the Egyptians, they had yet another meaning for the
Ottomans. They symbolized a reassertion of Ottoman sovereignty
over Egypt. The Ottoman thrust across Sinai collapsed at the Suez

Canal, however, and the British eventually counter-attacked in

Palestine. Stamps showing Ottoman troops in Sinai and the Dome
of the Rock in Jerusalem had to be withheld from circulation
(562-64, 581-82). They came out only after the war with an
overprint.
The figurehead sultan shows up again on the 1916 set, but an
unissued stamp of 1917 (549) is more revealing. It shows regime
strongman Enver Pasha with Kaiser Wilhelm II on the battlefield.
Enver was not only shouldering the sultan aside as the symbol of
the Empire; he was also advertising the fatal German alliance into
which he had led the country.
After the war, the sultan’s powerless government in occupied
Istanbul issued overprints with the dates of the armistice and of the
accession of Sultan Mehmed VI, but the centre of gravity was
shifting to Mustafa Kemal’s rebel government in Ankara. The
Kemalists soon enlisted stamps in their campaign to rouse the
Turkish population against French and Greek attempts to partition
Anatolia. A pictorial set of 1921 combined Islamic religious
appeals with new notes of patriotism drawn from ancient Turkish
folklore (82-92).
Kemal’s portrait replaced that of the deposed sultan on Turkish
stamps (738). With the alphabet reform of the late 1920s, the
Arabic script gave way to Latin. (Note the brief transitional use of
both scripts for writing Turkish, 637.) The tughra vanished with the
sultan-caliph, the calligraphic art disappeared with the Arabic
script, and the arabesque frames were mostly gone by 1940.
Turkish stamps shifted to an ’international-modern’ style (e.g. 738).
Of the Islamic-Ottoman symbolism only the crescent and star
survived, on coins and the flag as well as on stamps. The tughra,

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the arabesques, and the calligraphic decoration lived on for a time

on the stamps of more remote states like Saudi Arabia and
Afghanistan.

Turkish stamps cannot illustrate the frequent third-world themes of

colonial rule and leftist revolution, so let us turn to another
Ottoman successor state, Syria.~ Occasional examples from
Lebanon and other Arab states will also prove useful. As the
Ottoman army retreated northward in the fall of 1918, the British
and their Arab allies occupied Syria. Sharif Husayn of Mecca had
cast his lot with England by starting the Arab revolt against the
Ottomans in 1916. The troops of his son Faysal occupied Damascus
at the end of the war. Faysal’s hopes for an independent Arab
kingdom dimmed as the months went by and it became apparent
that the British and French were going to rule the Fertile Crescent
themselves and carve it up into separate states. Catholic Maronites
in Lebanon and Zionists in Palestine initially welcomed their
European rulers, but few others did.
Stamps of the (British) Egyptian Expeditionary Force replaced
Ottoman stamps in 1918 from Sinai to Cilicia (Palestine, 1-14).
These stamps bore the initials EEF, were non-pictorial, and were
bilingual in English and Arabic. England later overprinted this set
in English, Arabic, and Hebrew and used it in her Palestine
mandate until 1927. In that year a trilingual set in the colonial-
picturesque style came out. Its scenes carefully balanced sites of
significance to Muslims, Jews, and Christians (63-84). This set
continued in use until the establishment of Israel in 1948 gave birth
to another stamp tradition rich in Jewish symbolism.
To the north, England reluctantly abandoned Faysal to the
French, who conquered Damascus in July 1920. Faysal had time
only to overprint Ottoman stamps in Arabic with ’Arab Govern-
ment’ and ’Arab-Syrian Government’ and to issue two original
stamp designs before the French closed in. (Syria Issues of the -

Arabian Government, 85-93.) The new designs imitated the calli-

graphic and arabesque stamps of Faysal’s native Hijaz rather than
the post-1913 pictorials of cosmopolitan Istanbul. The British had
supplied Sharif Husayn’s early stamps - as well as his gold, guns,
and British advisers from Cairo, and their designs came from
-

