The State’s First Cultural Front: Education

The development of explicitly cultural endeavors by the Saudi state at the end of the twentieth-century was incidental to the institutionalization of education in the early part of the century. Much of existing historical analysis of the state’s patronage of culture is understood through the espousal of petrocapital wealth accumulation since the mid-century. This essay looks at the early history of public education established by the Saudi state with the purpose of understanding the evolution of cultural patronage by the government, and its eventual institutionalization, by the end of the twentieth century. In providing a teleology of the institutionalization of education parallel to that of the establishment of the state, education emerges at the forefront of cultural management by the government.

Concluding the advances made in the archeological surveying of the country thus far, the report notes the collaborative nature of the Department’s endeavors with a number of foreign archaeological missions. Some of the named collaborations were with Harvard University, Southwest Texas University, University of Missouri, University of California, the Institute of Archaeology, London, and the Centre National Recherches Scientifiques, Paris.^[48]

The outcome of these undertakings were recorded and published by the Department in ATLAL: the Journal of Arabian Archeology under the direction of faculty from the Archaeology Department at the University of Riyadh (later renamed King Saud University). The survey outcomes were documented in the journal with the help of contributing scholars who have either taken part in the surveying of archeological sites, the study of archeological findings, or even conducted specialized reports related to the survey findings.