"The dissolution of the colonial creation named "Iraq"
is now almost complete. Perhaps what comes next is a return to the
past; not a brutal Islamic "caliphate," but something more basic.Today, Mesopotamia is reappearing. The term is a Greek word meaning "the land between the two rivers."
The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers
are the defining features, each arising in mountains far to the north
of Baghdad. The rivers and their annual floods defined the landscape,
the cycle of life and the worldview of civilizations. The deserts to the
west and the mountains to the east and far north provided rough
boundaries and were liminal spaces related to the center, but yet
separate and apart, sunbaked and dangerous. Inside Mesopotamia was a
cauldron.
From the Sumerians of the third
millennium BCE through the Assyrian and Babylonian civilizations of the
second and first millennia BCE, to the Abbasids of the eighth century CE
and until the arrival of the British in the early twentieth century,
the space called Mesopotamia
was the container for civilizations that rose and collapsed. Cultures
invented writing and built the first cities, growing and shrinking in
response to changing river courses and global climate. They conquered
and were conquered, traded with surrounding regions, and formed a baggy
but recognizable whole—what we call Mesopotamian civilization."
was the container for civilizations that rose and collapsed. Cultures
invented writing and built the first cities, growing and shrinking in
response to changing river courses and global climate. They conquered
and were conquered, traded with surrounding regions, and formed a baggy
but recognizable whole—what we call Mesopotamian civilization."
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