In the footsteps ofthe Assyrian Empire

Our journey begins in the heart of Baghdad at dawn, when the northern road is still quiet, as we climb along the Tigris toward Nineveh Governorate. The first stop is not merely scattered ruins, but the very city from which the entire Assyrian Empire was born: Ashur, known today as Qal'at Sherqat, perched on a rocky bluff overlooking the western bank of the Tigris. From this exact spot rose one of the great powers of the ancient world, and to it the Assyrians tied their spiritual identity long after they had moved their political capitals northward.

The name itself holds the key to the city. Ashur is not only a place name; it is the name of the supreme god of the Assyrian pantheon, the god whose name the people bore and who in turn bore the name of his city. This threefold identity of god, city, and nation is what makes Ashur unique among Mesopotamian cities. While Babylon was the city of Marduk and Ur the city of the moon-god Nanna, Ashur was the dwelling of the national god himself, and his great temple was the center around which the legitimacy of every Assyrian king revolved. In Assyrian eyes, the king was but the god's earthly deputy, ruling in his name, leading his armies, and building his temples.

Why here? Site and geography

When you stand at the edge of the rocky spur and watch the Tigris curve beneath you, you understand why the site was chosen. The city was protected on three sides by the river and the cliffs, making it a natural fortress difficult to storm. It also sat at a strategic point on the trade route linking southern Mesopotamia with Anatolia and the Levant. This combination of natural defense and commercial position gave Ashur the means to arise and endure for thousands of years, remaining almost continuously inhabited from the third millennium BCE into the early Islamic era.

From trading post to imperial capital

Ashur was settled by the third millennium BCE at the latest, perhaps earlier. At the start of the second millennium, in what historians call the "Old Assyrian period," Ashur was not yet a warrior kingdom but a shrewd merchant city-state. Its traders led caravans of donkeys loaded with tin and textiles across hundreds of kilometers to the Anatolian plateau, founding trading colonies, the most famous of which was "Karum Kanesh" near Kültepe in modern Turkey. From this colony come thousands of cuneiform clay tablets that reveal, in astonishing detail, the lives of entire merchant families: partnership contracts, letters from wives to absent husbands, disputes over debt, and profit-and-loss accounts. Thanks to these tablets, Ashur is among the best-documented cities of the ancient world for its everyday economic life.

Over the centuries, the merchant city became a military nucleus. Great kings emerged, such as Shamshi-Adad I, who united northern Mesopotamia under his banner. Then came an age of turmoil when Ashur fell for periods under the sway of Mitanni and the Hittites. The great turning point came with Ashur-uballit I in the fourteenth century BCE, who declared Ashur an independent kingdom of international standing and corresponded with the pharaohs of Egypt in the "Amarna Letters" as an equal, demanding gold and recognition. From that moment, Ashur began its long road to becoming the empire that would one day rule from the banks of the Nile to the mountains of Iran.

The theology of the god Ashur and the New Year festival

Religion in Ashur was thoroughly a matter of state. The god Ashur was not merely the city's lord but the embodiment of the state itself and its destiny. Among the most important rituals the Assyrians practiced was the "Akitu," the New Year festival, when the god's statue would go out in a majestic procession from his temple to the "Akitu house" outside the city, in a celebration that renewed the king's legitimacy and refreshed the bond between nation and god. On these occasions the city filled with delegations and offerings, and hymns and myths were recited recounting the victory of cosmic order over chaos. This ritual dimension explains why Ashur remained the "holy city" even after the kings had departed, and why they were careful to return to it for great occasions and for burial.

Builder kings and gods of stone

The Assyrian kings were not only warriors but builders obsessed with immortalizing their names in stone and brick. King Tukulti-Ninurta I, in the thirteenth century BCE, after crushing Babylon and carrying off the statue of Marduk to the north, built a new city facing Ashur. Tiglath-Pileser I expanded the state's borders north and west, rebuilt the temples, and recorded his annals in grand language describing his campaigns and his hunts of lions and elephants. When you reach the site of Ashur today, you walk over accumulated layers of these projects, each layer representing a king who tried to leave his mark atop his predecessors', until the city became like a book of stone read from the deepest to the most recent page.

