Tuesday, April 05, 2005

"Kurds on the Bus"

A number of years ago I studied Anthropology at Stony Brook University Graduate School (went AWL Absent With Leave) and I studied the ancient city of Nuzi in Kirkuk, near Mosul, excavated by Starr of Harvard in the 1930's, with Elizabeth Stone, who became a MacArthur Scholar, studying women's roles in the ancient Middle East. That area then was a crossroads of many peoples (Hittites, Hurrians, the locals and the Sumerians) in an ancient kingdom of Mitanni, whose capital, something like Washanunni, has never been found. The clay tablets of Nuzi were considered important to the understanding of the ancient "cradle of civilization" though we also used Redman's book on the Levant (also the name of President Reagan's Press Secretary, the first Press Secretary George B. Cortelyou, a relation of mine was once married to, the first woman, Dee Dee Myers) and I must say I am very disappointed by our American (and others?) lack of preparation and consideration for the World Heritage of the "Fertile Crescent" it represents to so many school children, like myself. If as reported it has been purposely "desecrated" (as in Babylon) for military psycho-ops I think we should be extremely mad at those responsible, so to show the Kurds, who live in three countries, that we at least will police our own.

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