Clipmarks | Mesopotamia Clips

Iraqi man: I wish McCain had Iraqis tell about surge

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 23:34:33 GMT

clipped by: masbury
clipper's remarks: "Sami Rasouli is an ... Iraqi American who grew up in Najaf. He left Iraq in the late 1970s, eventually moving to the United States, and became a US citizen. In November 2004, nearly thirty years after leaving Iraq, Sami returned home to help rebuild his country."

Clip Source: www.democracynow.org

As you and the audience, the viewers, and many Iraqis still remember, Mr. Biden, when he introduced the bill to the Congress last year to partition Iraq, now he came back on the ticket. So that was not a surprise for me, at least, because the surge has accomplished one of its objectives, that Iraq is ready to be partitioned, by expelling or displacing more than five million Iraqis within the country and outside of the country.

And most of those displaced people are Sunni, and they lived in the capital, the jewel of Mesopotamia, Baghdad, which is now a very depressed city, isolated by walls. Communities are segregated, and they have no way to move freely, unless they have their own badges from this community and another community. And the division is based on their background ethnically or religiously. It’s too bad for an Iraqi.

I wish yesterday Mr. McCain invited an average Iraqi family to attend and talk about the effect of the surge and the military operation

on Iraqi lives.

Tags: iraq, surge, mccain

History of Western Civilization lost in Iraq

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 04:56:18 GMT

clipped by: masbury
clipper's remarks: "It was there, in what the Greeks called Mesopotamia, that life as we know it today began: there people first began to speculate on philosophy and religion, developed concepts of international trade, made ideas of beauty into tangible forms, and, above all developed the skill of writing." And US invaders stood by and watched as irreplaceable world history was hauled off by unarmed looters.

Clip Source: www.tomdispatch.com

The Past Destroyed: Five Years Later

On April 11, 12, 13, and 14, 2003, the United States Army and United States Marine Corps disgraced themselves and the country they represent in Baghdad, Iraq's capital city. Having invaded Iraq and accepted the status of a military occupying power, they sat in their tanks and Humvees, watching as unarmed civilians looted the Iraqi National Museum and burned down the Iraqi National Library and Archives as well as the Library of Korans of the Ministry of Religious Endowments. Their behavior was in violation of their orders, international law, and the civilized values of the United States. Far from apologizing for these atrocities or attempting to make amends, the United States government has in the past five years added insult to injury.

In 1258 AD the Mongols descended on Baghdad and pillaged its magnificent libraries

The world has never forgotten that medieval act of barbarism, just as it will never forget what the U.S. military unleashed

in 2003

Tags: war, iraq

#5 of the Top 10 Battles for the Control of Iraq

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 02:46:11 GMT

clipped by: Moonowler

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

637 AD - Battle of Al-Qadisiyah

The Persian Sasanians ruled Mesopotamia from 224 AD. They thrived for centuries, but eventually became distracted by fighting the Romans and amongst themselves. Ultimately, an unlikely outside force would topple them. The Arabs had been tribesmen, unorganized and militarily primitive. The new religion of Islam, founded by Muhammad, united the tribes. In 634, the Arab campaign against the Sassanians began. 18,000 Arab tribesmen, led by General Khalid ibn al Walid ("The Sword of Islam") reached the Euphrates delta and began battling the Iranians (Persians), who were rallied by their hero, Rustam. A decisive battle occurred at Al-Qidisiyah, a village south of Baghdad. Though outnumbered six to one, the Arabs defeated the Iranians, exhausted by many battles against the Byzantines. Rustam was killed. The Arabs shortly captured the Sassanid capital at Ctesiphon, ending their dynasty and introducing Islam to the region.

Reports of looting greatly exaggerated

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 07:43:25 GMT

clipped by: A53GG4

Clip Source: eureferendum.blogspot.com

Reports of looting greatly exaggerated

Remember all those stories of Iraqi museums and archaeological sites being looted after the Coalition invasion

Now we get an interesting story about the archaelogical sites.

A recent mission to Iraq headed by top archaeologists from the U.S. and U.K. who specialize in Mesopotamia found that, contrary to received wisdom, southern Iraq's most important historic sites -- eight of them -- had neither been seriously damaged nor looted after the American invasion. This, according to a report by staff writer Martin Bailey in the July issue of the Art Newspaper. The article has caused confusion, not to say consternation, among archaeologists and has been largely ignored by the mainstream press. Not surprising perhaps, since reports by experts blaming the U.S. for the postinvasion destruction of Iraq's heritage have been regular fixtures of the news.

