Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms Read Online Free PDF

private zoo had been evacuated to make room for an ever-expanding legion of Western bureaucrats who, exhausted by long days at their computer screens, occasionally fortified themselves with lobster flown in from America or with liquor served in bars closed to Iraqis, where the overwhelmingly male clientele swayed and shifted their feet collectively whenever a woman entered.
    I had at least the distraction of working in an office wholly staffed by Iraqis. During Ramadan, when they neither ate nor drank during the day, I sometimes slipped surreptitiously into the kitchen, anxious not to offend but in need of sugary soft drinks to stave off torpor. Otherwise, I tried to do as they did—up to the point where they had to leave the safety of the Green Zone. In the evenings during Ramadan we ate iftar together, the pleasure of the dates and simple soup magnified if I had managed to survive the day without eating. I tried to mimic the deep-voweled, complex Baghdadi accent, learned to navigate the shabby corridors of various government departments, and steeled myself to the ghastly news that came in every day from the world outside that office, where Sunni and Shi’a Muslim gangs were fighting for control. Each day new tragedies were reported: the decapitated head of a girl, implanted with explosives so that it became a booby trap for her family when they tried to recover it; men kidnapped and released for ransom, but with their eyes gouged out and their hands and feet cut off.
    All this was happening in the place where civilization began more than seven thousand years ago. In the landscape of recorded history, Iraq is Everest: just as Everest makes other mountains seem small, Iraq makes even ancient history seem recent by comparison. Noah’s ark? Ancient Iraqi legends speak of a great deluge, and of a man called Utnapishtim who survived it in a great boat. The legend, which influenced the biblical account of Noah, was based on fact. Iraq’s low-lying cities were exposed to devastating inundations. The archaeologist Leonard Woolley discovered evidence of one such flood as his team dug down through the ruins of Ur in the 1920s and found eight feet of clean soil between two layers of pottery and flint implements. As he drily recorded, “My wife came along and looked . . . and she turned away remarking casually, ‘Well, of course, it’s the Flood.’” It might be truer to say that it was a flood, but the basis for the biblical story is certainly Iraq, whose civilization therefore is older than the Flood.
    The pyramids? Spry youngsters compared with south-central Iraq’s cities, which appeared as early as 5300 BC —three thousand years before Pharaoh Cheops built the Great Pyramid. Iraq’s cities were almost as ancient for him as Tutankhamun is for us. It is the Iraqi habit of building in mud brick, in a climate much less dry than Egypt’s, that has caused its great monuments to collapse while Egypt’s have been preserved.
    Homer’s Odyssey ? The golden age of Iraq was almost over by Homer’s time. Iraqi epic stories survive from as early as around 2000 BC . One is about a hero called Gilgamesh, his relationship with a man called Enkidu, and their joint slaying of the monster Humbaba. It deals with eternal themes: friendship, sex, death. It even has comedy. A bawdy curse aimed at a prostitute goes, “May wild dogs camp in your bedroom . . . may drunkards vomit all over you . . . may angry wives sue you!” Odysseus himself might have heard this epic poem and recognized in it some similarities to his own travels—but even in his time, it was already old.
    The most famous and maybe greatest of all the cities of ancient Iraq was Babylon but this once-great city is now a huge expanse of almost featureless mud by the side of the Euphrates River, fifty miles south of Baghdad. All that remain are low walls and the foundations of gateways. These were once part of temples so tall that people thought they reached up to