By Bruce Feiler
Published: April 25, 2004
When U.S. Army chaplain Steve Munson arrived in southern Iraq last summer, he held an open-air baptism in the ancient city of Ur, where the Bible says Abraham was born. When Lithuanian troops patrol the city of Qurnah, they stop by a small concrete park dotted with olive trees. It is called the Garden of Eden.
The U.S.-led effort to rebuild Iraq is taking place not merely on the landscape of the modern Middle East but also on the most storied, most volatile and most important canvas in the history of humankind.
The land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers?the ?Cradle of Civilization??was known in antiquity as Mesopotamia and gave birth to the earliest empires in history, from Sumer to Babylon. The Garden of Eden was located here, the Tower of Babel was built here, the first alphabet was scripted here, the day was first carved into 24 hours here, and some of the greatest stories ever told were first uttered here, from the epic of Gilgamesh to the saga of Abraham.
And yet, for the last 35 years, these sites have been mostly closed to the West and, in the case of Babylon, crudely reconstructed as a propagandist playground to promote the idea that Saddam Hussein was the new Nebuchadnezzar, the great emperor of antiquity.
In recent years, I have been retracing the Bible through the desert, exploring the link between the past and today. I dreamed of seeing where the Tigris and Euphrates merge. I longed to walk where Abraham first yearned for God. When the fall of Saddam seemed to fling open the door to the past, I knew I must go now.
I set out with photographer Gwendolen Cates, starting in Kuwait. There, we strapped ourselves into a C-130 aircraft and took off for Baghdad, making a corkscrew landing to avoid shoulder-launched missiles. In a war zone, peace is a hotel room with tape on the windows, only one blackout per hour and the occasional rat-tat-tat of gunfire to keep one?s dreams on edge.
The Garden of Eden
The road south from Baghdad is cluttered with the detritus of war: bombed-out bridges, scorched tanks, looted oil tankers. Every few feet is a fruit stand selling the spoils of lifted sanctions: apples, oranges, and bunches and bunches of bananas.
Soon the scenery changes: Women in black veils swarm the roadside, giant portraits of Shia ayatollahs arise. And water appears everywhere?rivers, puddles, canals. We have reached the womb of the world.
The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the great double highway of antiquity, begin in Turkey, pass through Syria, then sprint through Iraq. Around 10,000 years ago, the earliest civilizations tamed these rivers and invented agriculture. Their origin stories suggest that the world was created as land arose from these waters. Genesis echoes this idea with earth emerging from watery chaos.
The Garden of Eden was located here, the Tower of Babel was built here, the first alphabet was scripted here.
The wetlands of southern Iraq evoke this idyllic time; they also evince evil. For millennia, the rivers were filtered by an intricate web of marshes. Saddam drained the marshes to penalize his Shia rivals and to prevent deserters from hiding here during his many wars. Nearly 8000 square miles, the land area of Massachusetts, were reduced to 400. Today, the area is a feeding ground for poverty and crime. We could only travel between 8 a.m. and noon; darkness is ruled by highway pirates.
?Saddam killed a culture that lasted thousands of years,? said Azzam Alwash, a local-born engineer and kayaker who has returned from California as part of a private foundation to help reflood the area. ?He destroyed 350,000 lives.?
Alwash named his organization Eden Again to invoke the idea that the original Paradise was here. Was he right? We don?t know. The Bible suggests that the Garden of Eden was located at the confluence of four rivers: the Tigris, the Euphrates and two that are unknown. We turned north from Basra, through an ethereal landscape filled with date palms, water buffalo and straw huts. Not the manicured greenery imagined in European paintings, but still alluring.
The Tigris and Euphrates merge today in the abject town of Qurnah. This confluence is recent, after a 1954 flood redirected the Euphrates. On the banks is a tiny park about the size of an outdoor basketball court. It contains a shrine to Abraham, a few trees, lots of concrete and no grass. Joni Mitchell was right: They paved Paradise.
