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My book: Saddam, The Origins, The Rise And The Fall |
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Sunday, 10 February 2008 12:12 |
Today’s posting to this blog is the first part of the introduction to my book on Saddam Hussein and his regime which I am going to start serializing on this website. The book was lying on the shelf for a very long time after finishing it at the end of 2003, because nobody in the publishing world was interested in giving it a chance to see the light. I am going to continue posting parts of the book on The Hanodi Letter and hope for the best. I very sincerely hope that you would like this piece of work and would very much welcome your suggestions and critiques; you have always been very kind and unusually supportive.
Introduction: Iraq in History
Part One – The Mesopotamian Civilization
THE history of modern Iraq as a separate entity began with the joining of three provinces from the Old Ottoman Empire following its defeat and dismemberment after the 1914-1918 war, but this country has a much older history which dates back to Sumer were humanity started its march into history more than 5000 years ago. Man was able here to achieve some astonishing accomplishments, the invention of writing and the ability to control the water supply to the lands and start a real revolution in agriculture which allowed him to create a very advanced society and inaugurate man’s first civilization.
IN the great deserts and the equatorial forests and in the vicinity of the Poles “Man” is overwhelmed by a hostile nature which is continually threatening his existence, in temperate areas on the other hand he –man- is at home in a favorable and a challenging environment, the situation ten thousands years ago in this area was like that, the ice plates of the last ice age were receding northwards leaving in their wake increasingly dry and hot lands but in the near east the balance between man and his environment was extremely favorable and very balanced a very good example of the role of geography in development which explains the great role the geography of Mesopotamia came to play in the subsequent cultural and economic development of the area.
IN the narrow sense Mesopotamia is the area between the two rivers Tigris and Euphrates this was the name given to the place by Herodotus –the father of history when he visited it in the 5th century BC. The area which corresponds roughly to the southern part of modern Iraq below the bottleneck at Baghdad. In the broader sense the name Mesopotamia has is nowadays more frequently used to describe the area bounded on the northeast by the Zagros mountains and on the southwest by the edge of the Arabian plateau and stretching from Persian gulf in the southwest to the spurs of the Anti-Taurus mountains in the northwest, about a 186,000 square miles. Only from the latitude of Baghdad were the two rivers reach their nearest points do the Tigris and Euphrates become truly twin rivers and continue to do dos so until they meet at the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab the 200 KM long and less than one KM wide waterway which empties into the gulf the ownership of which was always a source of great disputes between the Iraqis and the Iranians
MOST of the southern part of this area is nowadays dry barren and very hot and practically inhospitable in most of its expanse. It is very difficult to imagine that this piece of harsh geography was 8000 years ago the womb and the cradle of man’s first civilization, this in fact was made possible when the inhabitants of that place were able to control the water supply to the cultivable lands by an extremely ingenious system of irrigation. There is a big difference between the level of the land from the alluvial plains below Baghdad to the mouth of the gulf which is not more than a 100 feet which causes a very slow passage of the rivers allowing a continuous and a very heavy deposit of silt which results in a steady rise of the riverbeds which very often overflow of their banks, also sometimes the rivers themselves change their course a situation which does not encourage successful agriculture. This was the genius of the Sumerians, they were able to invent an extremely successful system of dikes, dams and canals which allowed them to make excellent use of the surplus water during times of flooding by which they were capable to produce a great deal of agricultural products mainly grain which was used to feed an increasingly growing population with the surplus used in the service of the higher interests of the state. This is and how man’s civilization was born.
CIVILIZATION was born, cradled and nurtured in Mesopotamia, but this birth was not a sudden chance eruption out of a vacuum, it was the culmination of a long period of evolution. The man of Mesopotamia needed centuries of preparations and experimentation before he was able to present to the world the incredible Sumerian Civilization.
THE Sumerians who were to occupy the center stage of history for the next thousand years were unknown until very recently. Who were they? And were did they come from? This is still a hotly debated question, but 5,000 years ago they were here and they provided the catalyst and the accelerative force which punctuated the earlier development and caused the sudden eruption into civilization. The Sumerians were undoubtedly a unique lot, there must have been something very special in their physical characteristics and psychology which allowed them to take over things and give a good deal of momentum to the earlier slow development and helped man to advance very rapidly [not by force] from a village life into one of big cities. This encouraged growth and sophistication of the existing systems and institutions and they left the world a number of truly fascinating technological and cultural contributions, including the first city states, the wheeled vehicles, the potter’s wheels and the first codes of law, two of their most important achievements were the invention of writing and in the field of agriculture.
