The debris of history

It was a brave attempt of the BBC to screen a programme earlier this week called Dan Cruickshank and the Lost Cities of Iraq. It was as if they were saying, Look! There is more to Iraq than Saddam Hussein, there's thousands of years of history! And we did indeed see some amazing remains, and were given hints of some amazing history, even if it was hard to penetrate the compulsive manner in which Mr Cruickshank stood in front of these amazing and incredible remains and said: "Amazing! Incredible!" at every opportunity, without often telling us just why these things were so incredible and amazing.

Not only did he get terribly excited about everything he saw, like a kettle that has been left to boil too long on the stove, but he also got quite grimly awestruck at the thought of the coming war, and would lower his voice to a dramatic whisper even when he was standing in the open desert. Whenever a plane flew overhead he would break off and gaze dramatically upwards, whispering: "It may well be an American jet! Even a British one!" leaving the poor cameraman wondering whether to try to find this mystery dot or just concentrate on Cruickshank.

He reached his peak of melodrama when he arrived at the British Military Cemetery north of Mosul, and found that most of the gravestones of the soldiers buried there in the Second World War had been broken up or recycled as a squatter's home. Their government minder said they should not film here, but they did, secretly, and all you saw was, well, broken bits of gravestone, with the occasional word like "Deceased" or "Royal Artillery" or "O'Connor" legible on them. Which Cruickshank intoned in a would-be meaningful whisper, as if we should all be horribly shocked by it.

But surely broken bits and pieces are what archaeology is all about. These lost cities are all bits and pieces, broken fragments, things that have been desecrated by time. For an archaeologist to mourn the natural passage of time is ludicrous. These great cities could not have been built in the first place without fighting, and conquering, and enslavement, and pitched battles, and private murders. What Cruickshank wanted to believe was that modern war was nasty and destructive, and history was all bustling trade and religion and architecture. What baloney. All through history people have been coming along and breaking up other people's military cemeteries, and looting and stealing, and they always will.

At one point Cruickshank invoked the shade of Agatha Christie, who, he said, was crazy about the archaeology out here, along with her husband Max Mallowan. More shades of baloney. I have just finished reading Agatha Christie's own account of life in the digs, Come, Tell Me How You Live, and it is fairly clear that although she enjoyed the country, and the people, and being with husband Max, the actual digging details became pretty tiresome to her. By the end, every time she felt her husband's pulse quicken as another unexcavated mound came into sight, she would sigh and hope to pass on.

And war? Well, in the mid-1930s, on the Syrian-Iraq border, there was a severe outbreak of peace. But there is one curious reference to fighting that has stuck in my mind, from near the end of the book, when the Mallowans are about to head home again across the desert to Lebanon.

"We decide to lunch here by the wadi. After lunch, Max and I paddle our feet in it – delicious, till a snake darts out, and quite puts us off paddling.

"An old man comes and sits down beside us. There is the usual long silence after greetings have been given.

"Then he inquires courteously if we are French? German? English?

"English!

"He nods his head. 'Is it the English this country belongs to now? I cannot remember. I know it is no longer the Turks.'

" 'No,' we say; 'the Turks have not been here since the war.'

" 'A war?' says the old man.

" 'The war that was fought 20 years ago.'

"He reflects. 'I do not remember a war... Ah yes, about the time you mention, many soldiers went to and fro over the railway... That, then, was the war? We did not realise it was a war. It did not touch us here.'

"Presently, after another long silence, he rises, bids us farewell politely, and is gone."