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ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA

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Bianca
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« on: August 16, 2008, 09:22:00 pm »









                                           A N C I E N T   M E S O P O T A M I A






Mesopotamia, an ancient Greek term meaning "the land between rivers," is considered to be the cradle of civilization because this is where we find the origins of agriculture, written language, and cities.

Mesopotamia is an area geographically located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, largely corresponding
to all of modern Iraq, as well as northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, and the Khūzestān Province of southwestern Iran.

Commonly known as the "Cradle of civilization", Bronze Age Mesopotamia included Sumer and the Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian Empires. In the Iron Age, it was ruled by the Neo-Assyrian Empire and Neo-Babylonian Empire, and later conquered by the Achaemenid Empire.

It mostly remained under Persian rule until the 7th century Islamic conquest of the Sassanid Empire.

Under the Caliphate, the region came to be known as Iraq.
« Last Edit: August 16, 2008, 09:28:35 pm by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

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« Reply #1 on: October 27, 2008, 11:31:39 am »











                                                       UR OF THE CHALDEES






In A.D. 1927, after a night that had lasted more than a million days, the sun of Mesopotamia again touched the gold of Ur. Through the dust-heavy sky of southern Iraq its rays slanted down on a massive mound of crumbling brick and on across fresh trenches and pits on the barren plain to the south. And there again—or still—was Ur of the Chaldees.


Ur. Even today, 40 years later, the name evokes echoes of the excitement that flickered through the world when Charles Leonard Woolley and his expedition began to uncover not only the Biblically famous city itself, but also the treasures of the Sumerian royal cemetery.


Before the 20th century, written history had told the world very little about Ur. Beyond the Bible's brief references to it as the home of the patriarchs, almost nothing was known. But in the early 1920's the British Museum and the University Museum of Pennsylvania sent a combined expedition to Iraq under Woolley's leadership to investigate a certain massive mound of brick about 230 miles south of Baghdad. And there was Ur.


It doesn't seem possible now that Ur was ever the site of the great civilization that Woolley was later to describe: a city surrounded by bounteous gardens with groves of figs and dates and tall palms standing by mathematically straight irrigation canals, a city of temples and warehouses, workshops and schools, spacious villas and the towers they called ziggurats, all within a great wall overlooking the waters of the Euphrates.


For now, despite the excavations and restorations that followed the initial discoveries, Ur squats unimpressively on a flat plain about halfway between Baghdad and the present head of the Arabian Gulf near a railway station prosaically called Ur Junction. That plain, called a "waste of unprofitable sand" by Woolley, played an essential part in the story of Ur. Once covered by the waters of the Arabian Gulf as far north as modern Baghdad, scholars theorize, the plain emerged from the water primarily as a result of an accumulation of silt carried into the Gulf by two rivers. One was the Korun River pouring out of the mountains in what is now Iran and the other, now dry, flowing from the high Arabian Desert in what is now Saudi Arabia.


The silt from these two streams built up a bar across the ancient Gulf like a belt at its middle. Combined with the water and silt of the Tigris and Euphrates flowing down from the north, it filled the upper half of the Gulf, first converting it into a shallow, brackish lagoon, later into a marsh and finally, probably about 7000 years ago, into a fertile plain. This theory explains why the area around Ur supported human life earlier than the northern area where one would have expected the Tigris and Euphrates delta to have begun its push into the Gulf. As soon as the land emerged, still unidentified non-Semitic peoples, whose successors would one day build Ur, came and settled the south first.
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« Reply #2 on: October 27, 2008, 11:33:19 am »









One of Woolley's more exciting discoveries came out of the 1927 excavation of the royal cemeteries. In the spring of that year, the sixth season in the field, the expedition began to find the astonishing, sunless kingdom of Ur—a kingdom of the grave into which deceased Sumerian kings had been followed by their servants, soldiers, courtiers and whole teams of oxen. In the graves the retinue took a soothing narcotic and lay down to die still bearing graceful lyres and harps, gaming boards, jewelry of lapis lazuli and carnelian, daggers, finely wrought helmets and golden bowls, all to be crushed by the debris of succeeding civilizations and layers of fertile silt left bone dry when the great Euphrates changed its course.


