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ERBIL, Iraq - If a neighborhood is defined as a
place where human beings move in and never leave,
then the world's oldest could be here at the
Citadel, an ancient and teeming city within a city
girded by stone walls.
Resting on a layer cake of civilizations that have
come and gone for an estimated 7,000 to 10,000
years, the Citadel looms over the apartment blocks
of this otherwise rather gray metropolis in Iraqi
Kurdistan.
The settlement rivals Jericho and a handful of other
famous towns for the title of the oldest
continuously inhabited site in the world. The
difference is that few people have heard of the
Citadel outside Iraq. And political turmoil has
prevented a full study of its archaeological
treasures.
While there may be confirmed traces of more ancient
settlements in Iraq, said McGuire Gibson, a
Mesopotamian archaeologist at the University of
Chicago, the people have all vanished from those
places.
"The thing about Erbil is that it is, in fact, a
living town," Dr. Gibson said. "It goes back at
least to 5,000 B.C.," he said. "It might go back
further."
Among the peoples that have lived in this
neighborhood are the Hassuna, Akkadians, Sumerians,
Assyrians, Medes, Persians, Greeks, Parthians and
Abbasids.
In 1964, when Kanaan Rashad Mufti and his prominent
family were part of the neighborhood, a floor in his
father's house, near the mosque, collapsed during
some renovations.
Underneath was a whole series of rooms from some
previous civilization, possibly the Abbasids, said
Mr. Mufti, who is now director of antiquities in
western Kurdistan. There is nothing that Iraqi
archaeologists would like more than to begin
systematic digs through those layers, said Donny
George, director of the Baghdad Museum.
"I have so much in mind," Dr. George said,
expressing scientific eagerness "to make such kinds
of excavations to see what we might find."
For now, what sets the Citadel visibly apart are the
contrasting rituals of an ancient neighborhood that
is caught between war and peace. Although the
Kurdish north of Iraq has remained comparatively
calm, Erbil has had its share of insurgent violence
lately, and before that Saddam Hussein's campaigns
to uproot and exterminate the Kurds left their mark
everywhere here.
The Citadel is no exception. Living in brick hovels
amid the ruins of palatial houses are about 1,000
families displaced from Kurdish villages that Mr.
Hussein destroyed in an infamous pogrom called Anfal.
In a routine that resembles a fire drill, the
families scramble to siphon water from sinuous pipes
running through the Citadel that function for about
30 minutes, once a day.
But in one of the intact great houses, a Frenchman
with impeccably moussed hair has just opened a
cultural institute that is displaying paintings of
wildly misshapen human and bestial figures in a
genre he calls postabstract. The institute, the
Center Arthur Rimbaud, plans to sponsor a contest
that will send a Kurd to France to study piano.
Right next door is a financially desperate textile
museum founded by Lolan Mustefa, a Kurdish native of
Erbil who studied anthropology in St. Cloud, Minn.,
and is trying to preserve the brilliantly colored
carpets woven by the old nomadic tribes of the
Kurdish mountains. A trickle of tourists has even
begun, along with the sense that all this could be
the first hint of a Kurdish SoHo or Greenwich
Village.
"If they give them the means, it could become a
place like Sacré Coeur in Paris," said Suayip Adlig,
a Kurdish filmmaker who was long exiled in France,
referring to another historical and romantic
district on a hill as he toured an old mosque next
to an 18th-century bath.
The people who actually live here, not surprisingly,
take a more practical stance. Kadim Mustafa - a
39-year-old mother of three, whose brick and
concrete shanty includes fragments of the grand home
that was here before - stood on a fancy balcony
overlooking Erbil and dismissed pretensions like Mr.
Adlig's.
"We have a nice place with a view, but not the
facilities of life," Mrs. Mustafa said. "As soon as
we start having lunch, the electricity will go off."
The direct evidence for what lies beneath Mrs.
Mustafa's house is scanty: Assyrian pottery that
tumbled out of the side of the Citadel in a
renovation of its walls, a dig that Mr. Mufti said
he participated in around 1980, an electromagnetic
probe that provided intriguing hints about the
layered structure.
