So much of who we are was born in ancient Mesopotamia, the land between the (Tigris and Euphrates) rivers: The first city-states. The earliest writing. The first songs and poems (including the Epic of Gilgamesh). The first glass-making. The earliest mathematical systems. The first archives and libraries …
Mesopotamia was the home of Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria. Mesopotamian influence stretched east into Persia and central Asia, north into Anatolia, west into the Levant and Egypt, and south into Arabia. When ancient kings needed to correspond with one another, they used the predominant language of Mesopotamia, of course, a Semitic language called Akkadian.
The world’s three great monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—have roots in ancient Mesopotamia. Not only are some biblical stories influenced by the literature of Sumer and Babylon, but Abraham, the Patriarch of Patriarchs, hailed from the southern Mesopotamian city of Ur (excavated by the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley in the 1920s).
It so happens, however, that most of ancient Mesopotamia is covered by modern Iraq, a country ravaged by war for the past quarter century.
The devastation in Iraq has also hit close to home. In June, Iraqi police in Baghdad broke a small smuggling ring and confiscated a cache of 3,000 ancient artifacts. In early August, we contacted a journalist in Baghdad, Micah Garen, who was working on a documentary film about archaeological looting and who had taken photos of the cache of 3,000 objects recovered by the police. Garen sent us photos (see “Recovered! Among the Cache of 3,000 Objects Confiscated by Iraqi Police in June, 2004”), but we needed more information about the artifacts. On August 11, we sent him a message (via e-mail) but never heard back. Then, on August 17, we got a message from his family saying that he had been abducted.
For six anxious days, Garen was held by Shi’ites who accused him of being a spy and threatened to kill him if the Iraqi-Coalition forces did not pull out of the city of Najaf, where militia loyal to the Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr were holding out. The terrorists even released a photo showing Garen kneeling in front of four hooded men, who were pointing rifles at him.
Garen was released on August 22, upon the personal request of al-Sadr, who said hostage-taking is not allowed in Islam.
Such events make the war more immediate and tangible. We attach the highest value to lives being lived in Iraq, both the lives of Iraqis and the lives of people like Micah Garen, who are visitors. But the fighting will someday stop, and then we will find that the damage done to the archaeological record is permanent. How do we weigh such things? How much of our limited resources should be devoted to protecting the past—as opposed to getting Iraq’s infrastructure back in shape, or restoring the kind of security that allows businesses, schools and governments to function?
In desperate times, as a practical matter, preserving the past will always give way to the exigencies of the moment. Nevertheless, ancient Mesopotamia is, in some sense, our infancy—the world’s collective childhood—and it must be cared for.
So much of who we are was born in ancient Mesopotamia, the land between the (Tigris and Euphrates) rivers: The first city-states. The earliest writing. The first songs and poems (including the Epic of Gilgamesh). The first glass-making. The earliest mathematical systems. The first archives and libraries … Mesopotamia was the home of Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria. Mesopotamian influence stretched east into Persia and central Asia, north into Anatolia, west into the Levant and Egypt, and south into Arabia. When ancient kings needed to correspond with one another, they used the predominant language of Mesopotamia, of course, a Semitic language […]
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