The oldest of the royal graves revealed by Woolley's team at Ur has been dated at about 2800 B.C. Although there has been much controversy about the occupants of the tombs (some authorities believe them to be symbolic kings and queens, married and sacrificed with their splendid retinues of up to 80 persons in mystic fertility rites; others believe them authentic temporal rulers buried in state) there is no dispute about the richness of the tomb furnishings and provisions for the dead, or the skill with which they were executed. One writer points out that although the graves are as beautiful as the famous tomb of the Egyptian pharoah Tut Ankh Amon, they are more than 1,000 years older.


Of one helmet with locks of hair in beaten gold Woolley wrote: "If there were nothing else by which the art of these ancient Sumerians could be judged we should still, on the strength of it alone, accord them high rank in the roll of civilized races." Of a set of golden toilet instruments he adds, "A recognized expert took them to be Arab work of the 13th century A.D., and no one could blame him for the error, for no one could have suspected such art in the third millennium before Christ."


Written records of the Sumerian culture in the form of baked clay tablets inscribed with Sumerian cuneiform writing, date from as early as 2600 B.C. The so-called First Dynasty of Ur dates from circa 2500 B.C. and it was about that time, scholars generally agree, that the first ziggurat was built at Ur, probably on the foundations of an earlier structure.
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« Reply #3 on: October 27, 2008, 11:34:19 am »









Almost nothing is known of Ur's Second Dynasty, but from about 2112-2015 B.C. the Third Dynasty flourished arid Ur was the capital of an empire. During the reign of King Ur-Nammu, who established the dynasty, the ziggurat that Woolley explored was built, probably on the rubble of the first one.


By the time the archeologists got to it, of course, the ziggurat had been so altered by decay and by succeeding restorations that a precise reconstruction was difficult. Woolley believed that it had three irregular stages, each with broad terraces on two sides, the topmost surmounted by a small shrine dedicated to the moon-god Nannar. The lowest stage, about 50 feet high (since restored by the Iraq Government in the early 1960's) measured approximately 150 by 200 feet, with the four corners lined up on the cardinal points of the compass.


The ziggurat was constructed of unbaked bricks faced with baked bricks bound together with tar and colored to represent the zones of heaven. At the base the courtyard was whitewashed; the lower stage was brushed with black bitumen; the top was of red brick and the highest shrine painted brilliant blue. On the northeast side were the three stairways giving access to the shrine, a feature setting it apart from the stone tomb pyramids of Egypt and more akin to the pyramids of Mexico.


Most of the cities on the Mesopotamian plains had ziggurats of some kind, apparently, according to one writer, "...the work of people investing mountains with religious meaning." This offers one clue to the origins of the immigrants. The Sumerians gave the towers names such as "The House of the Mountain" or "The Holy Hill." The ziggurat at Ur is the best preserved although the tower in Babylon is more famous because of the references to it in Genesis and Herodotus.


About 1800 B.C. the Babylonian . power was growing in the north and, eventually, conquered Ur and reigned over it until about the 6th century B.C. At the end of this period Nabonidus, a king of Babylon who was also an ardent archeologist and in his own words "venerator of the past," restored the ziggurat at Ur and even added two or three stories. It is from his clay records that the name of King Ur-Nammu the Third Dynasty builder was discovered. In the mid-19th century there were tentative efforts by the British Museum to investigate the lonely red hill on the southern Mesopotamian plain, the hill the nomads called "Tell al-Mugayyar." Complete excavation, however, was delayed until after World War I. Then came Woolley, to let the sunlight shine on ancient Ur once again.