Among the most prominent survivals at the site is the massive ziggurat dedicated to the god Ashur, the stepped tower that once rose like an artificial mountain to join earth and sky. Beside it lie the remains of the Anu-Adad temple with its twin ziggurats dedicated to the sky-god Anu and the storm-god Adad. There is also the Ishtar temple, dedicated to the goddess of love and war, one of the oldest temples in the city, rebuilt by kings again and again over centuries, so that excavation revealed successive temple layers stacked one atop another, offering scholars a rare sequence of the evolution of religious architecture across more than a thousand years.

Within the city also lie the royal tombs, where several Assyrian kings were buried in stone vaults beneath their palaces. The Assyrian king would not leave his sacred city even in death; however grand his political capital became, Ashur remained the final "home" to which his body returned. This symbolic tie between the legitimacy of rule and the sacred ground of Ashur endured to the empire's final days.

Walls, gates, and a living city

Ashur was ringed by massive walls, reinforced by kings generation after generation, pierced by main gates that served at once as crossing points, toll stations, and ritual sites. Behind the walls stretched residential quarters, workshops, storehouses, and smaller temples, revealing a city pulsing with life rather than a mere royal center. Excavators uncovered archives and administrative documents depicting the details of daily life: the distribution of rations, the management of temples, and lawsuits and verdicts. All of this makes Ashur a living laboratory for understanding how a great ancient city was run.

The fall and the long silence

In 614 BCE, as the Assyrian Empire reeled under the blows of a coalition of Medes and Babylonians, the holy city of Ashur fell. The Medes stormed, plundered, and burned it, and the fall of the mother city heralded the end of the entire empire, which collapsed completely a few years later with the fall of Nineveh in 612 BCE. The scene was so tragic that its echoes lingered in the texts of the Hebrew prophets, who spoke of the end of the "bloody city," and in the memory of the many peoples who had suffered the might of the Assyrian armies.

But Ashur's story did not end there. After centuries of silence, life returned to it in the Parthian era, when a new settlement arose upon its ruins and temples were built in a style blending local traditions with Hellenistic and Parthian art, in the same period when the nearby city of Hatra was at its height. Thus the visitor to Ashur today reads in its layers a continuous history stretching from the third millennium BCE into the early Christian centuries, when the region became home to ancient Christian communities that still cherish their Assyrian roots today.

The archaeologist's eye: Andrae and the German excavation

Credit for the systematic scientific uncovering of Ashur goes to the expedition of the German Oriental Society led by the archaeologist Walter Andrae between 1903 and 1914. Andrae was not merely a digger but a meticulous architect who drew, recorded, and documented the city with a methodology that changed the practice of excavation across the whole Near East. He cared about documenting every layer and reconstructing the original form of the buildings from the remains, rather than merely extracting precious objects. Thanks to his work, important facades and finds were moved to the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, while much remained in place as witness to the city. When you stand among the walls today, what you see, orderly and comprehensible, is the fruit of decades of patient scholarship.

Ashur in danger... and Ashur enduring

At the start of the third millennium, Ashur was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2003, and at the same time placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger, because of a dam project whose reservoir was feared to submerge the site. Then came the years of terrorist occupation of the region, adding a threat of another kind. Yet Ashur endured, as it had endured before against the Medes and the Babylonians, and against oblivion itself. Today visits return to it gradually, researchers return to it, and the life that history has repeatedly tried to extinguish returns to it once more.