A swarm of children engulfed us as we arrived. They climbed the trees, squealing, and for the first time during our travels, filled the air with hope. Soon, though, a huddle of men appeared, flashing guns. Another followed. Our guide insisted, ?We must go.? Suddenly we were thrust back into the real world of peril. There is no Eden here.
Ur
A few hours west from Qurnah is the city of Nasiriyah, a dusty crossroads with little water and streets dank with poverty. A narrow road leads to the ruins of ancient Ur, the birthplace of recorded thought. The site announces itself with a looming ziggurat, a stepped pyramid built to the sky. Approximately 150 feet wide and 60 feet tall (it once reached 75 feet), the ziggurat was built by the Sumerians in 2013 B.C.E. out of clay and baked bricks, to draw closer to the god of the moon.
For me, Ur held a more personal connection. Genesis 11 suggests that Abraham lived here, and my mother?s family name means House of Abraham. After 9/11, I wrote a book about using Abraham?the shared ancestor of Jews, Christians and Muslims?as a vessel for reconciliation.
Arriving at the base of the ziggurat, I felt a surge of elation that was part relief at reaching here safely and part awe at witnessing the timeless human urge to reach out and touch our gods. I threw off my armor and climbed the 122 steps to the summit.
Some U.S. soldiers had gathered to say farewell after their year at an adjacent base. ?There were a lot of times?heat, sandstorms?when life here was pretty demoralizing,? said Capt. Scott Barnett. ?To get up at sunrise and see this right outside the back of your tent was a reminder: ?I think I?ll get with the chaplain tonight and do a little devotional.??
Chaplain Steve Munson went further. One morning he lined an ammo crate with plastic and held a communal baptism; a soldier played ?Amazing Grace? on a saxophone. ?It reminded me that God has us here for a purpose,? said Munson.
Standing at the base of the ziggurat, I felt a surge of elation that was part awe at witnessing the timeless human urge to reach out and touch our gods.
The ruins themselves span 30 acres?a warren of royal palaces, shops and tombs. Leonard Woolley excavated Ur in the 1920s, and the remains are partially restored. Dhief Muhsen, the weathered, knowledgeable caretaker, pointed to where a 4000-year-old golden harp had been pulled from the ground.
Of all the people who ever lived in Ur, I asked Muhsen, whom would he most want to meet?
?The person who invented writing,? he said, referring to the Sumerian innovation of scratching cuneiform into soft clay tablets. ?Writing is the basis of all things: education, industry, trade.?
?And what would you say?? I asked.
?You served the world. Anytime anyone anywhere sits down to write a letter, they should thank you. They are a child of Iraq.?
Babylon
Several hours north is the crown jewel of Iraqi sites, Babylon, home to the world?s first complete legal text, the Code of Hammurabi, and to one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the Hanging Gardens. In 586 B.C.E., Nebuchadnezzar burned Jerusalem and exiled the Israelites to this river city.
Modern-day Babylon is different from Ur. For starters, it?s located inside a coalition base, with satellite trucks, mess halls and a buzz of troops. Noting that the Tower of Babel was built here?which resulted in God destroying the building and creating many languages?Major Dezso Kiss of Hungary observed that the soldiers who are now here communicate in one language: English. ?The Tower has finally been built,? he said.
Also, Babylon has been restored as a sort of Six Flags Over Hammurabi, with canals, picnic grounds and gift shops with plastic trinkets. Lording above the ruined palaces is the marble palace that Saddam built for himself.
While the crenellated restorations have an empty, Epcot feel to them, the occasional real ruins have enormous power. I walked through the Ishtar gate with John Russell, a bookish, poetic archaeologist from Boston who was advising the Coalition. Russell came to Iraq at personal peril to help mitigate the devastation done by looters to Iraq?s 10,000 ancient sites. Major sites still look like Swiss cheese, he said, with robbers continuing to shovel into the ground, pulling out objects willy-nilly. ?Sites that would have taken centuries to excavate, each of which would have rewritten our history books countless times over, are just gone,? he said.
"Sites that would have rewritten our history books countless times are just gone," laments one archaeologist.