This article appeared on pages 12-13 of the March/April 1968 print edition of Saudi Aramco World.
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« Reply #4 on: October 27, 2008, 11:59:01 am »












                                                              B A B Y L O N







...........From the time of the Mongol invasion in the 13th century until its independence from Ottoman and British rule in this century, Iraq was not in control of its own destiny. Perhaps that is why the nation's vision of itself now seems to reach beyond security and prosperity to a role of cultural prominence. Combining stringent management of its economic assets - petroleum, water and fertile soil - with substantial financial support from regional allies, this nation of some 16 million people, slightly larger than California, sought during the war not only to continue building its health, education, housing, irrigation and transportation infrastructure, but also to maintain its long-time public support of the arts.


Other nations have attempted to balance a guns-and-butter budget with mixed success; with a cease-fire finally in place and peace negotiations continuing, history will judge whether Iraq's resilience can match its will. But it is also history, in this case, which provides the inspiration for Iraq's ambitious, multi-faceted policy.


"The Land Between the Rivers," Mesopotamia, the fertile alluvial plain watered by the Tigris and Euphrates, believed by some to be the site of the Garden of Eden, is almost certainly where civilization was born. Here, by the fourth millennium BC - shortly before similar developments in Egypt's Nile Valley - religion, art, complex political systems and codified law had evolved. Iraq's very name is derived from the Arabic for "origin."


Among the facets of civilization that Mesopotamia originated or developed are writing and mathematics, the potter's wheel, wheeled vehicles, systematic irrigation, astronomy, medicine, currency, the arch, roads, the postal system and libraries. From the time of Sumer, about 3000 BC, to the Islamic Abbasid Dynasty (seventh to 12th centuries of this era), at least five powerful and inventive cultures flourished in this broad valley astride the trade routes between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. Two of the empires, the Babylonian and New Babylonian, or Chaldean, were centered in Babylon (See Aramco World, November-December 1984).

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« Reply #5 on: October 27, 2008, 12:02:31 pm »









The name Babylon comes from the Akkadian phrase bab ili, translated as "gate of the god" - hence the Biblical name Babel. It referred to the city on the Euphrates in the central plains of Mesopotamia whose patron god was Marduk Bal. Gradually the name Babylonia was applied to a unified empire which included Sumer in the south, with its river delta and its port cities. For much of the period between 2000 and 300 BC Babylon flourished as a religious, administrative and cultural center.


The first Babylonian Empire's most famous ruler, Hammurabi, who ruled for 42 years from about 1800 BC, was noteworthy because of his concern for the welfare of his people. He reformed taxes, improved the network of irrigation canals and systematically organized Babylonian law into some 300 provisions based on the premises that individuals had rights which were to be protected by the authority of the law, and that the strong should not injure the weak. His code of law covered such areas as wages, prices, loans and debts, medical malpractice, false accusation and family rights.


Known today as the Code of Hammurabi, the 3,600 lines of cuneiform writing, first inscribed on a black diorite column some 4,000 years ago, have influenced legal systems throughout the world, and still do so today. The security and prosperity established by the great ruler endured until about 1600 BC.


Babylon's second great period of glory came some 1,000 years later, after the fall of Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian Empire to the north. Under the Chaldean King Nebuchadnezzar II (605-563 BC), a descendent of the Arabian Kilde clan, the new Babylonian Empire prospered. Cities were rebuilt and fortified and canals repaired. Trade and industry mushroomed. Nebuchadnezzar II is mentioned in the Old Testament in his political and military roles; in his own records, however, the ruler focused on his exploits as peacemaker, builder and creator. Armchair archeologists remember him as builder of the legendary Hanging Gardens, which the ancient Greeks considered to be one of the Seven Wonders of the World (See Aramco World, May-June 1980).
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« Reply #6 on: October 27, 2008, 12:05:37 pm »











During Nebuchadnezzar's reign Babylon achieved its greatest splendor. The Euphrates flowed through the city, whose two sections were joined by a bridge of bricks and tar. Babylon was rectangular, with straight streets crossing at right angles. It was surrounded by two sets of walls, three and four meters (10 and 13 feet) thick; the outer was about 18 kilometers long (11 miles) and the inner about eight (five miles), with ample space between them for the cultivation of food crops in the event of siege. The inner wall was protected by a water-filled moat and bronze gates. Babylon was a city of palaces, with perhaps as many as 53 main temples and many smaller shrines.