Cairo’s Islamic monuments (e.g. Saudi Arabia, Kingdom of the

Hejaz, L162). Hijazi stamps used only Arabic; Faysal’s Damascus

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issues made the slight concession of including a Christian-era date

in Western numerals. The Hijazi and Damascus stamps revived the
Arabic word barid, as Egypt would soon do also, in preference to
the Western-derived posta of Ottoman stamps.
The French did not get around to designing stamps specifically
for Syria and Lebanon until 1925. In the meantime, they
successively overprinted French issues with ’TEO’ (Territoires
Ennemis Occup6s), ’OMF’ (Occupation Militaire Fran~ aise),
’Syrie-Grand Liban’, and finally ’Syrie’ and ’Grand Liban’
separately. (They also overprinted OMF on Faysal’s stamps.) The
non-pictorial and bilingual stamps of England’s EEF had been as
non-offensive to Muslims as stamps of military occupation could
be. French occupation stamps, in contrast, used no Arabic and
included allegorical females which must have shocked conservative
Muslims. One wonders whether Frenchmen or Syrians appreciated
the irony of issuing for conquered Syria overprinted French stamps
showing allegories of ’Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ (104). It was
almost as though French authorities preferred the example of
directly-ruled French Algeria whose stamps bore no hint of
-

Arabic - to that of their Moroccan and Tunisian protectorates

whose stamps were bilingual. Arabic was finally added to Syrian
and Lebanese stamps in 1924, but even in 1927 an overprint
announcing the Lebanese Republic came out in French only, with
Arabic being added as an afterthought the following year (72-84,
86-101).
England had already detached Palestine and Transjordan from
what might have been a greater Syrian state. In what remained of
geographical Syria the French followed a divide-and-rule strategy
of exploiting existing cleavages and ruling indirectly through local
elites. They split off Lebanon, whose mountainous interior had
already had an autonomous governor under European protection
since 1860. The French drew the new boundaries of Lebanon
carefully in order to assure an overall Christian majority, with the
Maronites being the largest single group. Maronites and other
Catholics generally supported the Lebanese idea, but Muslims were
slow to develop loyalty to a state dominated first by foreign and
then by local Christians. Syria looked on Lebanon as a lost
province.
Although France abandoned her early attempt to rule Aleppo
and Damascus separately, she did split off separate Alawite and
Druze states (named for Muslim sects with Shiite affinities) in the

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238

mountainous west and south. She gave the mixed Turkish-Arab

province of Alexandretta a separate administration also, and
eventually handed it over to Turkey in 1939 in pursuit of a Franco-
Turkish alliance. Alexandretta and the Alawite state (later renamed
after Lataqiya, its chief city) used overprinted Syrian stamps, but
the Druze state used regular Syrian issues.
The Syrian and Lebanese sets of 1925 are excellent specimens of
the colonial-picturesque (e.g. Lebanon, 119). Designed by a French-
man and printed in Paris, each set consisted of about a dozen
scenes of monuments and landscapes framed by arabesques. They
are bilingual in Arabic and French, but significantly the identifica-
tion of the scene and the names of the designer and printer appear
only in French.
The Syrian set has four or five vistas of Syrian towns, three views
of mosques, a picture of Aleppo’s citadel, and two scenes of
Palmyra. This mix, which is typical of later sets during the
mandate, does give the Islamic era its due. The identification only
in French, however, suggests that even the mosques were viewed
mainly as picturesque landmarks for Western audiences. The ruins
of Palmyra were probably seen as part of the classical heritage with
which the French identified rather than as ancestral to the Arab
heritage.
The symbols of the 1925 and later Lebanese sets appealed mainly
to Frenchmen or Lebanese Christians, not to Muslims. The 1925
issues show three Crusader castles, two views of Roman ruins at
Baalbek, five vistas of Lebanese towns, a cedar of Lebanon, and
two scenes of a palace built by the Maronite prince Bashir II. The
French prided themselves on being heirs of the Romans and the
Crusaders, and the Maronites could also identify with Amir Bashir
and the cedar. The cedar became the Lebanese national symbol on
the flag, coins, and stamps in the 1920s (e.g. 50).25 Unlike the
Canadian maple leaf, the cedar was not ethnically neutral. The
surviving cedars are in Maronite areas, under the protection of the
Maronite patriarch, and are annually remembered in a Maronite
religious celebration. An ancient Phoenician galley on a coin in
1925 and a stamp of 1931 introduced another perennial theme
which appeals to Christians rather than Muslims (D5; see also
C478). ’Phoenicianism’ is an historical myth of an on-going
Lebanese identity to which Islam and Arabism contributed little.
Given her mandate from the League of Nations, France had to
go through the motions of preparing Syria and Lebanon for

