Preserving Ancient Irbil, Iraq

National Public Radio (NPR) here in the United States broadcast a piece yesterday on the displacement of residents who live within the historic, walled citadel in Irbil, Iraq. This is the most recent of several stories that have appeared since the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom on the archaeology of Irbil, located within the Kurdish region of northern Iraq in the foothills of the Zagros mountains. The American archaeologist Robert Braidwood, who some have speculated to have been the prototype for "Indiana Jones," referred to this area as the "hilly flanks" of the Fertile Crescent. The Fertile Crescent itself, birthplace of the Sumerian civilization, is in central Iraq along the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates.

The citadel in Irbil is what we sometimes call a "palimpsest," created by at least five archaeological cultures spanning at least nine thousand years. Interviewed in 2005 by James Glanz of the New York Times, the archaeologist John Russell summarized the sequence as follows:

with its location in a rain-fed plain near the confluence of two rivers and the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, Irbil could have been the site of one of the earliest villages in the world. The first hunter- gatherer settlement could have started as early as 9300 B.C., followed by early pottery makers, the proto-Hassuna, by 7000 B.C. And unlike the arid regions to the south, the rain remained relatively steady in Irbil over the millennia, so there was no compelling reason to abandon a settlement.

By 1400 B.C., as cultures came and went, Irbil became one of the most important cities of the Assyrian Empire. The Assyrian Empire collapsed after a siege in 612 B.C. The Persians took over and were defeated in turn by Alexander the Great at Gaugemala, west of Irbil, in 331 B.C. About a millennium later, the Ottomans swept through after sacking the Abbasids, a Sunni Muslim dynasty centered in Baghdad. And in 1918, as the Ottoman Empire was crumbling, the British Army entered the city without resistance, and finally the modern nation of Iraq was born, with all the consequences that the world is now facing.

The Czech firm GEMA Art Group assessed the architectural monuments of the Irbil citadel in 2005 for UNESCO. Their proposal for the project, with a brief summary of the site's culture history, can be downloaded here. One of the primary objectives of the UNESCO project was to identify a structure that could be used as a focal point for the rehabilitation of the citadel at large and as a hosting place for cultural activities.

Only around 5000 people lived within the walls of the citadel in 2005, and that number had been declining in preceding decades. According to yesterday's NPR piece by Ivan Watson, local authorities evacuated all but one of the 828 families living there last month.

Each family was given a plot of land and $4,000 for new homes. They've been relocated to a barren plain about 25 miles east of Irbil, where an entire new neighborhood is under construction. The homes there are made of gray cinderblock, but that hasn't stopped them from naming their neighborhood "the New Citadel."

The old citadel, however, is now empty. Doors were left wide-open, and forgotten belongings — a woman's shoe, a child's schoolbook, empty packets of cigarettes and garbage — are scattered on the ground. The one family allowed to remain in the city is responsible for tending to the water tower, which supplies the city below. Aziza Kadr lives with her husband and children in the tower's shadow.

"I feel lonely here," she says. "It was very sad when all our neighbors left."