History at risk
DaarkSyde
Oldest Human History is at Risk
By Holland Cotter
Iraq has hundreds of thousands of archaeological sites. Some 10,000
have been identified, but only a fraction have been explored. Any of
them could change what we know about human history, as past
excavations have done. Some have already revealed the world's earliest
known villages and cities and the first examples of writing.
The country is also one of the prime centers of Islamic art and
culture. It is home to some of the earliest surviving examples of
Islamic architecture -- the Great Mosque at Samarra and the desert
palace of Ukhaidar -- and it is also a magnet for religious
pilgrimage. The tombs of Imam Ali and his son Husein, founders of the
Shiite branch of Islam, at Najaf and Karbala, are two of the most
revered in the Muslim world.
During the Persian Gulf war in 1991 at least one major archaeological
monument, the colossal ziggurat of Ur, was bombed. Shock from
explosions damaged fragile structures like the great brick vault at
Ctesiphon, and the 13th-century university called the Mustansiriya in
Baghdad. These are among the sites most at risk from war:
* Ur, which flourished in the third millennium B.C. and is identified
in the Bible as the birthplace of Abraham. In the 1920's and 30's a
British-American team excavated a royal cemetery in which members of a
powerful social elite were buried with their servants and exquisitely
wrought possessions. Ur's most spectacular feature, though, is its
immense ramped ziggurat or tower, the best preserved in Iraq. Although
excavation is more advanced here than at most other sites in the
country, it is far from complete, with many layers still to be
uncovered.
* Babylon (1700-600 B.C.) is rich in historical glamor. Built on the
banks of the Euphrates, it was the capital to Hammurabi,
Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander the Great. Monumental remains like the
Ishtar Gate have been uncovered, and locations for the Tower of Babel
and the Hanging Gardens tentatively identified. As home to the captive
Israelites, the city is a recurrent and potent symbol in the
Judeo-Christian narrative. The site of Nippur, an important religious
center of ancient Babylonia dedicated to the god Enlil, is also in
this part of southern Iraq, about 100 miles south of Babylon. The
spectacular site has yielded an extensive sequence of pre-Islamic
pottery.
* Nineveh, far to the north, the imperial seat of the Assyrian kings
Sennacherib (about 704-681 B.C.) and Ashurbanipal (668-627 B.C.).
Royal palaces with magnificent sculptures have been found, as have
more than 20,000 cuneiform tablets from Ashurbanipal's library. The
biblical prophet Jonah preached there. After the gulf war the
excavated palaces were looted of sculptures. Nineveh is on the World
Monuments Watch list of the 100 most endangered sites.
* Ctesiphon (100 B.C. to A.D. 900) is high among architectural
wonders. The audience hall is just a shell, but its graceful vault,
120 feet high with an 83-foot span, is intact. The cracks that
occurred in 1991 are believed to have been patched by Iraqi
archaeologists, but more or heavier shocks from military sites in the
area could bring it down.
While untold amounts of Iraq's ancient material past remains buried,
its Islamic art is mostly above ground, and monuments carrying
profound cultural and religious significance abound.
Baghdad itself is one of them. Once legendary for its wealth, learning
and beauty -- many of the tales in the "Thousand and One Nights" are
were set there -- it has been devastated many times. And while nothing
remains of its original circular design, superb late medieval
buildings survive, among them tombs, mosques, minarets, the university
and the revered Kadhumain, mosque and shrine. Baghdad also has the
country's largest archaeological museum, with a collection of the
finest Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian art in the world.
Samarra, once briefly a dynastic capital, has extraordinary early
Islamic buildings. The ruins of the ninth-century Great Mosque of
Mutawakkil, one of the largest ever built, lies outside the modern
city, its intact spiral minaret an icon of Islamic art. The city also
has one of the oldest known Islamic tombs, an early caliphal palace
and the only brick bridge in Iraq, dating from 1128.
Iraq's third largest city, after Basra, is Mosul, far north on the
Tigris and little studied by Western scholars. It is rich in
architecture, including the leaning minaret of the now destroyed
mosque of Nur ad-Din. The city also attracts pilgrims to the tombs of
Muslim saints and has some of the earliest Christian monasteries,
dating to the fourth century. Its museum holds important Assyrian
antiquities from excavations at Nineveh, Khorsabad and Assur.
Of the many Islamic monuments outside cities, one of the oldest is the
eighth-century fortified palace of Ukhaidhar. No one knows why it is
in so remote a spot, but the surrounding land was probably irrigated
for crops and gardens, and the palace seems to have been a
self-sustaining miniature city. Architecturally, it is also an example
of the multicultural impulse that has always defined Islamic culture,
in this case bringing together Persian, Syrian and Byzantine
influences.
"If any of the holiest Shiite shrines at Karbala, Najaf or Kadhumain
are hit, we can only expect a very angry reaction from Muslims
everywhere," said Zainab Bahrani, who was born in Iraq and teaches
Islamic art at Columbia University. "It would be like bombing St.
Peter's in Rome."