Bartle Bull's LAND BETWEEN THE RIVERS: A 5,000 YEAR HISTORY OF IRAQ

My home only celebrated its centennial as a U.S. state when I was 20 years old, so it's quite a thing to contemplate a land with over 5,000 years of recorded, settled history. So for me to read Bartle Bull's extensive and exhaustive history of Iraq was to regard our planet's oldest civilization from one of its youngest. 

Then, too, while I am slightly knowledgeable or in a few cases fairly so about certain periods of the region's long history -- chiefly the Sumerian and Alexandrian eras -- I've been largely ignorant of great swaths of it between then and my first personal awareness of Iraq, when the modern nation fought a war against Iran in my childhood. And, of course, when my college campus erupted in "No Blood for Oil" protests when the U.S. took it upon itself to rescue tiny little Kuwait from its big, bad neighbor. 

And then when the second President Bush and his ilk maneuvered us into "finishing" the fight the first one didn't, of course.

And I've read the Koran (in an English translation, of course; I have the merest smattering of Arabic, chiefly picked up while studying Urdu in grad school when I should have been doing my actual course work) long ago, always meaning to read it again sometime as a more mature and better informed adult, but my grasp of the origins and nature of, say, the Sunni/Shia schism was tenuous at best.

It's always bugged me, this barely-more-than ignorance of mine, so when I saw Land Between the Rivers: A 5,000 Year History of Iraq available on Netgalley, I gladly grabbed it, thinking it would serve my purpose well.

 

I had underestimated just how well it would serve, though. Or how compulsively readable it would be. Bull, I knew, is chiefly a journalist, rather than a historian, so I expected a better than average narrative out of this book, but what I got was a truly exceptional as well as informative read! There's something that feels very illuminating about a history that takes in all of the great figures, all the different peoples and cultures, who had an impact on this part of the world, in a single big narrative, Ur to Babylon to Baghdad.

There's a section where Bull makes a choice I find peculiar, though. When it comes time to discuss the Ottoman Empire, sometime opponent of the then-Persian/Iranian powers that held most of Iraq and sometimes that power itself, he chooses to do so thorough the lens of one Ogier de Busbecq, the Hapsburg Empire's marginalized ambassador to the Ottoman court of Suleiman the Magnificent. Heretofore mostly devoid of explicitly European perspectives in favor of sources much closer to the experience of the actual denizens of Iraq and its many conquerors, it seems weird to me to do so at this point in history, where surely a modern scholar has access to more direct sources about life in this fascinating period, especially since Busbecq never visited Iraq. But I am just a humble blogger who's never been anywhere, so who am I to pick this nit?

Except it happens again in later chapters, which are more about European archaeologists digging up the ruins of cities we visited earlier in this history. This is less jarring since it is through their efforts that anyone even knows a lot of what we do about places like Mosul and Nineveh, and this figures like Sir Austen Henry Layard are quite legitimately figures in Iraqi history. But Busbecq?

Anyway...

After years kicking his heels in Constantinople, Layard finally gets funding for a proper dig in what was then Ottoman-controlled Iraq.What Layard encounters as he approaches the likely site of the ancient, Old Testament city of Nimrud is very much the kind of information I hoped to find in these pages: 

"The tiny party alit in the gloaming and made their way on foot to the local village. It was empty, deserted, a "heap of ruins," without even the dogs that Layard was used to seeing in Arab villages. Then, through "the entrance to a miserable hovel," Layard saw the glow of a small fire. 

Inside the ruined house was a sight typical of the devastated country around. An Arab family - a father, three wizened wives, some half-naked children, and "one or two mangy greyhounds" - had taken shelter in the abandoned village. When Layard entered, the family cowered, thinking he and his party were "Osmanlis." Seeing that the newcomers were not Turks but Europeans, the Arabs relaxed. Layard heard their story from the father. "Plundered by the pasha," their sedentary tribe had dispersed across the countryside. This family had taken refuge alone in the abandoned village.

One man's archaeological site is another man's refuge, and the father of the family becomes the nucleus of the European's workforce. How very colonial.

And so begins a long history of locals being employed to dig up amazing artifacts, possibly the work of their own ancestors' hands, to be exported to fill Western Museums and private collections (Hi, Hobby Lobby).*

As I've said, this is an exhaustive work of historical writing, including biographical details of figures from Cyrus the Great through Alexander the Great through Suleiman the Magnificent and King Faisal I of (first) Syria and (later) Iraq in plenty of context. This may be more than most readers are looking for, who want to understand the modern nation of Iraq and its ancient ancestor states a bit better, but I suspect that most readers will not notice that while they're reading. I found no point in this book when I got exhausted and wanted to know how much further I had to go, for instance.

This was a particularly illuminating read in concert with Emmanuel Carrere's V13, in which some of the West's sins with regard to this region of the world were forcibly brought home to roost, meaning this is also an excellent book to which to refer when trying actually to understand "why they hate us" or how Islam can both claim to be a religion of peace and inspire brutal terrorism; indeed, it is the best exploration of many of the divides and schisms in that religion that I have yet found.

Bartle Bull has done us all a great service in producing this outstanding book.

*Of course, it is only due to this colonial extraction that I have ever been able to look at such things with my own eyes at places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.