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independence. Lebanon became a republic in 1926 and Syria in

1933. The French permitted Syria to discard a flag bearing a
miniature French tricolour in its corner in favour of a more Arabist
one.26 A Syrian set of 1934 even showed Saladin, the Muslim
scourge of the Crusaders (249-50). Another set brought the Syrians
back to reality by depicting the colourless Syrian president through
whom the French still ruled (246-48). The republican sentiment
which kept living presidents off French stamps back home was not
an issue here, and the Ottomans, Egypt, Iraq, and Transjordan had
all set precedents by showing their Muslim rulers on stamps.

The British and French Empires faded away in the years following
the second world war, although the former still flourishes in the
nostalgic ordering of Scott’s Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue.
Scott’s still lists Iraq, Ireland, Burma, the Sudan, and others under
the ’British Commonwealth and associated nations’ .27 ’A strict
observance of technicalities,’ it admits, would call for listing some
of these stamps elsewhere, but they are listed here ’for the con-
venience of the collectors’. Independence and departure from the
Commonwealth were hardly technicalities or mere matters of con-
venience to the Iraqis or the Irish.
The real turning-point in Syrian stamp design came not with
independence from France - which came in stages between 1941
and 1946 -
but with the war with Israel in 1948. The war pre-
cipitated the military coups, social upheaval, and eventual turn to
the left which have since characterized Syria.
The shift of Syrian stamps to an international-modern style came
rather abruptly in 1948. With stamps, as with air-terminals and
luxury hotels, the productions of Syria and India, the US and the
USSR, Argentina and the Sudan converge and sometimes become
stylistically indistinguishable. The arabesque frames and the fancy
calligraphy fade away. The pictorials often employ a semi-abstract
style (e.g. C357) and an international iconography. Broken chains
and rising suns represent revolution, doves stand for peace, globes
for universal themes, balance scales for justice, the Asclepian
serpent and staff for medicine, books and torches for education,
soldiers for the army. The allegorical female motif so popular on
French stamps represents Syria in one case (C231, C233), but this
particular symbolism seems to have been too foreign to Islamic
tradition to have taken root in Syria. Under the influence of the
Arab League, the United Nations, and other international

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240

TABLE 1
Dates of First Appearance of
International-Modern Symbols on Stamps, 1840-1972

*broken chain only

**sun emblem, not rising
***not a revolutionary symbol in this case
****Lebanese workers are shown as traditional craftsmen

organizations, Syria now issued commemoratives for Mother’s

Day, Children’s Day, Post Day, the Olympics, Palestine Day, and
the International Labour Organization. A reductio ad absurdum of
this tendency eventually produced a Syrian stamp commemorating
World Hypertension Day (806).
By the mid-1950s, Syrian stamp designers were experimenting
with a socialist subspecies of the international-modern style. Syrian