WRITING, the cuneiform is one of the greatest contributions of the Sumerians to humanity. History began with writing which gave us our first solid ideas about the story of man, it was one of their earliest accomplishments, in the beginning it was pictographs inscribed on clay with a stylus made of reef or wood, the cut edge of the stylus produced wedge shaped impressions on the clay and hence the name cuneiform which is what the earliest writing is called. History started with writing, history began at Sumer.
THE successful improvement of the agricultural process is often called the agricultural revolution; this was achieved by the creation of an efficient irrigation system which made it possible to make very good use of the surplus water during times of flooding during periods of scarcity. When water is available there is a surplus of agricultural products which was used to feed an increasingly growing population and to use it in the service of the higher interests of the state.
HERE was born some of the earliest philosophies, religions and myths of mankind. Here were built great cities were very complicated political and legal systems evolved and extremely advanced science medicine and art developed all inside a strict code of morality and law.
THE Mesopotamian civilization lasted for thousands of years with a striking cultural unity. From Summer its first center it radiated over the entire near east and was kept alive in other major centers, towns like UR, Nipper, Uruk, Agade, Babylon, Assur and Nineveh all situated on or near the Tigris and Euphrates within the boundaries of modern Iraq remaining fairly uniformly throughout although repeatedly shaken by political convulsions and attacks from outside its borders. At the beginning of the Christian era however, the Mesopotamian civilization gradually declined and vanished, but a great deal of its cultural and scientific achievements were salvaged by the Greeks and later became part of recent western heritage. The rest either perished or were buried for centuries awaiting the picks of archaeologists. A glorious past was forgotten. In Man’s short memories of these opulent cities, of their powerful gods, of their mighty monarchs only a few often distorted names survived. the dissolving rain, the sand bearing winds, the earth splitting sun conspired to obliterate most of the material remains, and the desolate mounds which since concealed the ruins of Babylon and Nineveh offer perhaps the best lesson in modesty that we shall ever receive from history.
THE Mesopotamian civilization lasted for thousands of years and in spite of this very long history it maintained a fairly uniform and a striking cultural continuity. Although the center of that civilization changed from Sumer to Akkad to Babylonia and Assyria to come back again to Babylonia from were it was extinguished. It has been slowly weakened and declined for the last few centuries when the final blow came in 539 BC at the hands of the Persians.
THE Persians appear for the first time in history in the mid 9th century BC as the occupants of a small state in southeast Iran which was founded by Achaemenes who gave it his name which by the 6th century BC has become so powerful, its fifth king Cyrus has become the ruler of all Iran and his further conquests extended his empire from Mesopotamia to India. Cyrus ruled Mesopotamia from Babylon until 331 BC when they were dislodged from the country at the hands of Alexander the Great who defeated the Persians in the battle of Guagamela [near Arbil] on the first of October 331 BC which opened the way to the Greek warrior to Babylonia and Persia.
ALEXANDER was hoping to make Babylon with Alexandria in Egypt the center of his empire but his very early death only few years later in Babylon [13 June 323 BC] resulted in dividing his empire between his more important generals who struggled for many years between themselves to prevent its reconstruction during that very complex period. Mesopotamia fell to Seleucus who established an empire which extended during its heydays from Eastern Europe to Mesopotamia to India, but this one in its turn started to lose control of large chunks of its territories including Mesopotamia which was conquered by the Parthians in 126 BC.
THE Parthian were a nomadic people originating in the steppe country between the Caspian and Aral seas the Parthian dynasty that was to displace the Greeks was at about 250 BC and was able a 100 years later to extend its rule to as far as Mesopotamia and during the next four centuries were able to extend their rule deep into Europe. But it in its turn fell under Sassanian domination AD 227.
THE Sassanians are an old Iranian dynasty which started in AD 224 and it was to last for another four centuries until it was destroyed by the Arabs during the years AD 637-651. Very little is known of the administrative social and economic status of Mesopotamia under these rulers but again shortly before the Islamic conquest the usual combination of military setbacks internal strife and economic difficulties brought about the decline of the Sassanian kingdom and the ruin of Mesopotamia and then the Muslims arrived in AD 651 which inaugurated the second most important phase in the history of Iraq.
Najeeb Hanoudi
Friday, February 8, 2008
Berkley, Michigan
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