What seems clear, said John Malcolm Russell of the
Massachusetts College of Art, is that with its
location in a rain-fed plain near the confluence of
two rivers and the foothills of the Zagros
Mountains, Erbil "could have been the site of one of
the earliest villages in the world." The first
hunter-gatherer settlement could have started as
early as 9300 B.C., followed by early pottery
makers, the proto-Hassuna, by 7000 B.C.
And unlike the arid regions to the south, the rain
remained relatively steady in Erbil over the
millennia, so there was no compelling reason to
abandon a settlement. By 1400 B.C., as cultures came
and went, Erbil became one of the most important
cities of the Assyrian Empire, said Dr. Russell, who
is an authority on the period.
The Assyrian Empire collapsed after a siege in 612
B.C. The Persians took over and were defeated in
turn by Alexander the Great at Gaugemala, west of
Erbil, in 331 B.C. About a millennium later, the
Ottomans swept through after sacking the Abbasids, a
Sunni Muslim dynasty centered in Baghdad. And in
1918, as the Ottoman Empire was crumbling, the
British Army entered the city without resistance,
and finally the modern nation of Iraq was born, with
all the consequences that the world is now facing.
Crouching on top of all those layers of history
around 10 a.m. on a recent day, Muhamad Amin, 31 and
a member of the Kurdish Khoshnaw tribe, had more
immediate things on his mind. The water was gurgling
briefly through one of the pipes snaking along a
path between the close-packed houses, and he was
rushing to connect a translucent yellow hose to the
pipe.
As other families scampered around him hooking up
their own hoses and turning on clattering little
pumps, Mr. Amin intently wrapped black electrical
tape around his own connection to keep it from
leaking. "Those people who are near to the pipe are
much better off than the ones who are far away,"
said Mr. Amin, who came here in 1993, when his
village was destroyed by Mr. Hussein's troops.
The half-hour of water did double duty as a social
event, and children swarmed everywhere until the
water stopped running at 10:35. Indeed, existence at
the Citadel is not uniformly bleak. Many inhabitants
here have at least laboring jobs in the city: there
is a thriving watermelon stand with a wisecracking
owner, an outdoor poultry shop where men cut the
heads off chickens on the spot, and cars protected
with striped cloth covers parked along the sole
paved road.
There is not much connection between the refugees
and the Center Arthur Rimbaud, but the Frenchman
with the moussed hair and black attire, Matthieu
Saint-Dizier, said he did a little experiment to be
sure he would be welcome after the center opened a
few weeks ago. He opened an exhibition of modern
paintings in an ancient bath next to the mosque. The
paintings showed transvestites and men with multiple
genitals.
"I want to make a test," he said. "The imam of the
mosque come to this exhibition and he don't make any
problems. He said to me, 'I don't understand very
well, but' " - and Mr. Saint-Dizier exhaled in a
peculiarly French sound, approximately phhhhht.
Mr. Mustefa, the Kurdish owner of the carpet museum,
rolled his eyes and said that Mr. Saint-Dizier had
no idea how much the exhibition had appalled the
locals, who nevertheless wanted to be polite to a
Westerner. As far as genuine interest in art goes,
said Mr. Mustefa, Kurdistan has been so consumed
with political turmoil that he has had a hard time
drumming up local interest even in his own
offerings.
Still, visitors do trickle in. Mr. Mustefa said that
after spending virtually his entire savings on the
museum contents he was now having serious trouble
paying for operating costs and upkeep. But he does
have an interesting building, with ornate old
pillars and an unroofed central court, right next to
the cultural center. When the municipality granted
him the building for his museum, "it was a dream for
me," Mr. Mustefa said.
"And I knew the Kurds wouldn't appreciate this," he
said with a long-suffering look. "Especially the
intellectuals. They think this is a backward art."
So it goes at the Citadel. Mr. Mufti, the
antiquities director, is also a member of the board
that is supervising preliminary studies, financed by
Unesco, for renovating the Citadel. The initial
project, according to the Unesco Web site, "aims at
identifying a building in the Citadel and at
providing it with necessary supplies and equipment
to serve as focal point for the rehabilitation of
the Citadel at large."
Mr. Mufti is trying, so far without success, to
secure financing for a new archaeological dig. But
as uncertain as all of those plans are, Mr. Mufti
said, there is one thing they all assume.
The neighborhood will remain.
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