ABSTRACT
Iraq, since time immemorial, has been one of the great highroads between East and West. Its people have watched for countless centuries the caravans faring forth from Baghdad to Aleppo and Damascus, to Mecca in the south and Samarkand in the north, to Persia, Afghanistan and India; they have watched the caravans returning. It has seen successive waves of conquest, with invaders and counter-invaders sweeping across from east to west and back again. It has its own dark history of crime, of ambition, of passionate love; through all the centuries the common people have carried on their commonplace existence and ensured the survival of civilization in the plain of the Two Rivers.
