Mesopotamia Through the Millennia

In the years on either side of General Petraeus’s surge (2008) I spent many a month living in Baghdad covering culture for the Wall Street Journal’s arts section. That meant abiding not in the secure Green Zone but out among the locals—very rare for outsiders—unarmed, unembedded, and frequently exposed to the city’s turbulence in search of stories: the last art gallery in Baghdad, the Iraq Symphony Orchestra, the embattled Ballet School, historical sites, and much else. Amid the booms and zings and present dangers, one got a seeping sense of a primevally fertile landscape haunted by ancient time. History had first emerged here (as opposed to prehistory); golden ages had come and gone, each time affecting the known world, acting as its pivot.

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