Nebuchadnezzar was said to have erected the Hanging Gardens on the flat Mesopotamian plain to console his queen, homesick for her native Median hills. A similar aspiration to reach above the monotonous plains may have accounted for the prominence of the ziggurat in Babylonian religious architecture, stepped towers built of baked bricks with bitumen mortar. Some experts believe the ziggurat at Babylon may have climbed in seven stories to about 91 meters (300 feet) in height, the inspiration for the story of the Tower of Babel.


Little remains of either the famous gardens or the ziggurat in Babylon today, but the past is always present in the Middle East, and the government of present-day Iraq continuously evokes the unparalleled cultural legacy of the Land Between the Rivers to inspire and challenge its citizens: If bitumen - asphalt - was the mortar which 6,000 years ago bound together bricks and paving stones to build the city, let modern petroleum resources rebuild the modern nation as well. As Iraq's Minister of Information and Culture, Latif Nassayef Jassim, said in his welcome address at the 1987 festival, "Those who contribute to civilization will be recorded in the brightest pages of history."


And beyond the additional motivations of domestic stabilization and international image-building implicit in a splendid festival - as valid now as 3,500 years ago - lies the fact that music, dance, theater and art have always been the abstract building blocks humans have used to build towering moral ziggurats above the plains of international conflict.
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« Reply #7 on: October 27, 2008, 12:08:36 pm »










The guiding hand behind the Babylon International Festival was Munir Bashir, a 58-year-old Iraqi musician described in The New Yorker as "acknowledged world master of the 'ud," comparable as an artist to the late Andrès Segovia, the virtuoso and, in a sense, inventor of the classical guitar. The 'ud, progenitor of the lute and relative of the guitar, originated in seventh-century Iraq. Bashir's travels with it as a performing musician gave him exposure and experience; his enthusiastic support of traditional music and music education in Iraq led to his appointment as director of the Department of Musical Affairs in the Ministry of Culture.


Iraq's initial festival, in September and October of 1987, ran for a full month and featured performing companies from some 30 countries, reflecting both Iraq's geographic position at the intersection of Europe, Asia and Africa and its desire to bridge traditional and modern cultures. But Iraq's most innovative contribution to the Middle Eastern festival scene was the scholarly International Music Symposium on ancient music and musical instruments, held in counterpoint to the public performances.


The selection of Babylon as a historically symbolic and physically suitable site was only possible because of restoration and preservation work carried out in the ancient city since 1978. The wisdom of extensive reconstruction of antiquities is a topic certain to stir debate among archeologists, but in Babylon the need to halt the continuing deterioration of the ruins settled the argument a decade ago.


The earliest Mesopotamian builders lacked metal, timber and, unlike the Egyptians, even stone. They built with the alluvial valley's most abundant resource: mud. Although lengthy excavations by German archeologist Robert Koldeway determined the general plan of Babylon and its principal buildings early in this century, little then remained of the city but its foundations. Erosion caused by wind, rain and the changing course of the Euphrates over two millennia, combined with a high water table and water-borne mineral salts, had crumbled mud-brick structures into dust. Moreover, the more lasting baked bricks of later periods had been "quarried" over centuries to build the homes of nearby villagers, and the famous blue-glazed bricks and molded lion bas-reliefs which once decorated the Ishtar Gate itself had been carried off to East Berlin's Pergamon Museum by their discoverers.
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« Reply #8 on: October 27, 2008, 12:09:51 pm »










With the impetus of the festival, the pace and scale of preservation and restoration already under way at Babylon increased dramatically. In the past two years, according to The Baghdad Observer, workers have laid some 15 million Babylonian-style baked bricks, slightly larger than today's standard building bricks. Archeological evidence, cuneiform texts and the descriptions of historians such as Herodotus guided the reconstruction, according to Antiquities and Heritage Director Dr. Mu'ayyad Sa'eed. Work focused first on the Processional Way and the Ishtar Gate, the Temples of Ishtar, Nabushakhari and Ninmakh, and the fourth-century-BC Greek-style theater - built during the eastern campaigns of Alexander the Great, who died in Babylon.


