In the previous two articles, we talked about the first two dimensions of Heritage, the Historical and the Geographical dimensions. Today, we will examine a new dimension, namely the Thematic Dimension of Heritage.
Years ago the UNESCO divided Heritage into two main categories, Cultural and Natural. The difference between these two is that the Cultural Heritage is manmade while the Natural one is made by nature. Both Heritages are very much worth preserving and that is why UNESCO along with many other governments, organizations, associations and centres, including the Centre for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage in Egypt, are investing a lot of effort in this domain.
Due to his religious needs, man has erected age surviving temples to revere the gods. And for shelter, he has built houses. To manifest the diverse shapes and colours he resonates with, he made paintings and sculptures. To express the heavenly rhythmic notes he hears in the depth of his soul, man has composed music. All these fall into the category of cultural heritage.
On the other hand, protectorates, national parks, wild animals, birds, vegetations, all types of biodiversities, natural formations like geological formations, sand dunes and natural landscapes are all examples of the Natural Heritage.
The UNESCO then subdivided the Cultural Heritage into two types: Tangible and Intangible, or as sometimes called Materialistic and non Materialistic Heritage.
Tangible Heritage is heritage that we can touch with our hands, including movable objects like the content of museums as statues, coins, tissues…etc, and immovable objects like archaeological tombs, temples and pyramids, or architectural structures like buildings, towns and bridges.
Intangible and Oral Heritage is, meanwhile, the heritage that we cannot touch. We grasp it only through seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling. Examples of that are music, epics, traditional stories, oral literature and food. We must take into consideration that there is a grey overlapping area between tangible and intangible heritage especially in the field of folklore. Paintings, for example, are considered intangible though we can touch them. The intangible heritage is in general much more fragile and subject to loss much quicker and easier than the tangible heritage. That is why the issue of documenting and preserving the intangible Heritage is very delicate and requires special skills in terms of dealing with time and fragility.
Apart from this categorization, the UNESCO classified a third type of heritage and called it Archival Heritage. This includes archives and content of libraries as well as the collections of manuscripts. Archival Heritage is, of course, treated in a different way. With the introduction, during the last few decades, of the Information and Communication Technologies “ICT”, it has become very popular to handle the different categories of heritage in a systematic way and this will be the subject of our next talk.