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politics after 1948 were as tangled as those of revolutionary France,

but the overall drift was to the left. The leaders of the Syrian and
other Arab coups were not communists, but the USSR provided
them with a model of rapid industrialization, a source of sophisti-
cated arms, and a counterweight against the West. The Syrians may
not have consciously imitated Soviet stamps, but as Table 1 shows,
they adopted revolutionary socialist symbols which the Soviets had
been using since the 1920s. There are swords severing chains, rising
suns, and revolutionary crowds. Heroic revolutionary types crowd
forward: industrial workers, soldiers, farmers, and women (C357).
Tractors, cogwheels, and smokestacks call to mind five-year plans
and the rush to industrialize (384, 612; Syria, UAR, C8). Several
stamps show the massive Euphrates dam (C412). Even Lenin
appears on a Syrian commemorative (C455).
Such themes are absent from the staid stamps of England, as
Table 1 shows, and they turn up only sporadically on those of
France. England’s political and industrial revolutions were distant
memories by the twentieth century, and in France the revolutionary
fervour was fading. French stamps cling nostalgically to peasant
agriculture and do not depict a tractor until 1949, a quarter of a
century after the first one on a Soviet stamp.
Syria could have drawn on either Soviet or French precedents in
the quantity of new issues. Fully appreciating the propaganda value
of stamps, the Soviets were churning out an average of seventy
issues a year-
one every five days in the 1940s. France averaged
-

forty-seven issues a year in the 1940s, but England put out only
twenty-one during the whole decade. Syria averaged sixteen issues a
year under the French mandate between 1925 and 1941; between
1961 and 1978 her annual average was up to thirty-nine.
Some countries subordinate the propaganda values of stamps to
their revenue-raising possibilities by turning out sets designed for
sale to (primarily Western) philatelists. Syria probably had
collectors in mind as she produced a wide variety of different
airmail stamps, but she never approached the excesses of those
Persian Gulf sheikhdoms which flooded the market in the late
1960s with stamps of astronauts, European paintings, and the
Kennedy brothers. These themes had nothing to do with the
heritage of the issuing countries, and often the stamps were not
even sold in local post offices.28 How would tribal conservatives
react to a Renoir nude? Stamp catalogues soon began boycotting
such obviously spurious postage stamps.

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No Syrian president has chosen to appear on stamps in bedouin

headgear and robes as Faysal I did in Iraq in the 1920s (1-14, 59-60)
and as his brother Abdallah did in Transjordan-Jordan until his
death in 1951 (147-57, 199-206). (Faysal also appeared later in coat
and tie -

15-26, 44-58.) Not springing from the Hijaz like Faysal

and Abdullah or having to cater to British ideas of picturesque
bedouin garb, Syrian presidents showed themselves as modern
townsmen in Western-style coats and ties. Three Syrian presidents
of the 1930s and 1940s appear in fezes (246, 286, 320), as Sultan
Mehmed V had done back in 1913. The fez was a modern symbol
when introduced to Ottoman troops in the early nineteenth
century, but by the 1950s it was becoming old-fashioned. After
1946 Syrian presidents appear bare-headed on stamps unless in
military uniform.
Soldiers first show up on Syrian stamps in June 1948 to mark the
inauguration of compulsory military service (344-45). The war with
Israel wasunder way, and the volunteer force which the French had
preferred for its political reliability no longer sufficed. One stamp
shows soldiers under a Syrian flag, which likewise appears for the
first time. The other shows the new national emblem, the eagle of
Khalid ibn al-Walid, the conqueror of Damascus.29
Nine months after their debut on Syrian stamps, soldiers over-
threw the government. With brief exceptions they have run it ever
since. Husni al-Za’im, the first soldier-president, produced two
stamps in 1949 showing himself in full military regalia (348, 351).
One stamp depicts him in front of a Syrian map which shows both
Alexandretta and Lebanon as lost Syrian provinces. A set of 1943,
when the French were still around, had shown a map recognizing
the severance of these territories from Syria (288-92). Another coup
unseated Za’im after a few months, and his military successors
were more cautious about advertising their power on stamps.
Presidents Shukri al-Quwwatli and Nazim al-Qudsi appeared on
stamps during two intervals of restored civilian rule (C208-11, 442),
but no other Syrian military ruler did until President Hafiz al-Asad
came to power in 1970. President Nasser did not show up on

stamps between 1958 and 1961 while Syria belonged to the United
Arab Republic. Despite the cult of personality which grew up
around him, Nasser also kept his portrait off Egyptian stamps
except on one or two occasions (631, 721). Assad and Sadat both
commemorated Nasser on stamps in 1970-72 after his death (e.g.
Syria C491; Egypt 846) but thereafter concentrated on showing

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their own portraits. Assad tried to enhance his legitimacy by always

appearing in civilian clothes despite his military vocation (e.g. 720),
while Sadat -
’the hero of war and peace’ -
alternated between
military and civilian garb.