Last year, the 5,000-square-meter (54,000-square-foot) Palace of Nebuchadnezzar II was restored. This so-called Southern Palace, from the seventh century BC, includes five major courtyards, 250 rooms and a brick entry arch 30 meters (100 feet) high. The throne room, called Al-'Arsh (Crown) Hall, is a 15- by 50-meter courtyard (50 by 160 feet) that serves as one festival auditorium; the more intimate Ninmakh Temple, honoring the mother goddess, is a second. The Babylonian Theater, used in ancient times for wrestling and public games, was restored to a height of 15 semicircular banks of seats accommodating 2,500 persons.


During the 1988 festival, all three venues were kept busy, with one or two different national groups performing in each on every evening. Again about 30 countries participated, but this year the time frame was condensed to 10 days. Music and dance companies from 10 Arab nations were scheduled, along with 14 East- and West-European groups, performers from Japan, China, India and Turkey and, representing the Americas, guitarist Maria Liva Sao Marcos of Brazil and the United States's Jeff Gardner Jazz Quartet.


Despite the packed schedule, second-time festival visitors commented that organizers had smoothed out many, if not all, of the 1987 inaugural season's wrinkles. Evidence of their planning was apparent. A special train made the Baghdad-Babylon round trip each evening, parking was ample, mobile Red Crescent clinics were set up on the grounds, museum exhibits and cafes were open, numerous kiosks sold iced drinks, and Iraqi handicrafts were displayed and sold in a colorful nomad tent.
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« Reply #9 on: October 27, 2008, 12:10:56 pm »









Festival managers made the Babylonian Theater's brick seats plushly comfortable by spreading woolen tribal carpets in natural white, blacks and browns over thick cushions. In Al-'Arsh Hall and the Ninmakh Temple the cushions padded handsome palm-frond wicker arm-chairs.


France and Hungary sent ballet companies to the festival, as did the Soviet Union, whose Leningrad Ballet presented a daring interpretation of Valery Gavrilin's modernistic Duel, followed by a bubbling dance production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night by Donizetti, which choreographer Boris Eifman likened to a sparkling toast. Austria sent pianist Paul Moser; Poland presented chamber music. Sudan was represented by a troupe of acrobats, The Netherlands by Slagwerk, an avant-garde percussion group, and Norway by the Glamos Folk Group, whose period-costumed dancers and fiddlers smiled their way through lively routines with flushed pink cheeks: Even in late September the brick walls of Al-'Arsh Hall radiated back a day's accumulation of solar heat into the night.


The Opera of Rome presented Rossini's Barber of Seville to an enthusiastic audience and England changed the pace with the rock group Hurrah, which played the Babylon Festival as part of a British Council-sponsored Middle East tour, accompanied by a BBC reporter and a writer-photographer team from Britain's hip, upscale magazine Sky.


Egypt sent both a folklore ensemble and a theatrical troupe, the Arab Theatrical Union, with popular screen actor Mahmoud Yasin starring in Wa-Oudsah, a highly stylized drama about Palestinian aspirations and the only overtly political note on the festival program. Accompanied by the Tariq Farid Orchestra, the Alexandria Folklore Troupe, directed by Hassen Abu Shanab, presented a colorful and contagiously light-hearted program which idealized village friendships and camaraderie like a Middle Eastern adaptation of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. In one delightful dance a fisherman wound up hooked, after proper - but token - resistance, by a winsome village maiden.
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« Reply #10 on: October 27, 2008, 12:12:14 pm »









Tunisia's Mahadat Rashidi Troupe featured a chorus dressed in tuxedos and white evening gowns and accompanied by violins, cellos and bass viol - but with a classically Middle Eastern sound. Two young female soloists were warmly received and male vocalist Lutfi Bushnak set the audience alight. But it was Shbelia Rashid, like an Eastern Ella Fitzgerald, who had the crowd swaying and clapping to her rhythms. In the Babylonian Theater a little girl in a yellow dress danced unselfconsciously in the aisles, then dashed up the steps onto the stage. To the cheers of her fans, Shbelia bestowed on the child a kiss to remember for a lifetime, shooed her good-naturedly off the stage - and never skipped a beat.


