Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (4 page)

A Mandaean baptism in the River Tigris. © Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images

Mandaeans claim descent from Seth, son of Adam, and to have received secret teachings passed on from Adam in the garden of Eden. When a Mandaean priest whispers into the ear of one of the faith’s followers, on the day of that individual’s first baptism, the person’s sacred name, the name that he or she must never disclose except to the closest family members, he says it in the language of ancient Babylon. When he takes down from his shelf one of the sacred books, containing legends and dialogues that were so secret that for many centuries they were not written down at all, he reads words that have been repeated by Mandaeans for more than fifteen centuries. When he ingests a sacred meal, performing the rituals in the precise order required for the salvation of souls, he is doing as his ancestors did for generations. These rituals connect the present day with the distant pre-Christian past, the funerary banquet of the Mithraists and the Egyptians, and the teachings of the Manichees, the now extinct religion that in its day had followers as far away as China and competed with Christianity for the loyalty of St. Augustine.

I encountered this extraordinary religion in the least promising of circumstances. In 2006 I was stewing in the dusty heat of Baghdad, suffering not from fear but from frustration. Barbed wire circumscribed my world—the Green Zone, a five-square-mile twenty-first-century dystopia filled with concrete berms and barbed wire, highway bridges that ended in midair where a bomb had cleaved them, and tunnels walled off to block intruders. In this place, which once had been a suburb specially built for the former dictator Saddam Hussein and his closest henchmen, swimming pools had now been dutifully filled in, gaudy palaces had been partitioned, and a private zoo had been evacuated to make room for an ever-expanding legion of Western bureaucrats who, exhausted by long days at their computer screens, occasionally fortified themselves with lobster flown in from America or with liquor served in bars closed to Iraqis, where the overwhelmingly male clientele swayed and shifted their feet collectively whenever a woman entered.

I had at least the distraction of working in an office wholly staffed by Iraqis. During Ramadan, when they neither ate nor drank during the day, I sometimes slipped surreptitiously into the kitchen, anxious not to offend but in need of sugary soft drinks to stave off torpor. Otherwise, I tried to do as they did—up to the point where they had to leave the safety of the Green Zone. In the evenings during Ramadan we ate
iftar
together, the pleasure of the dates and simple soup magnified if I had managed to survive the day without eating. I tried to mimic the deep-voweled, complex Baghdadi accent, learned to navigate the shabby corridors of various government departments, and steeled myself to the ghastly news that came in every day from the world outside that office, where Sunni and Shi’a Muslim gangs were fighting for control. Each day new tragedies were reported: the decapitated head of a girl, implanted with explosives so that it became a booby trap for her family when they tried to recover it; men kidnapped and released for ransom, but with their eyes gouged out and their hands and feet cut off.

All this was happening in the place where civilization began more than seven thousand years ago. In the landscape of recorded history, Iraq is Everest: just as Everest makes other mountains seem small, Iraq makes even ancient history seem recent by comparison. Noah’s ark? Ancient Iraqi legends speak of a great deluge, and of a man called Utnapishtim who survived it in a great boat. The legend, which influenced the biblical account of Noah, was based on fact. Iraq’s low-lying cities were exposed to devastating inundations. The archaeologist Leonard Woolley discovered evidence of one such flood as his team dug down through the ruins of Ur in the 1920s and found eight feet of clean soil between two layers of pottery and flint implements. As he drily recorded, “My wife came along and looked . . . and she turned away remarking casually, ‘Well, of course, it’s the Flood.’” It might be truer to say that it was
a
flood, but the basis for the biblical story is certainly Iraq, whose civilization therefore is older than the Flood.

The pyramids? Spry youngsters compared with south-central Iraq’s cities, which appeared as early as 5300
BC
—three thousand years before Pharaoh Cheops built the Great Pyramid. Iraq’s cities were almost as ancient for him as Tutankhamun is for us. It is the Iraqi habit of building in mud brick, in a climate much less dry than Egypt’s, that has caused its great monuments to collapse while Egypt’s have been preserved.

Homer’s
Odyssey
? The golden age of Iraq was almost over by Homer’s time. Iraqi epic stories survive from as early as around 2000
BC
. One is about a hero called Gilgamesh, his relationship with a man called Enkidu, and their joint slaying of the monster Humbaba. It deals with eternal themes: friendship, sex, death. It even has comedy. A bawdy curse aimed at a prostitute goes, “May wild dogs camp in your bedroom . . . may drunkards vomit all over you . . . may angry wives sue you!” Odysseus himself might have heard this epic poem and recognized in it some similarities to his own travels—but even in his time, it was already old.

The most famous and maybe greatest of all the cities of ancient Iraq was Babylon but this once-great city is now a huge expanse of almost featureless mud by the side of the Euphrates River, fifty miles south of Baghdad. All that remain are low walls and the foundations of gateways. These were once part of temples so tall that people thought they reached up to heaven itself. Among these unprepossessing ruins language was supposedly invented. “Therefore is the name of it called Babel,” says the Bible, “because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth.”

In their ceremonial religious processions, Babylonians carried effigies of the lion, the animal form of the sun god, Shamash, and of the dragon, the form of the moon god, Sin. Ishtar, goddess of love (whose name survives today as Esther), was symbolized by the dove. A temple almost as large as St. Paul’s Cathedral was dedicated to the city’s chief god, Marduk; its doors were decorated with motifs of dragons, mythical creatures that were half goat and half fish, and dogs. The city was reputedly home to the Hanging Gardens, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. It was here that Daniel and his companions escaped from the fiery furnace, Belshazzar was weighed in the balance and found wanting, and Alexander the Great died in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar, thwarted in his ambition to conquer the world.