Ironically, it was Egyptians who brought about the replacement of

French with English as the second language on Syrian stamps.
Egypt had clung to French on her own stamps between 1925 and
1956, partly because of lingering French cultural influence and
partly to spite her English opponents. In 1956 the Suez War
finished off any Egyptian illusions about French affection for
Egyptian nationalism. English had long since outdistanced French
among Nasser’s generation, and after Suez England no longer
threatened Egypt’s independence. Egyptians thus felt free to switch
to English for their second language on stamps in 1957. After the
union with Syria in 1958, Syrian stamps followed suit. Even after
Syria seceded from the UAR in 1961, she kept English on her
stamps.
What of antiquities? Syria and other Arab states still show them
frequently, but they are less noticeable in the flood of stamps on
other themes. The colonial-picturesque style had been offensive
because it had implied that Eastern countries were nothing more
than open-air antiquities museums. Syrians have developed some
pride in their pre-Islamic past, but the strength of Arabism in Syria
prevents them from going as far as the ’Phoenicianism’ of Lebanon
or the ’Pharaonism’ of Egypt. Even now Syrian stamp designers
often seem to have Western audiences in mind when they show
antiquities (C416, 664). Sets with folk costumes and traditional
handicrafts (C476) also show that the picturesque motifs did not
vanish with independence.
Pan-Arab themes have been popular on Syrian stamps since the
1940s despite the difficulties the ideology has encountered in
practice (e.g. 467). Umayyad monuments such as Qasr al-Hayr
(279) reflect a nostalgia for the days when that Damascus-based
dynasty ruled from Spain to the borders of China. A stamp
showing the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and supporting the
Palestinian cause mixes Pan-Arab with Islamic appeal (794).
Syrian stamps with purely religious themes, such as one showing
the Ka’ba in Mecca and commemorating the opening of the
fifteenth Islamic century (895), are surprisingly rare. President

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Assad and his inner circle belong to the Alawite minority and are
perhaps chary of symbolism that might play into the hands of the
Sunni fundamentalist opposition. A striking 1958 stamp depicting
a cogwheel, smokestacks, and a Damascus mosque seems to argue
the compatibility of Islam and modern industrialism (Syria, UAR,
C8).
The score of deceased heroes commemorated on Syrian stamps
since 1960 underline the Syrian nationalist, pan-Arab, and
secularist thrust of recent Syrian governments. Queen Zenobia of
Palmyra, who briefly defied the Romans, is the only pre-Islamic
figure and the only woman (e.g. 443). Among the Syrian
nationalists shown, four had struggled against the French and one
against the Ottomans (e.g. C294). None of the five would have
rejected a larger pan-Arab loyalty. The return of the bones of the
exiled Algerian hero Abd al-Qadir to his homeland was clearly a
pan-Arab theme (C374-75), as was the posthumous commem-
oration of Nasser.
From the earlier Islamic era, Khalid ibn al-Walid (C478-84),
Saladin (549-50), and Baybars (C462-66) were military men. The
others were scientists or litt6rateurs: five physicians, an astronomer
(671), and five poets or essayists. The great medieval theologians,
compilers of religious traditions, and specialists in Islamic law are
nowhere to be seen. Averroes was indeed a polymath who wrote on
Islamic law, but it is as a physician that he is commemorated (832).
He and Avicenna (C340) could have been remembered as
philosophers as well as physicians, but the regime has had its hands
full with fundamentalist Sunnis for whom philosophy is suspect.