When you stand at the edge of the rocky bluff at Ashur and watch the Tigris flow beneath you as it has flowed for five thousand years, you understand why the Assyrians chose this very spot to be the house of their god. The place breathes antiquity, and the silence here is not emptiness but a fullness of stories. We recommend taking your time to wander among the ziggurat, the temples, and the walls, carrying water and wearing comfortable shoes, for the ground is uneven and the expanses wide. From this point, carrying with us the spirit of the mother city, we head to our next stop: a city of an entirely different character, an Arab-Parthian desert city called Hatra.

After Ashur, the road bends southwest of Mosul, into the heart of the Jazira desert, where a whole city of tawny stone suddenly rises out of the emptiness: Hatra. Nothing prepares you for the moment its columns and arches appear on the horizon; after kilometers of bare, open plain, the towering temple facades emerge as if a mirage had turned to stone. Hatra is no mere ruin, but the most complete and best-preserved ancient city in Iraq, and one of the finest hybrid architectures the ancient world ever produced, weaving East and West into a fabric found nowhere else.

Hatra flourished in the first and second centuries CE, in the Parthian era, when it lay on the frontier between two warring empires: Rome to the west and Parthia to the east. This sensitive position, which might seem a curse, was in fact the secret of its wealth; the city controlled the caravan routes crossing the desert, imposed security on travelers in exchange for tolls, and became a commercial and religious center drawing pilgrims and merchants from every direction. Hatra was a "land-port" in an ocean of sand, where goods, ideas, and gods all met.

An Arab kingdom in the heart of the desert

Hatra was ruled by Arab kings who at first bore the title "marya" (lord or ruler), then rose to the title "King of the Arabs" as their power and standing grew. Among the most famous of these kings were Sanatruq I, Sanatruq II, and Abdsamiya, and inscriptions immortalized their names on statue bases and temple thresholds, while life-size statues were carved showing them in rich Parthian dress, embroidered and bejeweled. Hatra is among the earliest major archaeological evidence for organized Arab political entities in northern Mesopotamia, centuries before Islam, which grants it a special place in the history of the Arabs themselves, not only in the history of architecture. Here we see Arabs not only as nomads but as builders of cities, founders of kingdoms, minters of coins, and priests of temples.

The writings of Hatra were recorded in a dialect of Aramaic known today as "Hatran Aramaic," and hundreds of stone inscriptions survive. These inscriptions are not merely decorative but a living record: names of kings and princes, titles of priests and engineers, sacred vows, curses upon anyone who tampers with or steals the statues, and administrative details about temple endowments and the rights of their workers. When you see a carved stone slab in this elegant script at the site, like the one our visitors are examining in the photograph, you are looking at the voice of the city's own people, addressing you directly across some two thousand years, in a language sister to Arabic.

The Temple of the Sun and the sacred triad

Hatra was above all a holy city, a religious capital whose life revolved around the worship of the sun-god Shamash. At the heart of the city lies the great sacred precinct (the temenos), a vast walled complex containing a series of temples and enormous iwans lined up side by side. The most distinctive feature of Hatran architecture is this "iwan": a vaulted hall open on one side, an authentically Eastern Parthian element that you see here married to Corinthian columns and capitals of a Greco-Roman character, producing an architecture that resembles neither Rome nor Persia, but Hatra alone. The famous central arch dominating the facade, which appears in most images of the city, has become a visual icon summing up the genius of this fusion.

The city worshipped a sacred triad known as "Maren" (Our Lord, the sun-god), "Marten" (Our Lady), and "Bar-Maren" (Son of Our Lords), alongside other local, Babylonian, Arab, and Hellenistic deities who all gathered in this precinct, such as Nergal, god of the underworld, sometimes depicted in fearsome form; Atargatis, the Syrian goddess; and Allat and Shams among the Arab deities. The eagle, symbol of the sun and sky, spread its statues and reliefs throughout the city until it became one of its most prominent artistic emblems. This religious plurality reflects Hatra's nature as a crossroads city, accepting gods as it accepted merchants, and weaving from all that passed through it a fabric of its own.

