Hymn to Shamash

‘Today, almost every archaeological site in southern Iraq is under the control of looters.’ – Robert Fisk in yesterday’s Independent.

This piece by Fisk gets to me somewhere very deep and personal. Long ago, when I was a child, I was sent to Sunday School regularly by my Christian parents. On one occasion a young man called Alan Millard came to talk to us. His father was a member of my parents’ church (or assembly, as they preferred to call it, being Open Brethren).

It was some time in the early sixties. I was about ten or eleven, I think. Alan was near the beginning of what was to develop into a distinguished academic career as an authority on ancient Near Eastern languages and inscriptions. These days he is a professor emeritus of the University of Liverpool. But at that stage he had been working as an archaeologist on sites in what we called the Bible Lands. He gave us a talk on life in the ancient Near East (‘at the time of Abraham’) and illustrated it by showing us a handful of real archaeological finds that he had brought with him. One of them was a cuneiform tablet from Mesopotamia, modern Iraq.

At the end of the session, we children were allowed to go and look more closely at these objects where they were laid out on a table. And Alan let me pick up the cuneiform tablet and hold it in my hand for a few moments. I have never forgotten the sense of wonder and strangeness at holding something so immensely ancient: and knowing that the marks on it were writing, a message from the distant past.

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‘The looters have been told by the traders that if an object is worth anything at all, it must have an inscription on it.’ – Joanne Farchakh, archaeologist, in an appendix to Fisk’s article.

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I cannot blame those Iraqi people who are looting and selling their country’s heritage. It has been estimated that by this stage over a million Iraqis have died as a result of the occupation. About 2.3 million Iraqis have gone into international exile. The number of people internally displaced are variously put at between 4 million and 6 million, most of whom are subsisting in wretched conditions. This is out of an original population of just over 25 million.

Iraq has been ruined. People are surviving as and how they can, and who can be surprised? I do blame the dealers in the rest of the world who are facilitating this and growing fat on it. And I blame the US military, who have built bases on several important archaeological sites: even on the city of Abraham, Ur of the Chaldees.

This is a fragment of a Babylonian hymn to the god Shamash:

The progeny of those who deal unjustly will not prosper,
What their mouth utters in thy presence
Thou wilt destroy, what issues from their mouth thou wilt dissipate.
Thou knowest their transgressions, the plan of the wicked thou rejectest.
All, whoever they be, are in thy care...
He who takes no bribe, who cares for the oppressed,
Is favoured by Shamash,—his life shall be prolonged.

trans. Morris Jastrow (1861–1921)


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