MESSAGE
| DATE | 2005-08-23 |
| FROM | From: "Steve Milo"
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] The unending development of human civilization
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Oh deary dear............
> 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."
A 'living town' sans the Hebrews who had been there for just as many millenia that many of the other ethnicities have been.
> Among the peoples that have lived in this neighborhood are the Hassuna,
> Akkadians, Sumerians, Assyrians, Medes, Persians, Greeks, Parthians and
> Abbasids.
...and the Hebrews, very convenient that they have been forgotten.
> 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.
Horse$hit, the Iraqi of today and the turmoil many of the Middle East countries are going through is a direct result of the meddling of the former soviet union. Have a conversation with just about any russian who is willing to talk about it and they will start spouting off about how America is meddling. Needle them on the meddling that went on from the 1950's to the 1990's and they will brush that off with a 'thats not the point'.
The British invasion of 1918 into that part of the world has not played nearly as big a role in the turmoil created. Thats like saying the United States meddles in the Hawaiian islands. The only difference is that Hawaii is a willing participant. The middle east fought off the British very succesfully and were able to upright themselves, even during WWII. The soviet empire was a politially malicious machine, Americans who complain about their own beauracracy should spend five years in 1970 russia.
The political machine of the soviet empire may remain a mystery to the west for sometime it seems.
Steve
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