The art of sculpture at Hatra

Hatra left an enormous wealth of statues and carvings that are today among the treasures of the Iraq Museum. Among the most famous are the statues of kings, princesses, and priests, and stone faces of fine features reflecting an influence of realistic Roman art with an Eastern character of stillness and frontal directness. Faces with terrifying, Medusa-like features were also carved above the arches to serve as protection and to ward off the evil eye, alongside statues of camels, horses, and eagles. These works tell us not only of the Hatrans' artistic taste, but of their dress, their jewelry, their weapons, and their rituals; they are a gallery in stone of an entire city's life.

How does a city live in the desert?

One of the most pressing questions when you stand at Hatra is: how did a city of this size live in the midst of an arid desert? The answer lies in its people's mastery of water management. They relied on deep wells, systems for collecting rainwater, and cisterns, along with exploiting nearby seasonal valleys. This ability to secure water was no luxury but the very condition of both life and defense; when enemies besieged the city, the water supply was what decided the fate of the siege. Thus the hydraulic engineering of Hatra became an inseparable part of the story of its endurance.

The city that defeated Rome twice

Among the most admirable chapters of Hatra's history is its military resilience. Rome, the greatest military power of the age, tried twice to storm it and failed both times. The first was under the emperor Trajan in 116/117 CE during his great eastern campaign; he besieged the city but was forced to withdraw before its impregnability and the harshness of the desert. The second was under the emperor Septimius Severus, who besieged it around 198/199 CE with a huge army and advanced siege engines, yet recoiled in disappointment from its walls after being worn down by losses.

The secret of this endurance lies in the city's ingenious design: a double circular wall surrounding the city and extending for miles, pierced by dozens of closely spaced defensive towers that let archers cover every inch of its perimeter, preceded by a moat that hindered attackers and broke the momentum of their assault. Add to this its desert location, which exhausted any besieging army with a shortage of water and supplies and the killing heat of the sun, as well as the Hatran cavalry that would ambush the besiegers. Hatra was truly the "fortress of the desert" that broke the prestige of the Roman legions and left in memory the image of an Arab city defying the greatest empires on earth.

The end at the hands of the Sasanian Persians

But what Rome could not do, the Sasanians achieved. With the rise of the young Sasanian state in Persia, Hatra faced a decisive siege around 240–241 CE under Ardashir I and then his son Shapur I. Later accounts tell a famous legend that the daughter of Hatra's king, al-Nadira, betrayed her city out of love for the Sasanian prince and secretly opened the gates to him, so the city that armies could not take by force fell. Whether the legend is true or a popular invention, the result was the same: Hatra fell, was gradually abandoned, and the desert slowly swallowed it, to sleep for long centuries beneath the sands until modern archaeologists rediscovered it and dusted off its glory.

Discovery and excavation

The ruins of Hatra caught the attention of European travelers from the nineteenth century, but broad systematic excavation was carried out by Iraqi expeditions from the mid-twentieth century onward, with foreign missions contributing as well. The sacred precinct, its temples, statues, and inscriptions were uncovered, and many of its masterpieces were moved to the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, where they are displayed today. The city was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1985 in recognition of its exceptional value as the best surviving example of a fortified Parthian city.

Hatra on screen... and under the pickaxe

Hatra gained global fame when it appeared in the famous opening scene of the film "The Exorcist," where its ancient facades were used as an evocative backdrop that lent the film an unforgettable air of mystery. But Hatra later paid a heavy price; in 2015 it suffered deliberate damage at the hands of the terrorist organization that occupied the region, and painful footage was broadcast of some of its statues and inscriptions being smashed with pickaxes and weapons. Despite the gravity of the loss, the greater part of the city stood firm thanks to the massiveness of its stone construction, and today its gates open once more to visitors, while efforts are made to document what remains and restore what was damaged.