Tags: news

Obama Lays Out Plans for Continued War

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 16:03:45 GMT

clipped by: deadcowkid
clipper's remarks: I am posting this as a perspective. I truly and very unsure of how I feel about Obama. I have seen too many broken campaign promises in my life I have never found an unbroken one that I can think of.

Clip Source: www.indybay.org

Obama Lays Out Plans for Continued War

"As I’ve said many times, we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 — two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces."

In other words, he does not plan to get all of the troops out of Iraq and he will only get most of the troops out in two years. And what does he explain he will do with these troops? Redeploy them. Redeployed where? His rhetoric has been clear: Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran.

Obama goes on to call for a surge in Afghanistan as well as war in Pakistan:

Tags: war, polotics, obama

Palestine: The State History Forgot

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 12:37:18 GMT

clipped by: righthand
clipper's remarks: Is it a joke of history that before there was the states of Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Syria, etc there was Palestine? Now they all exist and Palestine doesn't yet.

You will read that there never was a Palestine from a certain quarter and how can you miss what you never had. How you know they are lying! They'll say that as they are all Arabs that there's enough room for them all. It's like saying that the Scots Welsh and Irish are all Celts and one state would do them all! Yes, there was a time when such thinking was regarded as valid. If we had the Age of Imperialism back then the Brits might validly have a claim on the USA and most of the rest of the world.

In the present imperialism, if the existent holder of the gunboat diplomacy role, the USA, decided to sort out Palestine's present difficulties it could in a breath. Hopefully in a more honourable fashion that the last gunboat holder did.

Clip Source: en.wikipedia.org

Mandate of Palestine

was a League of Nations Mandate created after the First World War when the Ottoman Empire was split up by the Treaty of Sèvres.

Clip Source: en.wikipedia.org

The approximate borders of the British Mandate circa 1922. In September 1922 Britain organized the territory east of the Jordan river, "Transjordan," as an autonomous state.

Clip Source: en.wikipedia.org

Clip Source: faculty-staff.ou.edu

Clip Source: www.palestinianisraeliconflict.com

Clip Source: en.wikipedia.org

At the 1920 San Remo conference of the Allied Supreme Council, at which the Mandates were granted, the precise boundaries of all territories, including that of the British Mandate of Palestine, were left unspecified, to "be determined by the Principal Allied Powers"^[1] and were not completely finalized until four years later

However, it was clear that the boundary of Britain's mandate for Palestine was to extend eastward to the western boundary of its mandate for Mesopotamia.

In 1921, following Churchill's negotiations with Emir Abdullah, Transjordan (later Jordan) was accepted into the Mandate

separated from the area on which a Jewish National Home could be establish

Clip Source: en.wikipedia.org

Clip Source: farm2.static.flickr.com

Tags: palestine, israel, history

Digging up the forgotten past of ordinary Egyptian folk

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:10:40 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Archaeologists have long fixed their sights on the grandeur that was ancient Egypt, the pyramids, temples and tombs. Few bothered to dig beneath and beyond the monumental stones for glimpses into the living and working spaces of ordinary Egyptians.

That is changing slowly but steadily. In the last two or three decades, excavations have uncovered urban remains and swept aside the conventional wisdom that the Egypt of the pharaohs, in contrast to Mesopotamia, was somehow a civilization without cities.

We can now confirm that this was not the case,

discovery of a large administration building and seven grain silos buried at the site of an ancient provincial capital on the Upper Nile

This is a really amazing site, at the cutting-edge of recent Egypt archaeology

Digging into towns, you get the full range of life, not the very narrow view of society as seen from the top, from the rich and elite

Where there are temples

they were surrounded by towns which have usually been overlooked

History in Maps

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 15:35:01 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman
clipper's remarks: Lots more interesting maps at the source.

