MESSAGE
| DATE | 2005-08-23 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] The unending development of human civilization
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August 23, 2005
Under the Old Neighborhood: In Iraq, an Archaeologist's Paradise
By JAMES GLANZ
ERBIL, Iraq - If a neighborhood is defined as a place where human beings
move in and never leave, then the world's oldest could be here at the
Citadel, an ancient and teeming city within a city girded by stone
walls.
Resting on a layer cake of civilizations that have come and gone for an
estimated 7,000 to 10,000 years, the Citadel looms over the apartment
blocks of this otherwise rather gray metropolis in Iraqi Kurdistan.
The settlement rivals Jericho and a handful of other famous towns for
the title of the oldest continuously inhabited site in the world. The
difference is that few people have heard of the Citadel outside Iraq.
And political turmoil has prevented a full study of its archaeological
treasures.
While there may be confirmed traces of more ancient settlements in Iraq,
said McGuire Gibson, a Mesopotamian archaeologist at the University of
Chicago, the people have all vanished from those places.
"The thing about Erbil is that it is, in fact, a living town," Dr.
Gibson said. "It goes back at least to 5,000 B.C.," he said. "It might
go back further."
Among the peoples that have lived in this neighborhood are the Hassuna,
Akkadians, Sumerians, Assyrians, Medes, Persians, Greeks, Parthians and
Abbasids.
In 1964, when Kanaan Rashad Mufti and his prominent family were part of
the neighborhood, a floor in his father's house, near the mosque,
collapsed during some renovations.
Underneath was a whole series of rooms from some previous civilization,
possibly the Abbasids, said Mr. Mufti, who is now director of
antiquities in western Kurdistan. There is nothing that Iraqi
archaeologists would like more than to begin systematic digs through
those layers, said Donny George, director of the Baghdad Museum.
"I have so much in mind," Dr. George said, expressing scientific
eagerness "to make such kinds of excavations to see what we might find."
For now, what sets the Citadel visibly apart are the contrasting rituals
of an ancient neighborhood that is caught between war and peace.
Although the Kurdish north of Iraq has remained comparatively calm,
Erbil has had its share of insurgent violence lately, and before that
Saddam Hussein's campaigns to uproot and exterminate the Kurds left
their mark everywhere here.
The Citadel is no exception. Living in brick hovels amid the ruins of
palatial houses are about 1,000 families displaced from Kurdish villages
that Mr. Hussein destroyed in an infamous pogrom called Anfal. In a
routine that resembles a fire drill, the families scramble to siphon
water from sinuous pipes running through the Citadel that function for
about 30 minutes, once a day.
But in one of the intact great houses, a Frenchman with impeccably
moussed hair has just opened a cultural institute that is displaying
paintings of wildly misshapen human and bestial figures in a genre he
calls postabstract. The institute, the Center Arthur Rimbaud, plans to
sponsor a contest that will send a Kurd to France to study piano.
Right next door is a financially desperate textile museum founded by
Lolan Mustefa, a Kurdish native of Erbil who studied anthropology in St.
Cloud, Minn., and is trying to preserve the brilliantly colored carpets
woven by the old nomadic tribes of the Kurdish mountains. A trickle of
tourists has even begun, along with the sense that all this could be the
first hint of a Kurdish SoHo or Greenwich Village.
"If they give them the means, it could become a place like Sacré Coeur
in Paris," said Suayip Adlig, a Kurdish filmmaker who was long exiled in
France, referring to another historical and romantic district on a hill
as he toured an old mosque next to an 18th-century bath.
The people who actually live here, not surprisingly, take a more
practical stance. Kadim Mustafa - a 39-year-old mother of three, whose
brick and concrete shanty includes fragments of the grand home that was
here before - stood on a fancy balcony overlooking Erbil and dismissed
pretensions like Mr. Adlig's.
"We have a nice place with a view, but not the facilities of life," Mrs.
Mustafa said. "As soon as we start having lunch, the electricity will go
off."
The direct evidence for what lies beneath Mrs. Mustafa's house is
scanty: Assyrian pottery that tumbled out of the side of the Citadel in
a renovation of its walls, a dig that Mr. Mufti said he participated in
around 1980, an electromagnetic probe that provided intriguing hints
about the layered structure.