Host Iraq presented various traditional music and dance groups in all three theaters on six different evenings, but foreign visitors were most surprised by the Iraqi National Symphony, now in its fourth decade and conducted at Babylon by Soviet maestro Yuri Aliev. The 60 men and women of the orchestra included conservatory students and their teachers; in a concert at the Ninmakh Temple they played "Greeting to Babylon," by Azerbaijani composer Ali Sade, Joseph Haydn's Concerto for Oboe, featuring soloist Leis Abdul Remy, and Beethoven's Second Symphony in D major.


In the international audience, on opening night as on other nights of the festival, a few blue berets stood out - the headgear of off-duty officers and men of the United Nations truce observation and support forces. Above their heads in the southeastern sky the waxing moon, like Ishtar emerging from the underworld, was rising above the proscenium, and beside it, orange Mars. The Romans, first stirring in Babylon's latter years, had identified the planet with their god of war, and fittingly, on this very night, Mars had begun to pull away from its closest approach to Earth in 17 years. Surely this was a portent - though few in the packed theater but romantics and poets thought such thoughts as television cameras began to carry the show live to a nationwide Iraqi audience - and record much of it, too, for rebroadcast throughout the Gulf states and the rest of the Arab world.


There were encores for all the opening-night performances, but the term "encore" takes on new meaning in ancient Babylon. As the Babylon Festival continues into its third and subsequent seasons, these ruins beside the Euphrates, witness to a civilization over 6,000 years old, echo again to the sounds and sights of music, dance and drama. For a few glittering weeks each year, Babylon the splendid is reborn.
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« Reply #11 on: October 27, 2008, 12:16:25 pm »









 
                                                   Notes on a First Encounter






Written and illustrated by
Marjorie Krebs Tracy

The warm smiles of the Iraqis, their courtesy and their vivid, living sense of history were the strongest impressions of my first visit to the Middle East.


Just one week after our wedding, my husband and I were in restored Babylon to report on the Second Babylon Festival. A young journalist from South Yemen discovered that we were recently married, and playfully quoted, "Shahr al-`asal, shahr al-basal" He explained the Middle Eastern saying, which describes what a honeymoon may be: "A month of honey, [or] a month of onions" Iraq helped make ours a shahr al-'asal.


The first night of the festival was designed to transport us into the past. The ancient roadway was flanked by dozens of men dressed as Sumerian soldiers, holding tall torches against the darkness. As I walked along the torchlit road in a long, white Moroccan cotton dress, I imagined myself a woman of 3000 BC. The pageantry of the festival emphasized the ancient cultures and their value to Iraq today.


The tie between past and present is particularly well portrayed at Baghdad's beautiful Iraq Museum. The museum windows are made of modern glass bricks, but each block is imprinted with what appears to be the cuneiform writing of ancient times.


As I wandered through room after room of relics of some of the most ancient cultures known, I realized that the faces of the museum figures are also the faces of today's Iraqis. We watched a young woman gazing at an ancient statuette; the two faces shared the same large eyes and gentle smile.


Perhaps one can see the value of eye-contact between people more clearly in a country where one doesn't speak the language. I found myself watching eyes more than ever before. Women paint their eyes to emphasize their loveliness; the children's eyes are lively and expressive.


The eyes of an old shopkeeper in the suq were wonderfully kind. We were looking at several misbahas - prayer beads or "worry beads." I knew I could not pay the price he was asking, and I said so. He simply said, "What would you like to pay?" and when I stated a much lower price, told me, "They're yours." He was presenting me with a gift, and I was grateful. His eyes were the same color as the sandalwood of the beads.


