Sightseeing in a War Zone: A Selection from Mike Spencer Bown’s The World’s Most Travelled Man (2018)
“I hired a Kurdish guy to drive me out to some of the ancient Assyrian ruins nearby. I could spot an ethnic Kurdish man a mile away, as they have a distinctive look in the frontier region: often big faces with thick features and prodigious mustaches. Also, they exceeded any other group or nation in exuberance for President Bush and Americans. The Kurds imagined a bright future, and perhaps they were right. And I met my first Westerners—a North American couple who had popped over the border to research a book on the Kurds. The woman, especially, seemed on edge, and she appreciated my words of encouragement. I told them that as long as they stayed in this northern part of the country, it was way calmer than the rest in terms of gunfire at night and tension in the crowds.
The site now called Nimrud, ancient Kalhu, was occupied with Peshmerga fighters, the military arm of the Kurds. One of them showed me around the whole place for a dollar. Half the original monuments have been carted away; the other half matches the stuff on display in the British Museum. But it’s interesting to see these giant carvings and statues of weird and wonderful beasts in situ, stuck in mounds of dirt and at the bottom of shafts.
King Shalmaneser ruled the city over three thousand years ago, and another king, Ashurnasirpal II, made the place his capital. He had a palace built of costly woods such as tamarisk, pistachio, and cedar, erecting monumental limestone and alabaster friezes, black obelisks, a great ziggurat, and statues of colossal winged lions and bulls, up to thirty tons in weight, known as lamassu. The British made off with some of these lamassu, and much else besides, in the mid-nineteenth century, and put them on display in London. And a good thing they did, too; it has preserved much that would have been lost to looters stealing pieces to order for wealthy collectors, chiselling and smashing to get what they want. The destruction has been tremendous since 2015, when barbaric ISIS armies conquered the region. It gives me no pleasure to realize that I visited all the major ancient sites here and elsewhere before they were bulldozed and dynamited, a world heritage that is denied to future generations.
Inscriptions on limestone slabs have yielded to deciphering scholars; they boast of the ancient king’s war crimes: ‘Many of the captives I have taken and burned in a fire. Many I took alive. From some I cut off their hands to the wrists, from others I cut off their noses, ears and fingers; I put out the eyes of many of the soldiers. I burned their young men, women and children to death.’
The descendants of the Assyrians still live in the area, but society’s notion of what is acceptable has evolved over the millennia since Ashurnasirpal’s rule. Committing, and boasting of, war crimes, including burning captives alive, beheading, torture, and slavery, is as popular as ever, with ISIS the most enthusiastic modern participant. But no VIPs are going to pay good money for sculptors to carve new lamassu for their mansions. Their neighbours would laugh at them. Nowadays it is hoarding antiques like looted lamassu and stele that indicate a refined character.”—Mike Spencer Bown, The World's Most Travelled Man: A Twenty-Three-Year Odyssey to and through Every Country on the Planet (2018)
