BAGHDAD (AsiaNews): Iraq’s ancient archaeological sites are under threat from climate change, including increasingly intense sandstorms and salinisation, Iraqi archaeologist Aqeel Mansarawi, saidnoting that over next decade in a “country facing the most and acting the least,” sand could cover “80 to 90 per cent of the archaeological sites.”
One site, Umm al-Aqarib, was an important Sumerian town in southern Mesopotamia dating back more than 4,000 years, and covering an area of five square kilometres.
The city reached its peak in 2350BC. The site has only suffered from the looting of antiquities in the past because of poor monitoring, but now the effects of climate change could bury it under sand.
More than 10 sandstorms have hit Iraq over the last year, with visible effects at the site. “Archaeological missions will have to put more effort” before excavating can start Mansarawi explained.
Extending across what was the Fertile Crescent of antiquity, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates, Iraq is rich in resources, but now emblematic of the environmental crisis facing the planet.
[Umm al-Aqarib] reached its peak in 2350BC. The site has only suffered from the looting of antiquities in the past because of poor monitoring, but now the effects of climate change could bury it under sand.
Sandstorms, rising temperatures and declining water resources, are having an impact not only on human health but also on the country’s cultural heritage.
Louis Raphael Cardinal Sako, patriarch of the Chaldean Church, had already raised the issue when he was archbishop of Kirkuk. He said that Iraq’s cultural heritage is a “universal” good that is worth “more than oil.”
Speaking at the International Conference for the Safeguarding of Cultural Heritage in Conflict Areas in Dubai in 2016, he said that protecting such heritage was everyone’s responsibility. On that occasion, heads of state and government, scholars, Islamic and Christian religious leaders, historians, archaeologists and cultural activists came together to discuss ways to preserve the cultural legacy of the past.
For now, the winds are “more loaded with dust” and “carry fragments of the soil, especially sand and silt, which produce erosion and the crumbling of ancient buildings,” lamented Jaafar al-Jotheri, professor of archaeology at Iraq’s Al-Qadisiyah University.
Al-Jotheri said that cause is drier winters and longer, hotter summers with temperatures that exceed 50 degrees and “weaken the soil and fragment [it] because of the lack of vegetation.”
…the winds are “more loaded with dust” and “carry fragments of the soil, especially sand and silt, which produce erosion and the crumbling of ancient buildings
Jaafar al-Jotheri
Mark Altaweel, professor of Near Eastern archaeology at University College London, blames another factor, salinisation, due to the “very dry” environment. When “water evaporates very quickly, only the salt residues remain,” which form a crust that devours everything.
Iraq is one of the five countries most affected by the main factors of climate change, the first of which are long periods of drought, according to UN reports.
Although the emergency is largely due to the lack of rain, Iraqi authorities are especially critical of Turkey and Iran for building dams upriver, which they view as the main factor in limiting the flow of water.
Still, Jotheri notes that Iraq has the “worst hydraulic management.” Even today, farmers resort to flood irrigation, a technique widely considered to be wasteful.
With water shortages gradually driving farmers and herders to cities, the land is abandoned and “the soil becomes even more vulnerable to winds,” Jotheri added.
Already in 2021, then Iraqi president, Barham Salih, raised the alarm noting that “desertification affects 39 per cent of Iraqi land,” a number expected to increase.
