Babylon has seen it all. From its peak as the Neo-Babylonian capital under King Nebuchadnezzar through its heavy-handed 1987 reconstruction by Saddam Hussein to its post-invasion demise when American and Polish troops ran roughshod over its ruins and ISIS threatened its very existence, the ancient city has witnessed empires come and go. History spanning the centuries
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Abstract There is a large, and growing, literature dealing with the power of gender parity, rightly concluding that GDP would increase with increasing participation rate of women in the labour market at various skills and seniority levels. Iraq is not different. This body of literature had simultaneously been pioneered by the academia, international organisations and establish
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BAGHDAD – I have spent much of my career – as an academic, an adviser to the EU and a policy analyst – speaking with high-level policymakers in Iraq. In my many meetings, I have tried to get a grip on the complex political structures of a country ravaged by war, sanctions, foreign occupation and internal conflict. It is easy to be caught into a general tendency to look closes
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Lamia Al-Gailani Werr, who as one of the Iraq’s first female archaeologists helped her country’s national museum recover from the looting of its antiquities at the outset of the Iraq war, died on Jan. 18 in Amman, Jordan. She was 80. Her daughter Noorah Al-Gailani said the cause was a stroke. Dr. Gailani had been in Amman attending a workshop that trains curators to help pro
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Part of what remains of the ceremonial entrance through the walls of the ancient city of Babylon. The site was partly reconstructed in the 1950s and 1990s, but in a way that caused damage. Conservationists now are trying to undo some of that damage. Jane Arraf/NPR Mohaned Ahmed is standing on scaffolding at the ancient site of Babylon, dipping water into a bucket and spongi
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