The experience of standing at Hatra

No description can convey the feeling of standing beneath the arches of Hatra. As you climb the steps toward the great iwan and raise your head to see the astonishingly finely carved capitals and the stone faces gazing down at you from on high, you feel the city still guards itself. The light here is special: in the morning it tints the stone a warm golden hue, and at sunset it blazes orange until the walls seem to glow from within. And the desert silence around you makes every sound, a footstep, a wind, a bird, echo among the walls like the echo of a past reaching you from two thousand years away.

Our visit to Hatra is usually accompanied by security guards, which is normal at remote frontier sites and adds to the experience a sense that you are visiting an exceptional place worthy of protection. We always recommend wearing comfortable shoes, carrying enough water, and bringing a hat and sunglasses on sunny days, for shade is scarce and the expanses open. From here, after spending enough time among the corridors of this unique city, we turn back northward toward Mosul, where we will spend the night in a comfortable hotel in preparation for a second day full of the landmarks of Mosul and Nimrud.

We begin our second day with a walking tour of the Old City of Mosul, the historic heart of the city on the western bank of the Tigris. Here the narrow alleys and heritage houses intertwine, built of the blue-grey "Mosul marble," that local stone which distinguishes Mosul's architecture from all other Iraqi cities. The facades are adorned with arches, carved ornament, and wooden mashrabiya screens, and the houses open onto inner courtyards ("hosh") that preserve privacy and temper the summer heat.

The Old City of Mosul was a rare human fabric, where mosques, churches, and monasteries stood side by side, and where the ancient markets mingled the scents of spices, hammered copper, and textiles. Among its most prominent historic landmarks are the "Qara Saray" (the Atabeg palace), the Clock Church, the Al-Tahira Church, its venerable historic mosques, and the shrine of the Prophet Jonah on the opposite bank. But the battle to liberate the city in 2017 left immense destruction in this historic heart, leveling entire neighborhoods.

Today the Old City is witnessing a vast reconstruction effort within local and international initiatives, foremost among them UNESCO's "Revive the Spirit of Mosul," where life is being restored to the houses, markets, and religious landmarks stone by stone, and residents gradually return to their neighborhoods. Walking these alleys today is a moving experience combining grief for what was lost with hope for what is being reborn, reminding us that cities, like civilizations, are capable of rising from the rubble.

At the heart of the Old City stands the famous Al-Nuri Mosque, built by the commander Nur al-Din Zangi in the twelfth century CE. The mosque was renowned for its leaning minaret known as "al-Hadba" (the hunchback), which became the symbol and emblem of Mosul, so much so that the whole city was nicknamed "al-Hadba" after it. The mosque and its minaret were blown up and destroyed in 2017, and reconstruction work is underway today under international supervision and support, so that it may return as a beacon for the city as it was for eight centuries.

From Mosul we head a short distance south to one of the greatest of the Assyrian capitals: Nimrud, known to the ancients as "Kalhu" and mentioned in the Bible as "Calah." Nimrud lies near the eastern bank of the Tigris, about thirty kilometers southeast of Mosul, and for a full century it was the center of the Assyrian world, the seat of its great kings and the storehouse of their wealth.

Capital of Ashurnasirpal II

Nimrud reached the height of its glory in the ninth century BCE under King Ashurnasirpal II (c. 883–859 BCE), who chose it as the new capital of his empire and moved the court there from the old city of Ashur. The king built his famous palace known as the "Northwest Palace," an architectural masterpiece whose walls were adorned with carved alabaster (gypsum) slabs depicting the king in scenes of hunting, war, and religious ritual, alongside winged beings and protective spirits blessing and guarding the king. The palace was inaugurated with a legendary celebration recorded on the famous "Banquet Stele," which relates that the king held a feast for tens of thousands of guests over several days, serving them thousands of head of livestock and fowl and vast quantities of wine and bread, in one of the oldest written documents of a royal banquet in human history.

