UNESCO was founded in London in November 1945, months after the end of the Second World War, on the premise stated in its own constitution that since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed. It grew out of an earlier League of Nations body, the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, and inherited that body's conviction that scholarly and cultural exchange across borders could do work that treaties alone could not.
From the outset its mandate spanned education, the natural and social sciences, culture and communication, which is a wider brief than either of the sister agencies founded alongside it at the UN's creation, and it has used that breadth to take on projects no single government agency would: standardizing scientific vocabulary, coordinating literacy campaigns, and, from the 1950s onward, developing an international vocabulary for cultural heritage itself. Its most famous early heritage campaign, the international effort that relocated the Abu Simbel temples in Egypt ahead of the Aswan Dam floodwaters in the 1960s, demonstrated that heritage protection could be organized as a genuinely international undertaking, and the campaign's success directly shaped the heritage conventions the organization would write in the following decade. UNESCO has no religious mandate and takes no position on the truth claims of any tradition it touches; its authority is administrative and its instrument is the list.