Mesopotamia through the millennia

A book review

Bartle Bull, LAND BETWEEN THE RIVERS: A 5000 YEAR HISTORY OF IRAQ (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press), 2024.[i]

Did I know that Gilgamesh, at the dawn of recorded history, governed Uruk? Of course I did—I had a liberal education. Have I been more or less consistently working on the Iraq file, in one way or another, for two decades? Yes, I have. Had I ever realized that one of the likely derivations for “Iraq” is “Uruk”? No, I had not. It took this book to bring that revelation—one of many in this surprisingly readable history of a country both foreign and familiar to us.

Bartle Bull’s magnificent Land Between the Rivers ties together the long history of the Mesopotamian region we now know as Iraq. Bull makes a powerful case that we should think of Iraq as the inheritor of this five millennia history, and that today’s Iraq is not merely—as some would have us believe—"carved illogically from three Ottoman provinces.” Instead, Bull presents Iraq as a singular whole, nascent in the opening days of history with the Sumerians. Bull shows us that the maps of the Akkadian and Assyrian Empires and Mamoun’s Baghdad Caliphate are as analogous to contemporary Iraq as are Prussia’s to modern Germany. While there is some flexibility on the exact borders, the fertile plains created by the Tigris and Euphrates (though not the headwaters) are consistently seen as a Mesopotamian unity. Or in Bartle’s phrasing, while the name shifts over time, “there is no question that the place referred to has for millennia been a distinct, if internally variegated, part of the world.”

Bull begins his story with Gilgamesh, the subject of one of the most ancient poems known to us. For Bull, Gilgamesh of Uruk, illustrates just how intertwined is Iraq with our emergence into civilization—and literacy—itself, making an implicit argument for Iraq’s continued relevance.

One of the most exiting things about Gilgamesh is precisely this: his inhabiting the shadow lands at the very edge of history itself. Occasionally he comes into view, when the sunlight of written records peeks through the thick fog of deep historical time. More frequently, he lurks in the misty gloaming of illiterate prehistory.

Bull pulls together a great deal of material, some of it complex and therefore confusing. But guiding consistently is Bull’s clear, even poetic, prose. For example, most of us learned in school that after the death of Alexander the Great, his generals fought among themselves, and his empire split among them. But Bull’s telling of the tale brings the pathos of the moment—a decades-long moment—to a most vivid and tragic light:

The world has never seen anything like the struggle that followed. The Macedonian armies clashed from Greece to India, fighting for the legacy of a king whose name is still spoken today in local languages across the entire vast theater. Twenty-one years of epic fratricide ensued between former comrades, many of them boyhood friends, who had grown into the most brilliant and experienced group of generals in the history of warfare. Most of them were in the prime of life. They fought with mighty tools: the confident, perfectly trained, infinitely hardened pieces of an army for the ages. The master may have gone, but the war machine, “the instrument with which he wrought,” remained intact.

Of course, one of the two post-Alexandrian winners, Seleucus, puts his new capital, Selucia, precisely where? Where the Tigris and Euphrates run closest together, right in the center of contemporary Iraq.

Bull’s subtle humor also permeates the work. When dealing with the rise of Islam, in noting that many of the details that God gives to Mohammed seem conveniently tailored, Bull concludes that, “[f]ew opportunities to improve the Prophet’s personal life appear to have escaped the Almighty’s care….”

Bull draws out that while Iraq should be seen as a unity, its primary city—where the narrative is centered—shifts over the centuries. In prehistory, Uruk, and later Abraham’s Ur, are both in the south close to the Persian Gulf. But then the energy seems to move far north, to the city of Nineveh (largely buried beneath the current footprint of Mosul). A cluster of cities will be founded in the center of the country—Babylon, Selucia, eventually Baghdad. And during the Abbasid period, Kufa (near Najaf) becomes the capital in 752.

Bull employs several clever literary devices to keep the storyline moving forward. The best illustration is in the chapter entitled “Slave Girls and Reason.” Bull wants to lay out a key theological debate inside Islam in the late half of the first millennia. But—academic specialists aside—who wants to read about the important of reason vs. will in pre-medieval Islamic jurisprudence? So Bull intertwines one of the more titillating strands of his story, that of slave girls in Abassid society, perhaps best distilled in an auction catalog that lists the best traits of Indian, Berber, Byzantine, Abyssinian and Armenian women as slaves. By making the recounting of the “owner of singing girls” also a milestone in the eventual triumph of the traditionalists over the rationalists, Bull manages to make the inclusion of the slave tradition in his narrative (slightly) less prurient. But more importantly, he makes theological debates somewhat intriguing, not to mention comprehensible. I believe only Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose has used a similar device—but that was fiction.

Bull admirably keeps the work centered on Mesopotamia throughout history. And if the work occasionally takes a subtle diversion to Arabia, to Persia/Iran, or to Turkey when each of these have their historical moment, Bull is reasonably good at tying even these moments, when the spotlight is elsewhere, back to the Tigris.

Bull does well to close his work with the 1958 coup against the Iraq monarchy—King Faisal II particularly—that would shortly lead (in 1968) to the Baath regime. The formal end of the work closes decades before the United States would interact with Iraq in any serious way. While Bull provides an appendix that chronicles the eventual overthrow of the Saddam Hussein government by the “coalition of the willing” led by the United States in 2003, the treatment is deliberately short and light. Bull chooses to lay out the long, detailed history of how Iraq arrived in its current form. And for this purpose, what happened at Ur, Babylon, and Kufa centuries ago may hold deeper lessons than (inter alia) Iraq’s suffering under United Nations sanctions or the Second Battle of Fallujah.

Covering five thousand years in a single volume—even if some eras get a fast-forward—is ambitious. Particularly for a country that has dominated the news cycle for the lifetime of many. But I think Bull’s purpose is to show his reader that they don’t fully grasp a country they think they know—whether from news coverage or even a deployment or two. Bull succeeds in dispelling our illusion of knowledge, while also giving much needed context to places that even frequent visitors may only know on a map (how many of us have visited Ur, the Pope aside?). But through showing us how little we may know about Iraq, Bull gives us the opportunity to look at it afresh. Each reader that comes away with a little more color in their previously monochromatic view of Iraq owes the author a debt.

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[i] Bartle is my friend and occasional co-author. However, while I knew about this project, I had zero involvement. I—rightfully— do not appear in the acknowledgments.