Hatra

• 1. Introduction

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  Hatra was a walled city in Upper Mesopotamia that rose to become, by some accounts, the richest archaeological site from the Parthian Empire known to date. Its ruins sit 290 kilometres northwest of Baghdad and 110 kilometres southwest of Mosul, in what is now the eastern Nineveh Governorate of northern Iraq. The city commanded a position between the Roman and Parthian worlds, and its circular walls nearly 2 kilometres in diameter were backed by more than 160 towers. Yet for all its fortification, Hatra eventually fell. A legendary story of betrayal clings to that fall, involving a king's daughter, a Sassanid conqueror, and a fate that punished both the betrayed and the betrayer. What kind of place was Hatra? How did it hold off emperors? And why, in 2015, did armed militants feel so threatened by its ancient stones that they filmed themselves smashing them?

• 2. Between Two Empires

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  Hatra flourished during the 1st and 2nd centuries AD as a religious and trading centre under the Parthians. Its location made it something rare: a semi-autonomous buffer kingdom on the western limits of the Parthian Empire, governed by Arabian princes. Rulers of the earlier period carried the Aramaic title mrjʾ, meaning "lord," the same title used by the Assyrian rulers of nearby Assur. Later rulers upgraded to mlkʾ d-ʿrb, "king of the Arabs."

  The city eventually became the capital of what may have been the first Arab-ruled kingdom in a chain of largely Arab-controlled cities stretching from Hatra in the northeast, through Palmyra and Baalbek, all the way to Petra in the southwest. Ruler number eight in the list preserved in inscriptions at the site, Abdsamiya, served between roughly 192 and 202 AD and is recorded as having supported the Roman emperor Pescennius Niger. Sanatruq II, who followed, became a vassal of the Romans under Gordian III during the Roman-Persian Wars.

  This capacity to shift between powerful neighbours defined Hatra's political identity. The city was not simply a pawn; it played each side with enough skill to survive sieges by some of the most powerful commanders of the ancient world.

• 3. Walls That Stopped Emperors

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  Trajan, one of Rome's most celebrated military leaders, attacked Hatra in 116 or 117 AD. He failed to take it. Septimius Severus tried again in 198 or 199 AD. He also failed. Both sieges became notable not for Roman success but for Hatra's stubborn resistance. The city's circular plan, its inner and outer walls, and the more than 160 defensive towers made it formidable.

  Hatra's forces also defeated the rising Sassanid Persians in 238 at the battle of Shahrazoor. That victory, however, proved to be the city's last major military success. In 241, the army of Sassanid king Shapur I took the city and destroyed it.

  Traditional accounts of how the city fell centre on al-Nadirah, daughter of the king of Araba. The story holds that she fell in love with Shapur and betrayed the city into his hands. After the conquest, Shapur killed her father and married al-Nadirah, but later had her killed as well, reportedly after concluding that a woman who would betray her own father was not to be trusted. It is a story that punishes the act of betrayal even when the beneficiary is the one doing the punishing.

• 4. A Temple for Every God

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  Hatra was famed across the ancient world for the fusion it achieved among different religious traditions. The city held temples to Nergal, the Assyrian-Babylonian and Akkadian deity; Hermes, representing the Greek tradition; Atargatis of the Syro-Aramaean world; Allat and Shamiyyah from the Arabian pantheon; and Shamash, the Mesopotamian sun god. The Hatran Aramaic inscriptions also mention the Aramaean Ba'al Shamayn, and a female deity called Ashurbel, who may have been an assimilation of the Assyrian god Ashur and the Assyrian-Babylonian Bel.

  The principal sacred precinct was enclosed by a temenos, the Greek term for a sacred boundary, surrounding the central buildings. Those temples covered roughly 1.2 hectares and were dominated by the Great Temple, whose vaults and columns once reached 30 metres in height. The local Assyrian god Shamash had a temple officially called Beit Elaha, "House of God," in Mesopotamian Aramaic inscriptions. A coin from the city records it as "Enclosure of Shamash."

  The city's Aramaic name, Hatrā, probably meant "enclosure, hedge, fence," and in Roman works it appeared as Greek Átra and Latin Hatra and Hatris. The name captured something real about the place: a bounded sacred space where gods from across the ancient Near East and Mediterranean world could coexist within a single walled enclosure.

• 5. How Hatra Looked

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  John M. Rosenfield observed that the statuary of Hatra belongs to the Parthian cultural sphere, with figures tending toward massive and frontal postures, feet often splayed, and clothing and decorative elements that match Parthian conventions. The architecture itself is generally understood as an example of Parthian style. Similarities have also been noted with the art of the Kushans, which scholars attribute either to direct cultural contact between Mesopotamia and the Kushan Empire or to a shared Parthian artistic background that produced parallel forms of representation.

  Hatra was the best preserved and most informative example of ancient Arabian architecture known before recent destruction. Its circular plan was unique in the region. The 1973 film The Exorcist used the site as the setting for its opening scene, bringing the ruins to a global film audience decades before most travellers could easily visit Iraq.

  Systematic excavation at the site began in 1951, carried out by Iraqi archaeologists. From 1906 to 1911, Walter Andrae of the German excavation team working at Assur had conducted the first survey of the site. From the 1980s onward, the Italian Archaeological Expedition directed by R. Ricciardi Venco of the University of Turin made major discoveries, focusing on a structure called Building A near the temenos, and on deep soundings in the central area. In 1990, a Polish expedition from the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Warsaw recorded and studied the city's defense walls. In 2004, one journalist described Hatra's columns and statues as making it one of Iraq's most impressive archaeological sites.

• 6. Restoration, Then Ruin Again

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  Saddam Hussein saw the ancient Mesopotamian history of sites like Hatra as a reflection of personal glory, and spent more than US$80 million in the first phase of restoration of Babylon alone. He demanded that new bricks used in the restorations carry his name, in deliberate imitation of the ancient Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. Parts of at least one restored temple at Hatra bear Saddam's name.

  The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant occupied the area around Hatra in mid-2014. In early 2015, ISIL announced plans to destroy artifacts at the site, claiming that statues and carved images were un-Islamic and encouraged shirk, or polytheism. They made this argument despite the fact that various Islamic regimes had preserved the site for some 1,400 years. A video released by ISIL showed the destruction of some artifacts. After the bulldozing of Nimrud on the 5th of March 2015, Abdulamir Hamdani, an Iraqi archaeologist from Stony Brook University, stated: "Hatra of course will be next." Iraqi official sources reported on the 7th of March that ISIS had begun demolishing the ruins.

  UNESCO and ISESCO issued a joint statement condemning what they called "the contempt in which it holds the history and heritage of Arab people." Pro-Iraqi government Popular Mobilization Forces captured the city on the 26th of April 2017. A PMF commander reported that damage to the walls and towers was relatively minor compared with initial fears, though statues and engraved images had been destroyed and the site's eastern gates had been mined. Layla Salih, head of antiquities for Nineveh Governorate, stated that most buildings were intact. A journalist from the EFE news agency had reported earlier finding destroyed statues, burnt buildings, and signs of looting. Hatra has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985, a status that offered protection in international law but not, in the end, on the ground.