Clip Source: www.fsmitha.com

The Ancient World

Mesopotamia to 2500 BCE

Israel and Judah to 733 BCE

Roman Empire, 12 CE

Roman Empire, 150 CE

Mesoamerica and the Maya

Africa to 500 CE

6th to 15th Centuries

Remnants of the Roman Empire, circa 500 CE

Europe, West Asia and Arabia, to 700 CE

Military expansion by Muslims, to 1000 CE

Anglo-Saxon England

Byzantium and the Balkans, 650 to 700 CE

Constantinople and its Walls

East Europe and the Ottoman Empire, 1481

Africa to the year 1500

Caribbean Islands, 1492 to 1500

16th to 19th Centuries

Aztec Empire

Aztec Centers in the Valley of Mexico

Inca Empire

American Indian Populations

Eskimo Territory circa 1500 C.E.

Eighteenth Century West-Central Europe

Central and Eastern Europe, 1740

Russia Expands toward the Black Sea, 1725-95

French Revolution, to 1794

1901 to World War War II

Germany's Farthest Advance, 1918

1945 to 21st Century

Europe, 2000 CE

Nations of Europe to 2005

Canada, the U.S., Greenland, Iceland to 2005

Nations of Latin America to 2005

Sargon of Akkad - the first emperor

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 20:43:21 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman

Clip Source: en.wikipedia.org

Sargon of Akkad, also known as Sargon the Great (Akkadian Šarru-kinu

meaning "the true king" or "the king is legitimate"), was an Akkadian king famous for his conquest of the Sumerian city-states in the 24th and 23rd centuries BC.^[1] The founder of the Dynasty of Akkad, Sargon reigned for 56 years, c. 2270 BC – 2215 BC

He became a prominent member of the royal court of Kish, ultimately overthrowing its king before embarking on the conquest of Mesopotamia. Sargon's vast empire is known to have extended from Elam to the Mediterranean sea, including Mesopotamia, parts of modern-day Iran and Syria, and possibly parts of Anatolia and the Arabian peninsula. He ruled from a new capital, Akkad (Agade), which the Sumerian king list claims he built (or possibly renovated), on the left bank of the Euphrates

regarded as one of the first individuals in recorded history to create a multiethnic, centrally ruled empire

Clip Source: www.youtube.com

[Video]

Clip Source: www.youtube.com

[Video]

Mesopotamian Mystery: Who Were The Hurrians?

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 02:23:25 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: Abstract from a very interesting article that appears on Archaeology magazine's latest (July/August) issue.

Clip Source: www.archaeology.org

Scholars long assumed that the Hurrians arrived in the middle of the third millennium B.C., and eventually settled down and adopted cuneiform as a script and built their own cities. That theory is based on linguistic associations with Caucasus' languages and the fact that Hurrian names are absent from the historical record until Akkadian times.

But Piotr Michaelowski, an Assyriologist at the University of Michigan, notes that Hurrian, like Sumerian, is a language unrelated to Semitic or Indo-European tongues that dominated the region during and after the third millennium B.C. Perhaps, he suggests, the Hurrians were earlier inhabitants of the region, who, like the Sumerians, had to make room for the Semitic-speaking people who created the world's first empire based at Akkad in central Mesopotamia around 2350 B.C.

Tags: archaeology, mesopotamia, hurrians, syria, akkad, sumer, bronze age

The Eridu Genesis and the great flood

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:02:11 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman

Clip Source: www.livius.org

The Eridu Genesis is written on a Sumerian cuneiform tablet of which about two thirds are now lost. The missing parts can be reconstructed from texts like the Sumerian King List and Berossus: first the creation of men, then the kings who ruled before the Great Flood, and finally the Flood itself, culminating in an offer of eternal life to the Sumerian Noah, Ziusudra. It is essentially the same story as the "Priestly document" that appears to have been a source of the canonical version of Genesis

Clip Source: en.wikipedia.org

Eridu

was the earliest city in southern Mesopotamia, founded ca. 5400 BC

Clip Source: en.wikipedia.org

Clip Source: www.atlastours.net

Clip Source: www.livius.org

the creation of men (now lost);
their miserable condition;
creation of kingship;
the first cities;
the kings who ruled before the Great Flood (lost)
the supreme god Enlil's decision to destroy sinful humankind (lost);
Ziusudra learns of the approaching calamity;
building of the Ark (lost);
the Great Flood;
Ziusudra's sacrifice;
an offer of eternal life to Ziusudra.

