In its time, the Assyrian capital faced waves of invasions and abandonment. Now a small team of archaeologists are protecting it from more modern threats.
Assur was first excavated at the turn of the 20th century, when a German expedition established the city’s boundaries by cutting a series of trenches. The archaeologists recovered thousands of cylinder seals and baked clay tablets, some carved with cuneiform inscriptions written in the second millennium B.C., which detailed religious rituals, business transactions and other subjects. But in recent decades, archaeologists have worked at the site only intermittently. “For Iraqis, it’s expensive,” Abdullah said. “The government can’t afford it.” The last major excavation concluded in 2002. Abdullah estimates that 85 to 90 percent of the site remains unexplored.
The challenges are numerous. For a start, it’s nearly impossible to secure the site. A mesh fence runs along to the road, but many sections have been flattened or removed altogether. And while a visitor technically requires a ticket, without staff to enforce the rule that system hasn’t worked for 30 years. Instead, residents of Sherqat treat Assur like a local park, wandering in for picnics. “In spring you can’t see the ground,” Abdullah said, referring to the volume of trespassers and the litter they leave behind. He stressed that local people would be less likely to damage remains if they knew more about the place and its value, but given the conflict and instability of recent decades there has been little opportunity for education. There is looting too. Every time it rains, topsoil washes away and artifacts—pot- sherds and even cuneiform tablets and statuettes—emerge on the surface of the ground. Although Abdullah believes Sherqatis respect the site too much to steal, it wouldn’t be difficult to pick up a few things and traffic them on the black market.
We walked west, to where three broad arches of the Tabira Gate glowed like bronze in the amber light of early evening. The structure is thought to date to the 14th century B.C. Though the gate is still the best-preserved monument at the site, it sustained heavy damage in 2015 when ISIS militants, having conquered the area, blew a hole in the structure. In 2020, three years after the area’s liberation, a joint project between the American University of Iraq-Sulaimani and the Aliph Foundation, a group that works to protect cultural heritage in war zones, carried out reconstruction work on the gate. By the time I visited, the contemporary mud bricks had bedded in nicely.
Still, Abdullah remains anxious about threats to the site. His greatest worry is the planned construction of a dam 25 miles south, at Makhoul. The dam was first proposed in 2002. The following year, Unesco named Assur a World Heritage site in danger, cautioning that the reservoir could flood numerous nearby archaeological sites. The project was halted by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, but, with fears of regional water shortages, the government in Baghdad revived the plan. In April 2021, workers laid a cornerstone, and excavators and other construction vehicles have since appeared at the site.
Khalil Khalaf Al Jbory, head of archaeology at Tikrit University, estimates that more than 200 archaeological sites near Sherqat are at risk of flooding. Assyrian sites, constructed primarily of mud, would be lost forever. He also pointed to what he called a “social disaster,” with tens of thousands of people facing displacement. “The government is not listening,” Al Jbory told me. “Not to the academics, or geologists, or anyone. It’s very dangerous, and very risky.”
