WASHINGTON: It is the cradle of civilization — home of the world’s earliest agriculture, its earliest cities and its earliest writing. Hazrat Ibrahim lived there, as did Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar. Hazrat Ali died there.
Empires have many times fought over the region now known as Iraq, and to the victor have always gone the spoils. But today, with a US invasion seemingly imminent, scholars are worried that a 21st-century war may threaten Iraq’s antiquities as never before.
Bombing, rockets, artillery and gunfire pose dangers to Iraq’s monuments, the scholars say, but the US armed forces have a strong track record in avoiding cultural heritage sites when the actual fighting takes place.
The gravest danger comes afterward, when authority disappears and desperate people cope with chaos by stealing the marketable treasures that reside in museums or in the ground. It happened after the Persian Gulf War in 1991, and Iraq never recovered from the experience.
“We’re afraid the whole cycle will repeat itself,” said University of Buffalo classicist Samuel M. Paley. “If we do go to war, something has to be done to put the heritage infrastructure back together.”
In January, the Archaeological Institute of America issued a statement calling on “all governments” to protect cultural sites both during and after a war, and late in the month a mix of scholars, museum representatives, collectors and dealers made the same case during a briefing at the Department of Defence.
“I did a lot of the talking,” said McGuire Gibson, an Iraq specialist at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute. “They had a list of 150 sites, and I said there were many more than that, and that the biggest problem was the aftermath.” The delegation urged defence officials to keep curators and security officials in place, “keep them functioning and bring them back up to full strength,” Gibson said.
Whoever is in place after a war will have plenty to do.
Iraq is the land of Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where Neolithic peoples around 9,000 years ago domesticated animals and developed agriculture, enabling them to form the world’s first cities.
Around 3500 B.C., the Sumerians became the world’s first great civilization. Cuneiform writing on clay tablets was developed about 3200 B.C. Empires rose and fell in ancient Mesopotamia, from the Akkadians to the Babylonians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Parthians and Romans.
Hazrat Ibrahim came from the southern Mesopotamian city of Ur, and Hammurabi, the lawgiver, ruled in Babylon, as did Nebuchadnezzar, the conqueror of Jerusalem, and Alexander the Great.Hazrat Ali died in Kufa in 661 A.D. and was buried in Najaf. Baghdad served as the center of the Abbasid Caliphate for 500 years until it was sacked by the Mongols in 1258 A.D.
Gibson has made a list of about 5,000 archaeological sites from surveys conducted in Iraq, but says there may be 100,000 or more. “The surveys cover only 15 percent of the country,” Gibson said, “and anytime we’ve gone back to a site, we find 10 to 50 additional sites within a 10kms radius. The whole landscape is an archaeological site.”
The breadth of Mesopotamian heritage ranges from world-famous tourist attractions like Ur, Babylon, Nineveh, Assur and Nimrud, to tiny, long-forgotten villages in the Iraqi backlands and onetime desert way stations where early Muslim pilgrims stopped on their way to Makkah.
“Baghdad itself is a major medieval site,” said Columbia University archaeologist and art historian Zainab Bahrani. “The city is filled with (Islamic-era) buildings from the ninth to the 14th centuries.”—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service.
