Conquest Archaeology: The Military Occupation of Babylon in the Iraq War

2025-01-01

Conquest Archaeology

2025-01-01

Ghosts of the gates of Baghdad: Monuments, colonialism and spatial transformation in early twentieth-century Iraq

Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World · 2025-12-01

This article explores the transformation of Baghdad’s monuments and urban spaces under British rule in the early twentieth century. Baghdad’s identity has long been shaped by the remains of its historical monuments and literary references to its past Abbasid glory. The city was described and visually represented as a shadow of its former self, reflecting a recurrent trope of nostalgia in elegiac Arabic poetry and descriptive travel accounts, such as those of Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Battuta. The British incursion and occupation led to significant changes in Baghdad’s distinctive urban landscape and its social dynamics. This aspect is particularly reflected in the fate of the renowned Seljuk-era city gates, an episode that historians of architecture and archaeology have left unexamined. At the time of the British entry into Iraq in the First World War, four monumental gates were still standing; by 1936, only one remained. Using historical images and archival sources, this article relates the fate of the gates and argues that if colonial strategies involved the appropriation of antiquity and the generation of racially charged narratives of the past, they also relied upon the reconfiguration of urban spaces for military and administrative purposes. The visual and spatial changes that took place during the British Mandate and the years immediately after had a profound impact and social implications, disrupting traditional urban practices. The colonial rhetoric of liberation contrasted sharply with the realities of occupation.

Remembering Tareq Ismael

Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World · 2025-03-01

Iraq

Routledge eBooks · 2023 · 4 citations

• Medicine

In this chapter, the author traces the increasing destruction and erasure of history in Iraq through the era of colonialism; the Gulf Wars; the US occupation, and its aftermath, arguing that the recent destruction can be better understood in this long-term view of a history of colonial-imperialist violence. A massive scale of displacement and uncounted deaths, the destruction of prominent monuments and traditional neighbourhoods, and the extraction of archives and antiquities are connected parts of the same biopolitical restructuring of the domain of life and livelihood. The author contends that alongside warfare, development, archaeology, and the cultural heritage industry itself have also contributed to the environmental and historical disaster in Iraq today.

Myocarditis and Autoimmune Disease Development Following Bariatric Surgery: A Possible Nutritional Deficiency Link

Asian Journal of Medicine and Health · 2023-06-20

Post bariatric surgery induced myocarditis in setting of autoimmune disease is rarely encountered in clinical practice. However, till date only few data of bariatric surgery induced myocarditis in setting of connective tissue disease (CTD) have been available. The following report illustrates the case of a 39-year-old female suffering from myositis who exhibited a nutritional deficiency myocarditis following biliopancreatic diversion surgery (BPD). The mechanism of myocarditis in patients suffering from CTD is incompletely understood. In this case we are going to try to found a relation between bariatric surgery, myocarditis and connective tissue disease and urges cautious action before surgery performance in the setting of suspected nutritional deficiencies and in connective tissue disease (CTD) as injudicious act might increase the risk of deleterious myocarditis and increase the mortality.

Metapictures, Materiality, and Texts: Ancient West Asian Art and the Scholarship of the Iconic Turn

2022-07-26 · 1 citations

A small carved and inscribed chalcedony stone of the Elamite era in ancient Iran is presented as a thing to think with, as a close-up case study for a discussion around art, ontology, and representation. Following up upon earlier arguments that the author has made regarding hypericons, the performative image, ekphrasis, presence, and mimesis, this essay further considers the relationship of metapictures, materiality, and texts together in the early literate societies of West Asia. The paper considers these aspects of representation in relation to the scholarship of the iconic turn. An exploration of concepts of art and images in this region can elucidate ancient art and forms of representation, and refine methodologies and definitions in a field of scholarship that is all too often limited by Eurocentric definitions of art.

Metallurgy and Civilization

West 86th · 2021-09-01

A revolutionary monument: Reclaiming the Naṣb al-Ḥurrīyya in Baghdad

Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World · 2021 · 19 citations

• Political Science
• History
• Ancient history

The monument that stands in Tahrir Square in Baghdad, known as Naṣb al-Ḥurrīyya (the Freedom Monument), is a site-specific work. Spatial in its conception from the very start, this monument came to exceed both primary historical event and iconographic representation to become the heart of the identity of the protest movement in the city of Baghdad, and to define its terrain. And it has now come to signify people’s rights across all of Iraq today. Commissioned soon after the 1958 revolution that overthrew the Hashemite Dynastic house, the Hurriyya monument has to do with the Event of revolution in the sense of event as defined in the philosophical writings of Alain Badiou, as a moment which emerges outside of, and changes the conditions and the frame of existence of its appearance. Thus, the Hurriyya monument commemorated historically the 14 July 1958 revolution in Iraq (the 14 Tammuz Revolution), yet it exceeded historical commemoration to signify the Evental character of a people’s revolution and its reclaiming of the city space.

Zainab Bahrani. Review of "Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria" by Anneka Lenssen.

CAA Reviews · 2021-05-24