Country west of Mosul

To confirm this, it may be interesting to

quote at random the reactions of a nineteenth century traveler to the

appearance of the country west of Mosul, during a journey in the spring 1840.

Sir Henry Layard had reached the market town called Tell Afar on his way to the

Sin jar Hills, and he describes his surroundings as follows “Towards evening I

ascended the mound and visited the castle….

From the walls, I had an uninterrupted view

of a vast plain, stretching westward towards the Euphrates, and losing itself

in the hazy distance. The ruins of ancient towns and villages arose on all

sides; and as the sun went down, I counted above one hundred mounds, throwing

their dark and lengthening shadows across the plain. These were the ruins of

Assyrian civilization and prosperity. Centuries have elapsed since a settled

population dwelt in this district of Mesopotamia.

Now, not even the tent of a Bedouin could

be seen. “I Layard was of course wrong in thinking only of the Assyrian nation;

for many of the mounds he was looking at were in fact occupied as early as the

sixth millennium B.C. However, he did not exaggerate their number. During a

survey in 1937, I myself recorded the surface pottery from seventy-five mounds

in that area, and these were only a few selected sites, which I could easily

reach by car during a short three weeks reconnaissance.2

However, apart from the close concentration

of mounds in certain areas of this sort, the pattern, which they make, is often

worth observing. AH over Iraq, and for that matter in neighboring countries, a

glance at the disposal of mounds in a landscape will often reveal to one in the

lividest possible manner some aspect of historical geography, whether political

or economic.

Royal Road

The city of Erbil, for instance, (PL. I)

stands within its fortress walls on a mound whose height almost justifies its

local reputation as the “oldest city in the world”: and from its rooftops, over

the undulating plain to the Zaab river crossings.

Which led to Nineveh and the north, one

sees a line of smaller mounds, pointing the exact direction of the age old

caravan route, which the Achaemenian Persians, coming from Susa, prolonged as

far as their new capital at Sardis. They called it the Royal Road, though it

had existed for several thousand years before their time. Wherever it crossed a

wade and there was a source of water, there also, today, there is a mound; and

villages, which make convenient stopping places on the modem motoring road,

crown many of them.