How do we imagine Iraq? Alongside oil and U.S. invasion, we might conjure “cradle of civilization”—a birthplace of civilizational “firsts,” from agriculture to writing to architecture and urbanisation. Yet, just as oil and war are imperial productions, so too are conventional historical narratives of the Mesopotamian cradle, developed as they were by 19th and 20th-century archaeologists, encyclopedists, and collectors operating under the aegis of European and later U.S. power. But how do these imperial histories intersect? In what ways did the excavation, removal, and interpretation of Mesopotamian artifacts, which were placed at the origin of a “universal” human history, combine with direct European political and corporate intervention to undercut incipient Iraqi nationalism, popular sovereignty, and self-development? What can the historiography of Mesopotamia, and its development within the modern history of Iraq, tell us about the relationship between power and knowledge? How has the discourse of the “cradle” helped to arrest the region in a state of permanent infancy?
In this course, we will explore the modern history of Iraq at the intersection of archaeology, museology, and imperialism. Starting with the first European digs, undertaken in the mid-19th century at Nimrud and Kalhu, we will reconstruct the narrativization of Mesopotamia as the “cradle of civilization”—as the origin point of a history that would reach its “higher” stages in Greece and Rome before terminating in Western global hegemony. We will see how archaeology itself, in its methods and orientation, internalized the prerogatives and attitudes of colonial power; and we will examine the ways in which modern museology enlisted ancient artifacts in its projection of “oriental” difference and underdevelopment. And we will look at how the archaeological construction of the “cradle” redounded to Western conceptualizations of Iraqi self-determination, as a “kingdom” impervious to popular anti-imperial organization and agitation from below. And finally, we’ll take our inquiry into the present, examining the consequences of U.S. invasion, from looting to the emergence of ISIS, on Iraqi heritage preservation, as well as recent developments in museum “decolonization” and artifactual repatriation. Readings will be drawn from mythological texts, creation epics, and religious and administrative texts, as well as scholarship by Irene Winter, Zainab Bahrani, Lamia al-Gailani, Susan Pollock, Mario Liverani, Nicholas Postgate, Lynn Meskell and Andrew George.
