Ancient Iraq

by Georges Roux

  We cannot leave this subject without mentioning the attempts made to put chronology on a more scientific basis by means of physical methods and, in particular, the Carbon 14 or Radiocarbon method developed in 1946 by Professor W. F. Libby of Chicago.12 Its principle is briefly as follows: all living organisms contain ordinary carbon of atomic weight 12 and a radioactive isotope of carbon of atomic weight 14 which is formed in the upper layers of the atmosphere through the action of cosmic rays on nitrogen, falls upon earth and is absorbed by vegetation and ultimately by animals. The ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12 remains fixed throughout life: one-billionth of a gram for every gram of ordinary carbon. After death, when no more carbon 14 is absorbed, that part of it which is in the organism decreases slowly and regularly by reverting to nitrogen. As the curve of disintegration, or ‘half-life’ curve, of carbon 14 is known (this is 5,568 years), it is possible to find the date at which the organism died, and consequently its age. This method can be applied to organic matter, such as bone, wood, charcoal, shells, reeds, etc., found in archaeological excavations, but its usefulness is limited by a number of factors (‘standard deviation’ inherent in the radiation counting technique, contamination by older or more recent material, variations in atmospheric carbon 14 concentrations with time) and recent attempts to ‘calibrate’ radiocarbon estimations by dendrochronology (the study of tree-rings) have met with problems. This means that radiocarbon dates must be taken with caution; they are of considerable help when prehistory is concerned – since differences of a few hundred years matter little – but cannot be used for precise, historical chronology.

  Archaeological Research in Iraq

  The transformation of once flourishing cities into tells was more rapid than one might think.13 Herodotus in the middle of the fourth century B.C. sees Babylon still alive, but neglects to visit Nineveh destroyed a century and a half before, and Xenophon leading ten thousand Greek mercenaries across Mesopotamia in 401 B.C. passed near the great Assyrian capital city without even noticing it.14 Four centuries later, Strabo speaks of Babylon as of a town in ruins, ‘almost completely deserted’.15

  A thousand years went by. As the blanket of dust over the ancient cities grew thicker and thicker, their memory gradually faded away. Arab historians and geographers still knew something of Iraq's glorious past, but Europe had forgotten the East. The peregrinations of Benjamin of Tudela in the twelfth century and the travels of the German naturalist Rauwolff four hundred years later were isolated episodes. It was not before the seventeenth century that western interest in oriental antiquities was awakened, when an Italian nobleman, Pietro della Valle, gave an entertaining account of his journey across Mesopotamia and brought back to Europe, in 1625, bricks found at Ur and Babylon ‘on which were writing in certain unknown characters’. Gradually, it dawned upon academics and royalty that here was a field worth investigating. For the first time, in 1761 a scientific mission was sent out east by the King of Denmark with orders to gather as much information as possible on various subjects, including archaeology. The numerous inscriptions copied at Persepolis by its leader Karsten Niebuhr – a mathematician by profession – were put at the disposal of philologists, who were soon at work deciphering the mysterious writing. From then on, nearly all those who visited, or lived in, the Orient made a point of exploring its ruins, collecting ‘antikas’ and copying inscriptions. Prominent among them are Joseph de Beauchamp, a distinguished French abbé and astronomer (1786), Claudius James Rich, a Resident of the East India Company and British Consul General in Baghdad (1807), Sir James Buckingham (1816), Robert Mignan (1827), James Baillie Fraser (1834) and that extraordinary army officer, sportsman, explorer and philologist, undoubtedly the greatest of all, Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (1810 – 95). We should also mention here at least one important government-subsidized expedition of the early nineteenth century, the British ‘Tigris – Euphrates Expedition’ (1835 – 6) of F. R. Chesney, who studied the course of the two rivers and collected a wealth of information on the country around them.

  With the exception of the two small pits dug by de Beauchamp and Mignan at Babylon, all these men confined their activities to the examination and measurement of the ruins as they saw them and were far from imagining what those ‘desolate mounds’ concealed. But in 1843 Paul Emile Botta, Italian-born French Consul in Mosul, started at Khorsabad the first archaeological excavations in Iraq, discovered the Assyrians and opened a new era. Almost at once (1845) an Englishman, Sir Henry Layard, followed his example at Nimrud and Nineveh, and soon a number of tells were excavated. In 1877 Ernest de Sarzec, French Consul in Basrah, having heard of some statues found by chance at Telloh, near Nasriyah, decided to dig there and discovered the Sumerians. Thus within thirty years a hitherto unknown civilization was revealed to a world astonished to learn that Mesopotamia could yield nearly as many treasures as Greece or Egypt. Botta, Layard, Sarzec, Loftus, Smith, the pioneers of that heroic period were all amateurs in every sense of the term. They had no experience and little method. Their main object was to discover and send to the museums of their respective countries statues, bas reliefs, inscriptions and objets d'art in general. They had no time for mud bricks and broken pots, destroyed much and preserved little, but they opened the road and, despite obstacles of all sorts, worked with an energy and enthusiasm which have never been surpassed.