In retrospect, Lebanese stamps since independence suggest reasons

for the country’s breakdown into civil war in 1975. Phoenician
(C478), and Roman (C556-59) symbols and the cedars continued to
promote a vision of the Lebanese past untouched by Islam. By
unwritten convention, Maronite Christians have furnished the
presidents of Lebanon since independence. Sunni Muslims do
provide the prime ministers and Shi’iMuslims the speakers of
parliament, but they do not share the presidents’ privilege of
appearing on stamps. Bishara al-Khuri, Camille Chamoun, and
Fu’ad Shihab - all strong if controversial presidents appeared -

often, but after Shihab’s retirement in 1964 political paralysis set

in. Charles Helou appeared only once (C437) alongside the -

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 245

pope, hardlyreassuring symbol for Muslims - and Suleiman

a

Franjiya not at all. The

question for President Ilyas Sarkis has not
been whether to put his portrait on stamps but whether his
shattered government can issue stamps at all; none came out
between 1975 and 1978.
The search for historical heroes to commemorate has been
difficult, and fewer have been depicted on Lebanese than on Syrian
stamps. The Druze prince Fakhr al-Din II (seventeenth century)
and the Maronite prince Bashir II al-Shihabi (nineteenth century)
increased Lebanese autonomy at Ottoman expense and have
appeared several times as the forefathers of Lebanese independence
(e.g. C329-30, J78). Neither man could stir the hearts of the large
Sunni and Shi’i Muslim communities in Lebanon. Lebanese stamps
do periodically make a bow to the Arab League (C503), and a 19711
set strove for sectarian balance by commemorating two Muslim
figures alongside two Maronite Christians (C620-23). A Lebanese
stamp luridly commemorating the massacre of a Palestinian Arab
village by Israeli extremists in 1948 must have angered those
Maronites who blame Palestinian refugees rather than Israel for
Lebanon’s problems (C457). It was left to Iraq rather than to
Lebanon to commemorate Kamal Junblat, the Lebanese Druze
leader who was assassinated during the civil war (C479).
No wonder Lebanese stamp designers preferred to retreat into
colourful but symbolically vacuous sets showing fruit, flowers,
birds, fish, butterflies, and folk costumes (e.g. C434). Like Syria,
Lebanon also picked up on such harmless international themes as
Mother’s Day, international sports events, and UNESCO.
Lebanon never had military coups or revolutions like Syria, Iraq,
and Egypt, so the soldiers who have appeared on her stamps since
1946 have celebrated independence day, not military-led revolu-
tion. Socialist themes only rarely stray onto the stamps of
Lebanon, a bastion of nineteenth-century-style free enterprise.
Conservative Lebanese Christians and Muslims alike must have
deplored the stamp commemorating Lenin’s birthday. The workers
on Lebanese stamps are traditional artisans, not heroic
proletarians. Commerce, finance, and tourism rather than heavy
industry are the mainstays of the Lebanese economy, and the
smokestack and the cogwheel rarely show up.

This article has attempted to show that postage stamps are not
merely colourful curiosities of interest to the historian only if he

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246

also happens philatelist. Our question at the start was

to be a
’Who/says what/in what channels/by means of what symbols/to
whom/with what effect?’. We have concentrated on the ’says
what?’ and the ’by means of what symbols?’. We have also touched
on the ’who?’ in discussing stamps put out by the Ottomans before
and after the Young Turk Revolution, the British-dominated
Egyptian government, the French in Syria and Lebanon, and
various Syrian and Lebanese governments since independence.
Further research could pin down the roles of artists, printers,
bureaucrats, and even kings and presidents in determining stamp
designs.
Future research should also come to grips with the ’to whom?’
and ’with what effect?’. These are the questions that preoccupy all
propagandists and ’PR’ men: ’Who are my targets?’; ’Is anybody
out there listening?’; and ’Is my message having the intended
effect?’. We have alluded to some of the intended targets in
passing. Some airmail stamps and souvenir sheets are clearly aimed
at Western publics, including tourists and philatelists. Other stamps
are directed toward domestic audiences, presumably more for the

letter-writing merchant than for the illiterate peasant.

