A reconstructed portion of the ancient city of Babylon, Hillah, Iraq (Wikimedia Commons)

In the years on either side of General Petraeus’s surge (2008) I spent many a month living in Baghdad covering culture for the Wall Street Journal’s arts section. That meant abiding not in the secure Green Zone but out among the locals—very rare for outsiders—unarmed, unembedded, and frequently exposed to the city’s turbulence in search of stories: the last art gallery in Baghdad, the Iraq Symphony Orchestra, the embattled Ballet School, historical sites, and much else. Amid the booms and zings and present dangers, one got a seeping sense of a primevally fertile landscape haunted by ancient time. History had first emerged here (as opposed to prehistory); golden ages had come and gone, each time affecting the known world, acting as its pivot.

Turns out there was another outsider who also spent time wandering in and around Baghdad imbued by the same thoughts. A New Yorker named Bartle Bull covered Iraq as a freelance journalist from 2004 to 2008, visiting ancient sites like Babylon, even embedding with the Mahdi Army early on. (One forgets that such Shiite militias started out as our allies against Saddam: By the time I trekked out to Babylon post-surge, the route was infested with bad guys largely composed of Mahdi Army sympathizers.) Bull went on to become a part-time businessman and investor in Iraqi funds. But he felt so infused with the spirit of the place that he ultimately dedicated a decade to writing a sweeping chronicle of Baghdad and its environs down the ages: Land Between the Rivers: A 5,000-Year History of Iraq. (Mesopotamia means land between rivers in Greek.)

The result is a book that will infuriate historians aplenty. However readable, diverting, or erudite, and the book is all those things, it impinges stage by stage on the terrain of specialists. From early Mesopotamian (2700 B.C.) to Biblical to Alexandrian to Sassanian and Ottoman down to the short-lived Hashemite monarchy’s brutal end in 1958, each phase is already ring-fenced by expert scholars. Not least by opinionated local ones. But bless Mr. Bull for undertaking the truly American project of the fearless outsider-enthusiast charging bravely into eternally contested territory.

One can only imagine the nightmarish challenge of organizing an epic historical narrative of this kind because the country that is now Iraq (from the Sumerian word Uruk) retains at best a slippery identity of its own across the centuries. Rather, it often serves as the receptacle of empires and cultures that start elsewhere and decant over or through it: the Persian, Hellenic, Arabian, Turkish, and so on. The author himself, from the perspective of 5,000 years, notes as "essentially ephemeral … any politics, wars, factions, foreigners and rulers." Faced with delineating the calendar and character of successive empires, worth a hefty volume each, Bull often uses the shorthand device of entering the story through an exemplary protagonist who embodies the era. Deploying a recurrent story-telling approach helps vary the pace and creates overlapping rhythms, giving the perfect cadence to the country’s long jumble of narratives. He then identifies overarching meta-themes that thread through the epochs.

And so he begins with the tale of Gilgamesh, the semi-mythical king of Sumerian Uruk, hero of the first ever recorded epic poem, conceived and set in Mesopotamia and written on clay tablets. The story is a notoriously inchoate one. Gilgamesh was likely based on a real king who reigned circa 2700 B.C. In the epic, he’s a quasi-symbolic figure, part human part elemental akin to Longfellow’s Hiawatha, who ventures away to strange enchanted lands and returns the wiser, undergoing transformative adventures on a mysterious quest for the meaning of life. Bull finds in him another first—the first exponent of "free will," a kind of ancient French Existentialist. The land that is now Iraq also spawns "kingship, priesthood, diplomacy, law," irrigated farming, cities, the wheel, and writing (the last around 3300 B.C.).

Scholars have long agreed that various motifs and events in the Old Testament originated in Mesopotamian myths a millennium earlier. Bull enumerates them: the flood, the Garden of Eden, Whore of Babylon, Genesis, and the like. "After the flood, Genesis tells us, humanity settles on ‘the plain of Shinar’ … a rendition of Sumer." It follows, therefore, that Bull’s next protagonist is Abraham, the "man from Ur" who ventures from home like Gilgamesh but never comes back and instead invents new nations. Abraham’s firsts, anchoring the fundaments of three religions, include paternity and propagation and covenants with God: "Abraham’s discovery of the one true God would mean nothing without descendants to worship him."

Bull picks out thematic threads of continuity between Gilgamesh and Abraham. Both are pioneers of "free will," both concerned with "posterity," which latter may seem a tenuous continuum until you consider that they were effectively inventing history and adumbrating a future for humankind. As the book progresses through the ages, the author’s metaphysics take shape: Greek thought merges with Persian and Judaic to form a broad heritage of enlightenment that threads into the Islamic period and beyond. "The Greeks improved calculations that the Babylonians had been making for centuries" and "in the eighth century AD the rise of an Iranian-Arab dynasty, the Abbasids, in Baghdad led to a rediscovery of the genius of the ancient Greeks."

With notable courage, the author subtly distinguishes between light and dark in the trend of civilizations, aligning with broadly traditional Western perspectives. As a white male American he has the nerve to retro-differentiate between good and bad caliphs, for example. The former, grouped under the great Abbasid leader Mamoun (813-833 A.D.), encouraged philosophical debate and translations that conserved Greek classical works for posterity. The others, Sunni fundamentalists, enforced submission to sharia, banished laughter and crying in public, and outlawed intellectual thought outside the Koran. Needless to say, they prevailed and all too often still do.

As the saga approaches the modern era, it’s rather telling that Bull picks the great British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard (1817-1894) as a pivotal protagonist. The area had become a sleepy backwater under Ottoman rule and Layard’s discoveries, including the cuneiform tablets with the Gilgamesh epic, "rewrote the history of the world." One senses the author’s feelings of kinship with Layard’s years-long devotional calling. In both we have Western outsiders presuming to tell Iraq’s story to the world, an affront to today’s postcolonial historiography.

Perhaps the book’s final segment is its finest, a hard-nosed retelling of modern Iraq’s misadventures since its invention by Western powers between the world wars. However hapless the construct, which is the conventional wisdom, we see that it was no more alien and indeed considerably more humane than all the preceding centuries of interventions by outsiders. Foisting in the former sharifs of Mecca, the Hashemites, to create a constitutional monarchy was immensely popular at first. They’d helped T.E. Lawrence liberate Arabia from Turkish rule. But Iraq’s incessant nationalisms led to their toppling and murder in a 1958 military coup, and to endless bloodshed since.

The book’s epilogue is a timeline itemization of events from 1958 up to the near present. We can infer from it that the author is no fan of Saddam or Bush Jr. but more broadly that, yet again, Iraq became the center of history’s focus and confirmed the book’s entire reason for being.

Land Between the Rivers: A 5,000-year History of Iraq
by Bartle Bull
Atlantic Monthly Press, 576 pp., $35

Melik Kaylan writes about culture and the arts for the Wall Street Journal.

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