Clip Source: www.crystalinks.com

Clip Source: lexicorient.com

'When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?'

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 23:06:17 GMT

clipped by: righthand

Clip Source: www.independent.co.uk

Fisk: So al-Qa'ida's defeated, eh? Go tell it to the marines

Last week the head of the CIA claimed it was winning the battle. Nonsense, argues Robert Fisk. The extremists in the Middle East are growing stronger

Six thousand dead in Afghanistan, tens of thousands dead in Iraq, a suicide bombing a day in Mesopotamia, the highest level of suicides ever in the US military – the Arab press wisely ran this story head to head with Hayden's boasts – and permanent US bases in Iraq after 31 December. And we've won?

General Peter Pace

aid of the American war in Iraq that "we are not winning but we are not losing"

Gates, said he agreed with Pace that "we are not winning but we are not losing".

James Baker

"I don't think you can say we're losing. By the same token, I'm not sure we're winning."

Bush

"We're not winning; we're not losing."

Am I alone in finding this stuff infantile to the point of madness?

The hell-disaster of the Middle East is now spread across Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, even Lebanon

Tags: lies, usa, iraq, war, afghanistan, death, suicide, soldiers

Iraq's cuneiform tablets getting "virtual life"

Fri, 30 May 2008 14:20:38 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: dsc.discovery.com

May 29, 2008 -- A technology normally used in reconstructive surgery to create prosthetic limbs is now being applied to create reproductions of Iraq's precious and fragile cuneiform clay tablets, according to an Italian team of researchers.

Thousands and thousands of artifacts were stolen and broken at Bagdad's museums following the invasion of Iraq in 2003, in what has been called the most catastrophic theft of antiquities since World War II.

Called "Duplication and Rebirth," the project consist of an electronic catalogue with bibliographical references, photographs, and when possible, 3D images of the tablets. These three-dimensional models can then produce exact replicas of the original relics.

While scholars estimate that roughly five million of the tablets are still buried in the mounds of Iraq, some 500,000 are kept in museum and private collections worldwide.

Tags: archaeology, iraq, mesopotamia, writing, cuneiform, technology, science

Shamash The Sun God

Sun, 18 May 2008 00:19:21 GMT

clipped by: paulwm909

Clip Source: www.windows.ucar.edu

The image above is a symbol of Shamash.

Shamash was a Sun god according to the Sumerian mythology. Sumerians were living more than three thousand years ago in Mesopotamia. The region of Mesopotamia corresponds to the valleys of Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Since he could see everything on Earth, he represented also the god of justice. That is why Shamash was depicted as a ruler seated on a throne. Shamash and his wife, Aya, had two important children. Kittu represented justice, and Misharu was law.

Every morning, the gates in the East open up, and Shamash appears. He travels across the sky, and enters the gate in the West. He travels through the Underworld at night in order to begin in the East the next day.

In Babylon, located in the south of Mesopotamia, the symbol of Shamash was the solar disk, with a four-pointed star inside it.

Military Matters: Iraq state fantasy

Fri, 16 May 2008 16:56:41 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar
clipper's remarks: The truth about Iraq and 4GW conflicts that the GOP and the Pentagon (and their supporters) don't get:

"Because there is no state in Iraq, there is also no government. Orders given in Baghdad have no meaning, because there are no state institutions to carry them out. The governmental positions of Iraqi leaders have no substance. Their power is a function of their relationship to various militias, not of their offices. Maliki has no militia, which means he is a figurehead. "

Clip Source: www.upi.com

When Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki sent his "army" to fight the Mahdi Army in Basra, U.S. President Bush called it "a defining moment." It turned out instead to be a confirming moment. It confirmed that there is no state in Mesopotamia -- the geographical territory known as the nation of Iraq.

One of the most common signs that America's leadership is clueless about Fourth Generation war is the language they use.

Fourth Generation war has few if any defining moments. Nor does it have "turning points," another common Bushism. In his testimony to Congress, U.S. Gen. David Petraeus revealed the limits on his own grasp of 4GW when he said, "We've got to continue. We have our teeth into the jugular, and we need to keep it (sic) there."

Opponents in 4GW have no jugular. 4GW is war of the capillaries. What U.S. forces have their teeth into in Iraq is a jellyfish.

Tags: 4gw, iraq, insurgency, reality, truth, empire