The ’with what effect?’ is the most elusive question of all. Has a
postage stamp ever moved anyone to cast a ballot or throw a
bomb? Perhaps not, but the very decisiveness with which newly-
independent or revolutionary governments move to change the
stamps proves that the symbolic messages of the old regime were
deeply resented. For the colonized, postage stamps were one more
daily reminder of their humiliation and powerlessness. After the
deposition of King Faruq in 1952, his military successors were as
eager to obliterate his portrait on stamps as they were to change the
coinage, alter street names, rewrite history books, and auction off
the royal stamp collection.
Historians must use the evidence at hand in the elusive and
frustratingly incomplete attempt to understand the human past.
They cannot afford to neglect the evidence to be gleaned from liter-
ature, music, paintings, coins, or radio broadcasts. Neither, it
would seem, can they afford to ignore the lowly postage stamp.

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Notes

*
A preliminary version of part of this paper was presented on 6 November 1981 at
the meeting of the Middle East Studies Association in Seattle as part of a panel
entitled ’Middle Eastern Postage Stamps: A Tool for Teaching and Research’. I
would like to thank fellow panelists L. Carl Brown, William Ochsenwald, and
Kenneth Perkins for the stimulus of their ideas. Herbert Bodman kindly brought
two sources on Ottoman stamps to my attention. Unfortunately, it has not been possible
to reproduce illustrations prepared to accompany this article.

1. V.S. Naipaul
, A Bend in the River (New York 1979).
2. Unless otherwise specified, information on stamps in this article is derived
from the stamps themselves, or from Scott’s 1982 Standard Postage Stamp
Catalogue (4 vols., New York 1981), or Minkus’ New World Wide Stamp Catalog,
1980 (Vol. 1, Pt. 2, New York 1979). The number (or series of numbers) in the
parentheses in this article refers to the number under the relevant country in Scott.
3. On cartoons as historical sources, see Thomas Milton Kennitz, ’The Cartoon
as a Historical Source’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 4 (1973), 81-93, and
Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, ’The Cartoon in Egypt’, Comparative Studies in
Society and History, 13 (1971), 2-15 .
4. Harold D. Lasswell, Daniel Lerner, and Hans Speier (eds), Propaganda and
Communication in World History, Vol. 1: The Symbolic Instrument in Early Times
(Honolulu 1979), 7. For another recent treatment of symbols see Mary LeCron
Foster and Stanley H. Brandes (eds), Symbol as Sense: New Approaches to the
Analysis of Meaning (New York 1980).
5. Cf. the classification of research approaches in Harry W. Hazard, ’Islamic
Philately as an Ancillary Discipline’, in James Kritzeck and R.B. Winder (eds), The
World of Islam (London 1960), 199-232. See also Donald M. Reid, ’Egyptian
History through Stamps’, The Muslim World, 62 (1972), 209-229.
6. Herbert Heaton, ’Economic Change and Growth’, The New Cambridge
Modern History, Vol. 10: The Zenith of European Power, 1830-1870, J.P.T. Bury
(ed.), (Cambridge 1960), 36.
7. John Ferguson, ’Classical Civilization’, in Lasswell, Propaganda, V. 1,
257-98. For a convenient catalogue of nineteenth and twentieth-century coins, see
Chester L. Krause and Clifford Mishler, Standard Catalog of World Coins, 1981
(Iola, Wisc. 1980).
8. See Ying-wan Cheng, Postal Communication in China and its Modernization
1860-1896 (Cambridge, Mass. 1970), and Howard Robinson, The British Post
Office: A History (Princeton 1948).
9. For this section see Robinson, ibid.; Howard Robinson, Carrying British Mail
Overseas (London 1964); and John K. Sidebottom, The Overland Mail: A Postal
Historical Study of the Mail Route to India (Perth, Scotland 1948).
10. James A. Mackay, The Dictionary of Stamps in Color (New York 1973), 246,
n. 6, has further information on this stamp.
11. Robinson, British Post Office, 314- 316; and Kathryn Moore Heleniak, William
Mulready (New Haven 1980), 25, 136, n. 138. Widespread derision forced the post
office to withdraw Mulready’s melodramatic and over-elaborate design.
12. Robinson, Carrying British Mail, 185-186.

