The Crade Has Fallen

Look up "Cradle of Civilization". What you will find is a word: Mesopotamia. It comes from the Greek, meaning "between". It refers to the lands between two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates.

Before the great European civilizations, before the Romans, before the Greeks, even before the Egyptians, there were great civilizations in Mesopotamia.

There were great civilizations residing between the rivers for millenia. There were the Assyrians. Later, there were the Babylonians. Much of what we know of in the Old Testament takes place in this fertile crescent. Abraham, considered the father of Jewish, Christian and Islamic tradition, came from the city of Ur, also in this region.

All that greatness. All that culture. All that history.

It's dead now.

Sure, it had been dormant for several years. Dictatorship has a nasty habit of doing that. But the truth, the essence, of the land and its people, was still there. It was waiting, longing for the day when it could rise again and perhaps take a place alongside our views of other great civilizations, like the Greeks and the Romans.

There is no chance for that now. That place, that Cradle of Civilization, is in Iraq.

And I fear we have lost forever the birthplace of civilization.