The plains of
the country that is today known as Iraq are
dotted with giant mounds, sites that have grown higher and
higher over the millennia, as people built new homes upon
the ruins of older ones.
But Iraq's archeological
sites -- some of the richest in the world -- attract few
researchers today. Although the problem is security, but
officials in Kurdish-administered northern Iraq say their
region is safe enough for excavation work. And one
fascinating place to probe is the 36-meter-high tal in the
center of Irbil, a citadel that historians and
archeologists say has been continuously inhabited for
6,000 years. Below the homes that now stand on the hill
are the remains of ancient civilizations still waiting to
be explored.
Kanan Mufti, general
director for antiquities in the western Kurdish region,
says that probes sunk deep into the hill have shown
evidence of layers of successive civilizations. Not enough
work has been done to be able to identify who exactly
those inhabitants were, but among the peoples who have
lived in the Irbil region are Akkadians, Sumerians,
Iranian Medes, Persians, Parthians, as well as Greeks and
Arabs invaders. All have been attracted by Irbil's
location, on a fertile plain at the junction of two rivers
and in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains.
Mufti
says the successive names of Irbil give some idea of this
history. Sumerian scripts refer to it as Urbylon. The
Assyrians called it Arbaillo and considered it one of
their most important cities. The Iranian Medes knew it
Hadeap. A historian accompanying Alexander the 3rd
century BC Macedonian warlord named it Arbella. And the
Kurds still call it Hawler, probably meaning "the
place where the sun is worshipped" since the name is
thought to derive from the ancient Kurdish word "helio"
(sun).
International
interest in the citadel as an archeological treasure could
help make that a possibility.
The UN's cultural agency,
UNESCO, is financing preliminary studies into the
possibility of renovating parts of the citadel. Many in
Irbil hope the result will be a well-restored old town and
some careful excavations of the site.
Irbil’s citadel is just
one of numerous potential archeological sites throughout
the Kurdish region. A study carried out decades ago by
Baghdad catalogued more than 3,000 sites. Mufti, the
director of antiquities, says fewer than 25 have been
excavated, because former regime in Baghdad generally
forbade archeological digs in the Kurdish region in an
effort to deny Kurds and their Iranian evidence of a
cultural heritage distinct from that of Iraqi Arabs.