What seems clear, said John Malcolm Russell of the Massachusetts College
of Art, is that with its location in a rain-fed plain near the
confluence of two rivers and the foothills of the Zagros Mountains,
Erbil "could have been the site of one of the earliest villages in the
world." The first hunter-gatherer settlement could have started as early
as 9300 B.C., followed by early pottery makers, the proto-Hassuna, by
7000 B.C.
And unlike the arid regions to the south, the rain remained relatively
steady in Erbil over the millennia, so there was no compelling reason to
abandon a settlement. By 1400 B.C., as cultures came and went, Erbil
became one of the most important cities of the Assyrian Empire, said Dr.
Russell, who is an authority on the period.
The Assyrian Empire collapsed after a siege in 612 B.C. The Persians
took over and were defeated in turn by Alexander the Great at Gaugemala,
west of Erbil, in 331 B.C. About a millennium later, the Ottomans swept
through after sacking the Abbasids, a Sunni Muslim dynasty centered in
Baghdad. And in 1918, as the Ottoman Empire was crumbling, the British
Army entered the city without resistance, and finally the modern nation
of Iraq was born, with all the consequences that the world is now
facing.
Crouching on top of all those layers of history around 10 a.m. on a
recent day, Muhamad Amin, 31 and a member of the Kurdish Khoshnaw tribe,
had more immediate things on his mind. The water was gurgling briefly
through one of the pipes snaking along a path between the close-packed
houses, and he was rushing to connect a translucent yellow hose to the
pipe.
As other families scampered around him hooking up their own hoses and
turning on clattering little pumps, Mr. Amin intently wrapped black
electrical tape around his own connection to keep it from leaking.
"Those people who are near to the pipe are much better off than the ones
who are far away," said Mr. Amin, who came here in 1993, when his
village was destroyed by Mr. Hussein's troops.
The half-hour of water did double duty as a social event, and children
swarmed everywhere until the water stopped running at 10:35. Indeed,
existence at the Citadel is not uniformly bleak. Many inhabitants here
have at least laboring jobs in the city: there is a thriving watermelon
stand with a wisecracking owner, an outdoor poultry shop where men cut
the heads off chickens on the spot, and cars protected with striped
cloth covers parked along the sole paved road.
There is not much connection between the refugees and the Center Arthur
Rimbaud, but the Frenchman with the moussed hair and black attire,
Matthieu Saint-Dizier, said he did a little experiment to be sure he
would be welcome after the center opened a few weeks ago. He opened an
exhibition of modern paintings in an ancient bath next to the mosque.
The paintings showed transvestites and men with multiple genitals.
"I want to make a test," he said. "The imam of the mosque come to this
exhibition and he don't make any problems. He said to me, 'I don't
understand very well, but' " - and Mr. Saint-Dizier exhaled in a
peculiarly French sound, approximately phhhhht.
Mr. Mustefa, the Kurdish owner of the carpet museum, rolled his eyes and
said that Mr. Saint-Dizier had no idea how much the exhibition had
appalled the locals, who nevertheless wanted to be polite to a
Westerner. As far as genuine interest in art goes, said Mr. Mustefa,
Kurdistan has been so consumed with political turmoil that he has had a
hard time drumming up local interest even in his own offerings.
Still, visitors do trickle in. Mr. Mustefa said that after spending
virtually his entire savings on the museum contents he was now having
serious trouble paying for operating costs and upkeep. But he does have
an interesting building, with ornate old pillars and an unroofed central
court, right next to the cultural center. When the municipality granted
him the building for his museum, "it was a dream for me," Mr. Mustefa
said.
"And I knew the Kurds wouldn't appreciate this," he said with a
long-suffering look. "Especially the intellectuals. They think this is a
backward art."
So it goes at the Citadel. Mr. Mufti, the antiquities director, is also
a member of the board that is supervising preliminary studies, financed
by Unesco, for renovating the Citadel. The initial project, according to
the Unesco Web site, "aims at identifying a building in the Citadel and
at providing it with necessary supplies and equipment to serve as focal
point for the rehabilitation of the Citadel at large."
Mr. Mufti is trying, so far without success, to secure financing for a
new archaeological dig. But as uncertain as all of those plans are, Mr.
Mufti said, there is one thing they all assume.
The neighborhood will remain.
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