It is now four thousand years since Babylon was founded, and for more than half that time it has lain abandoned, exposed to rain, flood, and the pillaging of later generations. After Alexander’s death in 323
BC
his huge empire was split between his squabbling lieutenants. Their civil war devastated Babylon’s economy, and the city entered a period of decline. Apart from sporadic sacrifices, we hear no more of its great temples. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon disappeared, and today no trace of them can be found. One grandiose project exists among the ruins—but it is new, not old. It is one of the ancient city’s palaces, reconstructed. Its bricks bear an inscription: “In the era of President Saddam Hussein, all Babylon was reconstructed in three stages. From Nebuchadnezzar to Saddam Hussein, Babylon is rising again.”

All around, Ozymandias-like, is an expanse of decaying mud brick. Saddam’s reconstruction of Babylon was pastiche, derided and deplored by serious archaeologists. Most of what had remained of the actual Babylon was taken long ago as building material for the city of Baghdad, or plundered or bought for a song by foreign archaeologists and shipped to museums in London, Berlin, and Paris. Saddam’s new palace was not built to please archaeologists, though. By building it, Saddam was laying claim to Iraq’s ancient past, which could help to legitimize Iraq’s existence as a country and his own rule over it. Instead of being a set of Turkish provinces wrested from their Ottoman rulers in the aftermath of World War I, unified by neither religion, language, nor ethnicity, he could present his oppressive police state as the successor to the Babylonian and Assyrian empires. Conveniently, in that glorious past, it had been ruled not by Muslim clerics, whom Saddam hated and feared, but by capricious and brutal monarchs—just like Saddam.

By 2006, Saddam was under American guard and Iraq was in chaos. The time when it was a capital of world civilization could not have seemed more distant. Once Christian patriarchs in Iraq had signed their letters “From my cell on the river of the garden of Eden” because they believed that it was the site of the original paradise where Adam and Eve had lived. Now that same river carried the bodies of the dead down toward the sea, past Abu Nawas Street, where Baghdadis in happier days used to sit, eat fish, and smoke
narghileh
pipes. Most Iraqis tried simply to stay safe: they headed home as quickly as possible after work and then stayed indoors. If they wanted to try to live as they had before the war and sit at one of the city’s cafés, they had to harden themselves. One woman told me how she and a friend had been drinking tea from the elegant tea glasses that Iraqis call
istikhana
s—wide at the rim, thin at the waist; similar examples survive from the fifteenth century—when they heard a man blow himself up further down the street. They looked around briefly, and when they realized there was no immediate danger, they turned back to their
istikhana
s and resumed sipping their tea. A mere suicide bomb was an everyday thing.

In the months that I had spent in Baghdad as a diplomat, speeding along the city’s highways in an armored car or looking out from a helicopter scudding over Iraq’s farmland with a machine gun hanging out the side, I had seen no trace of the country’s history. Its ancient palaces and mosques and churches had been destroyed in multiple wars, invasions, and ill-considered rebuilding schemes; mud-brick houses had been dissolved by centuries of rain. Wars, neglect, decay, and an oil-fueled twentieth-century construction boom had all helped modernize Baghdad, which was now ringed by vast suburbs of small two-story houses with tiny yards.

A guidebook bravely written around the time of the 2003 war for the few tourists who might want to visit (under the section “Entertainment,” it said, “The news is bad”) recommended just a few mosques and one palace that remained from the city described in
The
Arabian Nights
, where the caliph Haroun al-Rashid had wandered at night in the company of his faithful servant Jaafar.
The
Arabian Nights
was fiction, but the real city had been remarkable enough: built by the Arab caliph al-Mansur in
AD
734, designed by Persians, and at one time staffed by Hindu astronomers who had been brought from India by a Jewish envoy. This monument to the fertile links between cultures and religions was now buried in concrete somewhere underneath the main railway station. Iraq had not been kind to its own history.

—————

THE MANDAEANS, THOUGH
, were living history. Their religious texts dated back at least to the third century
AD
, and they preserved customs and traditions that were far older—dating back perhaps to Babylon itself. For the surprising fact is that neither Christianity nor Islam fully suppressed Iraq’s older religions. Certain areas of Iraq remained predominantly pagan after the Muslim conquest. A book called
Nabatean Agriculture,
written by an Iraqi called Ibn Wahshiyyah in around
AD
904, described a contemporary culture so little changed from ancient times that Victorian scholars for a while thought that the book dated back to ancient Babylon and was thus the oldest ever written. It describes encounters with worshipers in temples to the sun and moon; fruits, vegetables, and trees that, invested with the power of the gods, are able to speak; insects brought into being by the evil deeds of men; soothsayers; golems formed by Greek science from Chinese clay; ascetic bands dedicated to the old gods, but resembling Christian monks or Sufi mystics, with henna-dyed hair and long beards; and philosophical speculation about the origin of the world. Against such a backdrop, Babylonian culture could easily have survived—and indeed, the Muslim writer al-Mas’udi wrote in the tenth century
AD
that the “remnants of the Babylonians” were still living in the Iraqi Marshes, which once covered over 7,000 square miles of southern Iraq.