  Meanwhile, in the libraries of Europe no less enthusiastic but more patient pioneers were engaged in the fantastic task of deciphering the written documents which by then were pouring by the thousand into the museums. The story of this intellectual adventure, which lasted no less than a hundred years and taxed to the extreme the ingenuity of many scholars from several nations, cannot be told here even briefly.16 We feel, however, that homage should be paid to such men as Grotefend, a teacher of Greek at Gottingen University, who made the first serious and partly successful attempt at reading the Old Persian inscriptions in cuneiform script copied by Niebuhr at Persepolis; Rawlinson, who between 1835 and 1844 not only copied at the peril of his life the long trilingual inscription which Darius had engraved high up on the rock of Behistun in Western Iran but also began to translate it – the inscription in Old Persian, Babylonian and Elamite has been called the ‘Rosetta stone of Assyriology’, with the difference that none of the three languages could initially be read – and to the Irishman Edward Hincks and his French colleague Jules Oppert, who, with Rawlinson, deserve to be called the ‘holy triad’ of cuneiform studies, since they overcame the greatest epigraphic and linguistic difficulties and, as one of their modern successors puts it, ‘laid open the dusty pages of the clay “books” buried all over the ancient Near East’.17 The decipherment of the Assyro-Babylonian language (now called Akkadian) was considered assured in 1848, and by 1900 the other language of ancient Mesopotamia, Sumerian, was broadly comprehended. The former now has virtually no secret; the latter still has its dark corners, but is read with increasing certainty. At a conservative estimate, half a million tablets are – or, since many of them have not yet been published, will eventually be – at the historian's disposal,18 and countless more will be discovered as archaeological research progresses. It can be said without exaggeration that no other country in the world has yielded such a wealth of ancient texts in the very form in which they were written thousands of years ago.

  The entry on to the stage by the Germans at the turn of the century heralded a new approach to excavation work. Robert Koldewey at Babylon (1899 – 1917) and Walter Andrae at Assur (1903 – 14) introduced strict, even meticulous techniques in a domain where luck and intuition had long reigned supreme. The German method was soon generally adopted, and the twenty years between the two world wars witnessed what should perhaps be considered as the most brilliant and fruitful period in the history of Mesopotamian archaeology. These were the days when Woolley was digging up the past at Ur and its celebrated Royal Cemetery (1922 – 34), when Heinrich and his team were working at Uruk, Parrot at Mari, the British at Ubaid, Nineveh, A
rpachiyah and Chagar Bazar, the Americans at Tepe Gawra, Nuzi and in the Diyala valley, and both the British and the Americans at Kish and Jemdat Nasr. One by one, large and small tells were opened up and yielded their secrets. The main features of Mesopotamian history were defined piece by piece, and beyond history older, fascinating cultures appeared which threw new light on the origins of civilization in that part of the world.

  During this time Iraq had emerged as a nation. Baghdad now had its own museum. Young Iraqi archaeologists had been trained, and excavations, far from coming to a complete standstill during the Second World War, continued with the most interesting results at ‘Uqair (1940 – 1), Hassuna (1943 – 4) and ‘Aqar Quf (1943 – 5). The war over, work was resumed by the Germans (Lenzen) at the huge site of Uruk, by the Americans (Haines and McCown) at Sumer's religious capital, Nippur, and by the French (Parrot) at Mari, the metropolis of the Middle Euphrates. Mallowan, on behalf of the British Museum, reopened Nimrud, the Assyrian military capital city which had not been touched for over seventy years. Seton Lloyd, Taha Baqir, Fuad Safar dug up for the Iraq Museum three virgin sites: Eridu, one of the most ancient sacred cities of Iraq, Harmal, a modest mound unexpectedly rich in texts, and Hatra, the strange capital of a pre-Islamic Arab kingdom. After 1958, the young Republic of Iraq opened its doors even wider to foreign archaeologists. Whilst the Germans and Americans continued working on the inexhaustible sites of Uruk and Nippur, whilst the Iraqis themselves discovered at Tell es-Sawwan a new prehistoric culture and sounded numerous smaller mounds, fresh excavations were undertaken by the British at Tell al-Rimah, Umm Dabaghiyah, Choga Mami and Abu Salabikh, by the French at Larsa and the Belgians at Tell ed-Der, by the Germans at Isin, by the Italians at Seleucia, by the Russians at Yarim Tepe and the Poles at Nimrud, and even by the Japanese at Telul ath-Thalathat, to mention only the main sites. At the time of writing, several of these excavations are still in progress and others are being planned. All the large cities of ancient Mesopotamia and many less renowned towns have been, or are being, unearthed and a considerable amount of restoration work has been done, or is going on, notably at Nineveh, Nimrud, Babylon, Ur and Hatra.

