Earlier this year, an Italian archæological team uncovered a set of reliefs dating back nearly three thousand years, in Qadâ’ Sumaîl in northern Iraq. These reliefs depict Sargon II in a procession of the seven main gods of the ancient Assyrian pantheon. Moreover, these exquisitely-preserved panels represent one of the single most important archæological finds of the Assyrian period unearthed in nearly two hundred years. Previously, the Khinnis Reliefs, discovered in 1845 and dating back to the reign of Sargon II’s son and heir Sennacherib had been the most important exemplar of Assyrian rock art open to the modern human view. Surveys of the site began in 2012, but the invasion of Dâ‘iš caused the archæological expedition to be put on hold and its finds hidden from detection until last year, when the dig resumed, under the leadership of an Italian research team.
Unfortunately, Assyrian rock art is a politically-sensitive subject, and Dâ‘iš is not the only threat to this great heritage of human civilisation. It is worth understanding that when an Assyrian man, Hormuz Mushi, uncovered a similar, smaller relief from the same period in the same governorate in May of 2019 and asked for the Iraqi government to take steps to preserve it, he was threatened and detained by the local Kurdish police, and released on bail for the equivalent of six thousand American dollars. Mr Mushi’s arrest and unlawful detention make sense only when we consider the hateful and detrimental role that Kurdish nationalism has played for centuries in northern Iraq, particularly where the indigenous Assyrians are concerned.
Not only the puritanical and iconoclastic religious fanaticism of Dâ‘iš (though certainly that as well), but also Kurdish nationalism is a grave threat not only to the Assyrian community but also to any historical manifestation of an Assyrian presence in northern Iraq, which it sees as a threat to its claims to the land, whether legitimate or not. The reliefs at Ma’altaya have been the targets of repeated vandalism, including the spray-painting of the Kurdish flag. All this happened over the protests and injunctions by Assyrian activists and cultural preservationists inside Iraq.
Kurdish authorities and powerful families in northern Iraq have taken repeated advantage of American imperialist adventures in Iraq going back to the first Gulf War, but in an escalating way after the Iraq War, to grab land from the indigenous Christians and to repress their œconomic and political activity. To Assyrian Christians, sites like the monastery of Saint ’Ishâq at Rabban Shabir and the præ-Christian rock reliefs left by the ancient Assyrian kings are both prominent physical reminders of their belonging and their continued presence even as they are rendered politically powerless: by a central government weakened by decades of fallout from imperialist warfare under both Bushes; by the threat of annihilation by Dâ‘iš; and by a set of determined and hostile local predators, in the throes of a nationalist ideology that barely brooks their presence. To them, ‘the stones speak for us’.
Unfortunately, both American leftists (particularly of the anarchist and left-libertarian flavours) and American evangelical Christians are deeply in thrall to a rose-tinted romanticism that has typecast the Kurds in the rôle of the ‘democratic freedom fighter’. This romanticism is inherently linked to neoconservative myth-making, and it allows otherwise ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’ people to excuse and even welcome even the most heinous forms of state-sponsored extrajudicial murder by the American military-industrial complex. This romanticism allows Christians to turn a blind eye toward the least of their brothers and sisters. That is a difficult ideological narrative to overcome, and yet for the sake of clarity and understanding it must be overcome.
Because the stones of Iraq and Syria and Palestine – both the living ones and the ones which have stood for the spans of hundreds of lives – must speak, and will speak at the end of all things. In the meanwhile, the ruins of ancient Assyria will continue to hold for the present-day Christian Assyrians a double-edged meaning.
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