Uruk, located near Basra in Iraq, was one of the world’s first cities, and it is where the first writing system emerged. Babylon, just an hour’s taxi ride from Baghdad, was long the world’s largest and most sophisticated urban center. And the first truly international empire was ruled from the great Assyrian cities of Nineveh and Nimrud, near today’s Mosul in the northern part of the country.
The past four years of war and political turmoil have threatened that invaluable heritage—both above and under the ground. Donny George Youkhana, who chaired the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities, has been placed in jeopardy as well. The 56-year-old archaeologist has been vilified as a Baathist sympathizer by American neoconservatives, criticized as pro-West by Sunnis, and viewed with suspicion by Shiites because of his Christian background. “I never knew if I would make it to work,” he says of his daily life in Baghdad since 2003. “Or if I would make it home.” In 2006 he left Iraq, joining the ranks of more than 2 million Iraqis who have fled since 2003. Last November he accepted a teaching position at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is one of only a few hundred Iraqi refugees who have been admitted to the United States.
Donny George, as he is known in the States, started his career in archaeology as a storeroom assistant at Iraq’s National Museum, an institution that houses not only most of the artifacts excavated in Iraq during the past 150 years but also a vast store of knowledge on one of the first centers of civilization. Located in the center of Baghdad just off Haifa Street—now one of the most dangerous spots on the planet—the museum was founded in the 1920s by Gertrude Bell, an extraordinary British historian who helped draw Iraq’s borders, choose its first king, and negotiate a peace among Mesopotamia’s many clashing tribes.
Over the past three decades, George spent much of his time working on excavations in the field. Before the war, I accompanied him, along with some foreign archaeologists, to a site deep in the flat desert of southern Mesopotamia, where he was directing a dig at a buried 5,000-year-old Sumerian city. He talked of attending the weddings and funerals of the local tribe in order to win their trust and support in protecting the site. But when we arrived, he slung a rifle over his shoulder. During those hard years of economic sanctions, looters were already a danger.