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248

13. Hobsbawm, Age of Capital, 53.

14. For the diffusion of the postage stamp, see Robinson, British Post Office,
371-86, and the evidence of the stamps themselves as listed in Scott and Minkus.
15. Standard accounts of the Ottoman Empire during this period are Stanford J.
Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey,
Vol. 2: Reform, Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808-1975
(Cambridge, Eng. 1977); Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey
(London 1961); and Roderic H. Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire,
1856-1876 (Princeton 1963).
16. D. Sourdel, ’Barîd’, The Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (Leiden 1954-), V. 1,
1045-46.
17. Adolf Passer, The Stamps of Turkey (London 1938), 2. See also Shaw,
Ottoman Empire, II, 40, 229, 367, 449. Shaw gives conflicting dates (1823, 1841) for
the founding of a Western-style postal system.
18. Robinson, Post Office, 377, and Dictionary of Stamps, 169, n. 1.
19. Oleg Grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art (New Haven 1973).
20. Claude Cahen, Pre-Ottoman Turkey: A General Survey of the Material and
Spiritual Culture and History, c. 1071-1330 (New York 1968), 36-37, 227-28. R.
Ettinghausen, ‘Hilâl’, Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed., V. 3, 381-85, treats the
crescent in Islamic art.
21. John Sly, The Genesis of the Universal Postal Union: A Study in the
Beginnings of International Organization (Worcester, Mass. 1927), 39-40. In this
context I am classifying Russia, Greece, Romania, and Serbia as ’Western’.
22. Aside from the evidence on foreign post offices to be derived from Scott and
Minkus, see Shaw, Ottoman Empire, V. 2, 229, and MacKay, Dictionary of Stamps,
P1. 34, and 177-78.
23. An earlier pictorial set had appeared, in 1898 (MI-5). Only Ottoman troops in
Thessaly used it, however, during a war with Greece. The pictorial part of the design
-
the bridge at Larissa -
is barely noticeable next to the tughra, other calligraphy,
and arabesques. An Ottoman Red Crescent set of charity stamps of 1910 depicts
wounded soldiers, a nurse, a steamer, and a flag. Postal users had to affix these
additional stamps to letters on religious and national holidays. Turk Pulari Rehberi
1953, Talat Nutuk and V. Alyanak (eds) (Istanbul 1953), 162.
24. On twentieth-century Syria and Lebanon, see Tabitha Petran, Syria (New
York 1972); Stephen Hensley Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon under French Mandate
(London 1958); K.S. Salibi, A Modern History of Lebanon (London 1965); and
Michael Hudson, The Precarious Republic: Political Modernization in Lebanon
(New York 1968). Aside from Scott and Minkus, see Mackay, Dictionary of Stamps,
plate 38 and p. 183, for the two countries’ stamps.
25. On the symbolism of the Lebanese cedar, see Whitney Smith, Flags through the
Ages and across the World (New York 1975), 253.
26. Ibid., 154-55.
27. Scott’s, 1982, V. 1, British Commonwealth section, 1.
28. Mackay, Dictionary of Stamps, plate 41 and 187-88.
29. Syria’s example spread the eagle as a pan-Arab symbol. Egypt adopted ’the
eagle of Saladin’ as a national emblem in the 1950s. In 1971 the eagles gave way to
the similar hawk of Quraysh — the tribe of Muhammad the Prophet — in the flag of
the abortive Federation of Arab Republics (Syria, Egypt, Libya — Syria, 612; Pl.
25). The hawk continues on the Egyptian flag to the present. See Smith, Flags, 47,
259, 285.

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 249

Donold M. Reid
is Professor of Middle Eastern History at
Georgia State University. He is the author
of Lawyers and Politics in the Arab World,
1880-1960 (Minneapolis 1981) and The
Odyssey of Farah Antun: A Syrian
Christian’s Quest for Secularism
(Minneapolis 1975). He is currently
working on a study of the role of Cairo
University in the national life of modern
Egypt.

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