  In the late 1970s a new and rewarding type of archaeological activity developed: the so-called ‘salvage excavations’ made necessary by the building, for agricultural purposes, of several dams on the Euphrates, the Tigris and some of their tributaries in both Syria and Iraq. The lakes created by these dams were bound to submerge a great number of tells, and it was imperative to explore as many of them as possible before this happened. These huge tasks were performed by Syrian and Iraqi archaeologists working in cooperation with colleagues from Europe, America, Australia and Japan. The first of these large-scale rescue operations was prompted by the construction of the Assad dam on the great bend of the Syrian Euphrates; then came, in Iraq, the ‘Hamrin basin project’ in the valley of a tributary of the Diyala river, the Haditha (or Qadissiyah) salvage excavations on the middle Euphrates, and the Eski Mosul project in the Tigris valley upstream of Mosul. Altogether, almost two hundred sites, ranging from prehistoric to late Islamic times, were explored, some of them partially and briefly, others extensively and for several months or years. The results of this international effort were very interesting: they brought to light not only a few large cities, like Emar (Meskene), but also some relatively minor towns, such as Haradum on the Iraqi Euphrates, which probably would have never been excavated; they provided a great deal of information on settlement patterns at different periods and filled many gaps in our knowledge of proto-historic cultures hitherto poorly documented.19

  The ‘Gulf War’ has put an end to all archaeological research in Iraq, but there is no doubt that sooner or later such peaceful activities will be resumed there. Some six thousand tells in Iraq alone are awaiting the diggers – enough to keep busy several generations of archaeologists and epigraphists. And as though in our search for the past we were proceeding backwards, after the Assyrians, after the Babylonians, after the Sumerians, after the nameless peoples of the fourth and fifth millennia B. C, the Stone Age of Iraq has been brought under the searchlight. Despite inevitable gaps in our knowledge, it has at last become possible to write a complete history of ancient Mesopotamia, starting from those very remote days when men chose the hills and caves of Kurdistan for their dwellings and left behind them the humble tools of chipped flint which betray their presence.

  CHAPTER 3

  FROM CAVE TO FARM

  Until 1949 textbooks and scientific journals alike were silent on the prehistory of Iraq. Archaeological work had concentrated on the Mesopotamian plain, where prehistoric remains, if they ever existed, would by now be buried under a very thick layer of alluvium. The lowest levels of several tells had supplied enough material for historians to build up a sequence of five proto-historic cultures which announced and explained the dawn of the Sumero-Akkadian civilization in about 3000 B.C., but all these cultures belonged to the late Neolithic and to the Chalcolithic ages and covered, at the most, a couple of thousand years. Prehistory proper, the Stone Age of Iraq, was practically unknown. True, a few worked flints had been found on the surface in various parts of the Syro-Mesopotamian desert,1 and as early as 1928 Professor D. A. E. Garrod, the lady archaeologist well known for her studies on prehistoric Palestine, had visited Kurdistan and found palaeolithic artefacts in two caves near Suleimaniyah; but these discoveries attracted little attention outside a small circle of specialists. Twenty years were to elapse before Professor R. J. Braidwood publicized the Neolithic site of Jarmo and aroused enough interest to promote further research in this long-neglected field.2 Since then, the American excavations at Barda-Balka, Palegawra and Karim-Shehir (1951), the survey of the Zab basin by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (1954 – 5) and the startling discoveries made by Dr R. Solecki in Shanidar cave3 since 1951 have contributed considerably to our knowledge of Iraq's most ancient past and filled a very regrettable gap in Near Eastern prehistory.

  Palaeolithic

  Among the three classical subdivisions of the Stone Age – Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic – the first named is by far the longest. It entirely fills the geological period called Pleistocene because it is ‘the most recent’ (pleistos kainos) chapter in the very long history of the earth. The Pleistocene began approximately two million years ago and ended in about 10000 B.C., to be replaced by the Holocene (‘latest’) period in which we are still living. Pleistocene and Holocene together constitute the Quaternary era.

  The beginning of the Pleistocene was marked by the ultimate and weaker convulsions of the previous period, the Pliocene, which in the Near East led to the formation of the Taurus and Zagros ranges, which are part of the Alpine-Himalayan system, to the deep fault of the Rift Valley linking the Dead Sea and the Red Sea to the great East African lakes, and to the creation of the Mesopotamian plain and the Arabo-Persian Gulf due to sliding of the rigid Arabian platform underneath the not less rigid Iranian plateau. These tectonic movements were accompanied by a considerable plutonic activity, as witnessed by the numerous volcanoes, most of them nowadays extinct, that are scattered all over Turkey, the Caucasus range and Iran, as well as by the extensive lava fields to be found, for example, in Syria, south of Damascus.

  About one million years ago, the surface of the earth, which by then had almost reached its present configuration, entered a period of relative rest, the main activity being erosion of the relief. This was largely facilitated by the expansion and retraction of four successive ice-caps lying over the northern parts of Europe and America: the four glaciations called, at least in Europe: Günz, Mindel, Riss and Würm, and their consequences. It must be noted that in tropical, subtropical and equatorial regions long periods of heavy rains (pluvials) alternating with periods of relative drought (interpluvials) corresponded approximately to the glacials and interglacials of Europe and North America.

  Stone industries in Iraqi Kurdistan: 1 – 4, microlithic (Shanidar B); 5 – 13, Aurignat
ian (Baradostian, Shanidar C); 14 – 16, Mousterian (Shanidar D); 17–19, Levalloisian-Acheulaean (Barda Balka). After R. Solecki and H. Wright Jnr, Sumer, VII, 1951 and VIII, 1952.