Winged bulls and guardians of the gates

The most famous thing associated with Nimrud in the global imagination is the lamassu statues: winged bulls and lions with human heads, which guarded the entrances of palaces, temples, and gates. These hybrid creatures were not mere decoration but spiritual guardians combining the strength of the bull, the courage of the lion, the wisdom of man, and the freedom of the bird in a single body. They were carved with five legs by an ingenious artistic trick, so that the statue appears fixed and complete when seen from the front, and walking and in motion when seen from the side. The lamassu became the icon of the entire Assyrian civilization, and their original examples are today spread across the world's greatest museums from London to New York, testifying to the genius of the Assyrian sculptors.

The temples of Nimrud and its ziggurat

Nimrud was not only palaces but a sacred city as well. It contained a massive ziggurat that once rose above the city, a temple to the warrior god Ninurta, patron of the city and son of the god Enlil, and a temple to the god Nabu, god of writing and wisdom, known as "Ezida." The temple of Nabu contained a school for scribes and an archive of tablets, for this god was the patron of writers and scholars, and the written word was in the eyes of the Assyrians a source of authority and knowledge. In these temples the rituals binding the king to the gods were performed, texts and treaties were preserved, and some were recited on official occasions. The remains of these buildings reveal the degree of development reached by Assyrian engineering and art in the imperial age.

The steles and the military fort

From Nimrud came some of the most famous Assyrian steles, among them the "Black Obelisk" of King Shalmaneser III, which depicts foreign kings and princes offering tribute and gifts to the Assyrian king, and is a historical and artistic document of the greatest importance. The city also contained "Fort Shalmaneser" at its southeastern edge, a massive military arsenal (a review palace) where weapons and spoils were stored and campaigns were equipped, reflecting the military character of the Assyrian state at its height.

The treasures of Nimrud: from Layard to the gold

The name of Nimrud is bound in the history of archaeology to the British traveler Austen Henry Layard, who excavated there in the 1840s and sent many of its masterpieces to the British Museum, dazzling Europe and igniting its passion for the newly discovered Assyrian civilization. Later, excavation was continued by the British archaeologist Max Mallowan, husband of the famous novelist Agatha Christie, who accompanied him on the digging seasons, helped restore and document the finds, and even drew inspiration from the atmosphere of the East for some of her novels. Then came the greatest discovery in 1988–1989, when an Iraqi expedition found the astonishing "Tombs of the Queens" beneath the floor of the Northwest Palace, containing hundreds of gold objects, crowns, bracelets, earrings, necklaces, and finely wrought vessels, in what became known as the "Gold of Nimrud," one of the most precious archaeological treasures to emerge from the soil of Iraq in the twentieth century, which miraculously survived looting and wars to remain a witness to the genius of the Assyrian goldsmiths.

The wound and the endurance

In 2015 Nimrud suffered a barbaric assault at the hands of the terrorist organization that occupied the region, which bulldozed vast parts of the site, blew up some of its landmarks, and smashed its statues in scenes that shocked the entire world and provoked international outrage. The loss was grievous, but it did not erase Nimrud from existence; the earth still holds what the pickaxes could not reach, and researchers still work to document what remains, gather the scattered fragments, and restore what can be restored, in a race against time to save what can be saved of humanity's memory.

When you walk over the mounds of Nimrud and touch the fragments of carved slabs scattered on the ground, and perhaps come upon a brick stamped with a king's name in cuneiform script as in the photographs from our trip, you feel that you are touching history directly with your own hands, with no glass to separate you from it and no rope to hold you back. This is the magic of Iraq's sites: that they are still alive, open, honest, telling their story without an intermediary. Visiting Nimrud today is not merely tourism but an act of solidarity with a civilizational memory that refused to be erased. From Nimrud, after two days full of the greatest achievements of the civilizations of Mesopotamia, we begin the journey back south to Baghdad, carrying with us images, memories, and unforgettable stories of a land that was, and still is, the cradle of civilization.