Uruk, located near Basra in Iraq, was one of the world’s first cities, and it is where the first writing system emerged. Babylon, just an hour’s taxi ride from Baghdad, was long the world’s largest and most sophisticated urban center. And the first truly international empire was ruled from the great Assyrian cities of Nineveh and Nimrud, near today’s Mosul in the northern part of the country.
Sumerian bust of a Bearded Man circa 3500-3200 BC | Image courtesy of U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs
The past four years of war and political turmoil have threatened that invaluable heritage—both above and under the ground. Donny George Youkhana, who chaired the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities, has been placed in jeopardy as well. The 56-year-old archaeologist has been vilified as a Baathist sympathizer by American neoconservatives, criticized as pro-West by Sunnis, and viewed with suspicion by ...
