UNRAVELING THE CRADLE OF CIVILIZATION ‘LAYER BY LAYER’: IRAQ, ITS PEOPLES AND CULTURAL HERITAGE

Our history was in the building. It was the soul of Iraq. If the museum doesn’t recover the looted treasures, I will feel like a part of my own soul has been stolen. (Lemonick 2003:46) The modern state of Iraq came into being with its demarcation by outside Powers following the First World War. This moment threw into stark relief two characteristics which have prevailed to the present day. On the one hand, there is the diversity of its constituent peoples, that is, the multifarious ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities which live within its territorial boundaries. On the other, its rich cultural heritage has been deployed consistently to imbue its populace with a unified, national sentiment. Iraq has been an often tragic testing ground for the themes of this book: cultural heritage, diversity and human rights. In this chapter, I concentrate on the two (often contradictory) forces which have defined the state of Iraq and the antagonisms and efforts at reconciling them which have marked it since its inception. The centrifugal force of diversity was an inevitable consequence of the emergence of a nation hewed from the remnants of a collapsing empire. The mixin