On a street corner in the suq another old man sold roughly cut squares of sweet-smelling olive-oil soap. The cakes were stacked in boxes and bags on the sidewalk beside him. He was doing a lively business: People were buying 10 or 12 bars at a time. When he saw us watching him, he smilingly scrubbed at his head with his hands as if to say, "It's good for your hair." He was clean-scrubbed himself - a good advertisement - so we bought a dozen bars. Friends who went to buy soap the next day could not find him; I visualized him at home in his village, making more soap to bring to the Baghdad market.


Boys walked through the narrow streets with trays of hot tea in small, tapered glasses. In one shop where we were buying note cards, the tea-seller had just delivered three glasses to the proprietor and his two friends. The day was hot, and when the merchant saw me thirstily eyeing the glasses he insisted on giving his to me. I have never tasted a better or more welcome drink. Later, when another merchant hailed one of the teasellers and offered us two glasses of the strong, sweet drink, the boy waited politely, looking as if he had all day, while we sat in chairs on the sidewalk, stirred and drank our tea, and finally returned his glasses.


A radio reporter who was interviewing visitors to the festival asked my impression of women's roles in Baghdad. A friend told me later that the interviewer had hoped I would comment on the new freedom of women. I hadn't thought to speak about it because the women I had seen seemed to be very much as women everywhere I've been - working as tour guides, hotel desk clerks, bank clerks, airline stewardesses, or hostesses in dining rooms. On the street, most wore Western clothing; those in black abayas were usually older. Every day a rather jovial young woman in a billed cap and work pants tended the hotel flower gardens.


When my husband spoke his "simplified" Arabic, people responded with amused, but very kind, smiles. We talked one evening with five or six young, off-duty soldiers. "Teach us an American phrase," they said, and he taught them to say, "I play football." It wrenched my heart to think how those friendly boys had been threatened by the war so recently over. They were so open, carefree and handsome.


At the festival's music symposium we talked again with bright teenage boys, students of the 'ud master Munir Bashir. Gently and a little shyly they asked us questions and answered ours. We asked them about their schoolwork and their music, and with proud smiles they generously edged one boy forward: "Here is the best student - he plays the 'ud better than any of us." Their open admiration was refreshing.


We came back from Babylon with photographs of the festival, the dancers and the theaters, but the pictures in my mind are of the warm smiles of the people I encountered in Iraq - the young soldiers, the students, the woman in the garden and the kindly old bead seller in the suq .
 




William Tracy, a lecturer on Islam and Middle Eastern affairs, is a former assistant editor of Aramco World and remains a frequent contributor.

Marjorie Krebs Tracy is a research librarian living in Austin, Texas.





This article appeared on pages 2-7 of the May/June 1989 print edition of Saudi Aramco World.
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« Reply #12 on: November 02, 2008, 05:24:34 pm »










                                           MEDICINE IN ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA






Historical Background



The name Mesopotamia (meaning "the land between the rivers") refers to the geographic region which lies near the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and not to any particular civilization. In fact, over the course of several millennia, many civilizations developed, collapsed, and were replaced in this fertile region.

The land of Mesopotamia is made fertile by the irregular and often violent flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. While these floods aided agricultural endeavors by adding rich silt to the soil every year, it took a tremendous amount of human labor to successfully irrigate the land and to protect the young plants from the surging flood waters. Given the combination of fertile soil and the need for organized human labor, perhaps it is not surprising that the first civilization developed in Mesopotamia.

The origins of civilization can be traced to a group of people living in southern Mesopotamia called the Sumerians. By c.3500 BCE, the Sumerians had developed many of the features that characterized subsequent civilizations. Towns grew to be cities, an early form of pictographic writing was used, metal working had begun, and temples were built on a monumental scale.