?I worry, because we call this the Cradle of Civilization. If we?re civilized, we?re going to find the evidence for that here. If we destroy that, what does that make us??
?One of the most famous passages of the Bible,? I said, ?is ?By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept.?? His voice cracked: ?You can?t fly over hundreds of acres of our past that?s destroyed and not weep.?
The Museum
Compared with the wretchedness in the south, Baghdad is alive with commerce and anxiously making a fresh start. Bombed-out government complexes share streets with shops selling satellite dishes and air conditioners. The pedestal that held Saddam?s statue has been filled with a woman holding a moon?a symbol of freedom.
One emblem of the war?s horror and tentative recovery is the Iraq National Museum. Last April, looters rampaged the central depository of Mesopotamian art. Of the museum?s 170,000 objects, 14,000 were stolen, many in an apparent inside job. ?This is not only the heritage of Iraqis,? said Dr. Donny George, the urbane director of the museum. ?It is the heritage of humankind.?
Today, more than 5000 looted objects have been recovered. The U.S. and private donors have earmarked millions for reconstruction. George hopes to reopen the museum in two years. Meanwhile, he has regained respect for the resiliency of Iraqis.
?Some leaders believe they make history,? he said. ?They?re wrong. People make history. People produce art, songs, writing. And the people are looking for a better future now.?
Nineveh
Our last leg took us north, through the anarchic Sunni triangle, to the mountainous northern region, where plump sheep wander the grass-lined slopes and ravens pluck at fields brimming with vegetables.
"Some leaders believe they make history. But people make history. They produce art, songs, writing."
Here may be the greatest concentration of ancient sites outside Egypt: Hatra, the immense Arabian stronghold from the third century B.C.E.; Nimrud, the Assyrian city famed for its stunning collection of gold jewelry; and Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, built by Sennacherib and reviled in the Bible for destroying Israel. Jonah was sent to denounce Nineveh before he was swallowed by the whale.
Wandering these faded behemoths, with their soaring pasts and crumbled dreams, I was struck by how strongly the pulse of Mesopotamia still throbs through the country?and through me. Life here seems instantly familiar, because we learn about these places in second grade and read about them in the Bible. This is the unspoken secret of the place: It?s more dangerous than it appears on television, but it feels more like home.
In fact, being here filled a gap in my identity that I hadn?t even realized was there: I had finally touched the bedrock of history.
So, what morals did I come away with? First is that political power is fleeting, from that of Nebuchadnezzar to Sennacherib to Saddam. Yet every empire also leaves echoes behind?such as writing or the idea of a garden paradise?that become embedded in the onrush of history.
Second, no civilization has the exclusive claim to truth. To walk in these sites is to appreciate how history is written by winners and losers. The grandeur of Babylon suggests that Nebuchadnezzar was a daring commander and visionary leader, yet the Bible presents him as a villain.
History is so powerful here that even Saddam tried to link himself with the past by carving his initials on every third stone in Hatra?tens of thousands of claims to ownership. Yet soon his name will be etched away and his arrogation erased.
The major lesson of Iraq, I believe, is that different cultures must live side by side.
Finally, the major lesson of Iraq, I believe, is that different cultures must live side by side. The one iconic image that links Sumer, Babylon and Nimrud is the ziggurat, but each one was built to a different god. The Bible casts this structure as the Tower of Babel, a ziggurat that led humans closer to the one God. Babel has long been viewed as a warning: God is so threatened by humans cooperating that he disperses them into many nations.
But wandering these ruins, I suddenly viewed the same story as a plea, and maybe a blessing: God wants there to be many people in the world, living alongside one another, dignified in their difference yet striving toward a future of peace.
How You Can Help
The Emergency Protection for Iraqi Cultural Antiquities Act of 2004 is currently before the U.S. Senate. To express support, contact your Senators or Representative, as well as Sen. Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) and Rep. Bill Thomas (R., Calif.). For links to more on U.S. efforts at cultural heritage reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, see below.
PARADE Contributing Editor Bruce Feiler is the author of Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths , now in paperback, and Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses .
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