When the outstanding archaeologist Abdulamir Al-Hamdani died final Friday (29 April) shortly earlier than his fifty fifth birthday, the previous Iraqi minister of tradition (2018-20) left his nation at a time of ongoing chaos. Final October’s parliamentary elections have produced sectarian infighting however no clear victor, however because of Hamdani’s work Iraq’s historic world is extra organised than its current.
“One among his exceptional achievements was making a digital database and atlas of about 15,000 archaeological websites in Iraq, which took about 15 years of his profession,” says pal and colleague Bijan Rouhani, a senior researcher and senior undertaking supervisor for Endangered Archaeology within the Center East and North Africa (EAMENA) at Oxford’s College of Archaeology. In line with the College of Oxford, these included 1,200 new websites that had not beforehand been documented.
Hamdani, who was born and died (of mind most cancers) in Nasriyah, simply outdoors of the traditional website of Ur—the birthplace of the prophet Abraham and residential of the famed Sumerian ziggurat—was a coaching supervisor for EAMENA earlier than being appointed Minister for Tradition, Tourism and Antiquities of Iraq in 2018.
His imaginative and prescient, says Rouhani, “was to organize a younger technology of Iraqi specialists who may apply new applied sciences and methods to determine, monitor and defend Iraq’s historic heritage”.
As Hamdani’s coffin was pushed to the Nasriyah Museum, the place he was the director in addition to the director of antiquities for Dhi Qar governate from 2003 to 2009, en path to his last resting place in Najaf, he was remembered by colleagues all over the world as an incredible defender of Iraqi heritage. The Iraqi prime ministerMustafa Al-Kadhimi referred to as him a “shining gentle of archaeology.”
After the 2003 invasion resulted in widespread unrest and looting of Iraqi heritage, Hamdani declared, “We now have 800 websites and a million thieves. […] I’m able to work with the Satan so as to defend these websites.” To that finish he labored with the Italian military, which was in command of safety in Dhi Qar from 2003-06, to guard archaeological websites. Working with a group of Carabinieri, he helped return over 400 looted objects.
Abdulamir Al-Hamdani throughout an EAMENA-CPF Coaching Workshop Courtesy the EAMENA Mission
In 2010, working with the State College of New York at Stony Brook (SBU), Hamdani co-directed a joint Iraqi-American mission to excavate the location at Tel Sakhariyah close to the traditional metropolis of Ur (visited final 12 months by Pope Francis). Throughout the peak of Islamic State’s destruction of historic websites in Northern Iraq in and round Mosul, Hamdani, then pursuing a PhD at SBU, helped organise a protest in entrance of the White Home the place he lamented, “1000’s of years of historical past are being smashed by the hammers of ignorance. With every destroyed statue, a narrative is forgotten.”
Underneath Hamdani’s watch as minister of tradition, the Baghdad Museum began a significant renovation of its Sumerian galleries, a cultural heritage museum opened for the primary time in Basra and Babylon was lastly inscribed as a Unesco World Heritage website.
“His profession highlighted the position of Iraq’s oldest civilisations for a preferred viewers at house, while breaking new floor academically with the systematic research of the Sumerian capital of Ur and Iraq’s southern marshes,” says Tobin Hartnell, the director of the Heart for Archaeology and Cultural Heritage on the American College of Iraq in Sulaimani. Hartnell labored with Hamdani on the historic Assyrian website of Ashur from 2018-20, elevating an Aliph (Worldwide alliance for the safety of heritage in battle areas) grant to stabilise the outer arch of the famed Tabira Gate broken by an Isis bomb in 2015.
Hartnell provides, “As an administrator, Abdulamir Al-Hamdani superior the reason for distant sensing so as to systematically report the tens of 1000’s of heritage websites throughout Iraq.”
Hamdani was born into in a big household dwelling in a reed hut within the Mesopotamian marshes. His illiterate father requested the Iraqi authorities to supply a instructor for his youngsters. Fittingly for a spot that was each an historic website and the birthplace of the Iraqi Communist Occasion in 1934, they despatched members of the Communist Occasion to teach the younger Hamdani. His imaginative and prescient of Iraq’s previous as a vector for its future and a option to transcend sectarianism and create solidarity would appear to have been born of this distinctive upbringing that blended Marxism and a conventional life-style.
In an interview final 12 months, Hamdani mentioned that being raised in a village within the marshes on high of an historic website piqued his curiousity and inspired him to review archaeology.
“Later, I discovered that cultural heritage may unify the Iraqis” he mentioned. “We have to use cultural heritage to form our nationwide id of Iraqis to reply the query, ‘Who’re we? Are we Iraqis? Are we Arabs? Are we Kurds? Are we Christian? Are we Muslim? Are we Jewish?’ So, to reply that query we have to use the Mesopotamian id as our id—as us. To unify a fragmented society, we have to have a platform to unify the individuals and I believe the Mesopotamian id and the cultural heritage of Mesopotamia as Iraqi heritage is the perfect device to unify the society and to open a dialogue between completely different ethnic and spiritual teams in a spot like Iraq.”