Generally speaking, however, true civilization is said to have begun around 3100 BCE with the development of cuneiform writing. Cuneiform was a system of writing established by the Sumerians which required the use of a stylus in order to make wedge-shaped marks on wet clay tablets, once the tablets were dry they could by stored, transported, etc. After its development, cuneiform became the dominant system of writing in Mesopotamia for over 2000 years. Even after Sumerian became extinct as a spoken language, many other Near Eastern cultures continued to write using cuneiform. As a result of its extensive use of several centuries, many cuneiform tablets have survived. These tablets provide historians with the opportunity to glimpse the culture of the ancient Mesopotamian civilizations.
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« Reply #13 on: November 02, 2008, 05:29:15 pm »










Mesopotamian Medicine: The Sources



Most of the information available to modern scholars comes from cuneiform tablets.

There are no useful pictorial representations that have survived in ancient Mesopotamian art, nor
has a significant amount of skeletal material yet been analyzed. Unfortunately, while an abundance
of cuneiform tablets have survived from ancient Mesopotamia, relatively few are concerned with
medical issues. Many of the tablets that do mention medical practices have survived from the library
of Asshurbanipal, the last great king of Assyria.

The library of Asshurbanipal was housed in the king's palace at Nineveh, and when the palace was burned by invaders, around 20,000 clay tablets were baked (and thereby preserved) by the great fire.

In the early 1920's, the 660 medical tablets from the library of Asshurbanipal were published by Camp-
bell Thompson. Other medical texts have been published more recently. For example, Franz Kocher has published a series of volumes called Die Babylonishch-Assyrische Medizin. The first four of these contain 420 tablets found from sites other than Assurbanipal's library, including the library of a medical practitioner (an asipu) from Neo-Assyrian Assur, as well as Middle Assyrian and Middle Babylonian texts. The remaining two volumes of Kocher's work augment Campbell Thompson, providing new joins of broken fragments and much material uncovered in the British Museum.

At least one more volume of Nineveh texts has been announced. In addition, the series Spaet Babylonische Texte aus Uruk contains some 30 medical texts not included in Kocher's work. The vast majority of these tablets are prescriptions, but there are a few series of tablets that contained entries that were directly related to one another, and these have been labeled "treatises." The largest surviving such medical treatise from ancient Mesopotamia is known as "Treatise of Medical Diagnosis and Prognoses."

The text of this treatise consists of 40 tablets collected and studied by the French scholar R. Labat. Although the oldest surviving copy of this treatise dates to around 1600 BCE, the information contained in the text is an amalgamation of several centuries of Mesopotamian medical knowledge. The diagnostic treatise is organized in head to toe order with separate subsections covering convulsive disorders, gynecology and pediatrics.

It is unfortunate that the antiquated translations available at present to the non-specialist make ancient Mesopotamian medical texts sound like excerpts from a sorcerer's handbook. In fact, as recent research is showing, the descriptions of diseases contained in the diagnostic treatise demonstrate a keen ability to observe and are usually astute.

Virtually all expected diseases can be found described in parts of the diagnostic treatise, when those parts are fully preserved, as they are for neurology, fevers, worms and fluxes, VD and skin lesions. The medical texts are, moreover, essentially rational, and some of the treatments, as for example those designed for excessive bleeding (where all the plants mentioned can be easily identified), are essentially the same as modern treatments for the same condition.
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« Reply #14 on: November 02, 2008, 05:35:34 pm »









Mesopotamian Concepts of Disease and Healing



Mesopotamian diseases are often blamed on pre-existing spirits: gods, ghosts, etc. However, each
spirit was held responsible for only one of what we would call a disease in any one part of the body.

So usually "Hand of God X" of the stomach corresponds to what we call a disease of the stomach.

A number of diseases simply were identified by names, "bennu" for example.

Also, it was recognized that various organs could simply malfunction, causing illness.

Gods could also be blamed at a higher level for causing named diseases or malfunctioning of organs, although in some cases this was a way of saying that symptom X was not independent as usual, but was caused in this case by disease Y.

It can also be shown that the plants used in treatment were generally used to treat the symptoms
of the disease, and were not the sorts of things generally given for magical purposes to such a spirit.

Presumably specific offerings were made to a particular god or ghost when it was considered to be a causative factor, but these offerings are not indicated in the medical texts, and must have been found in other texts.
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