When Iraq was not yet Iraq, it was the birthplace of the first written words.
The words look like bird tracks. Masterful hands drew them in clay with sharpened canes.
Fire annihilates and rescues, kills and gives life, as do the gods, as do we. Fire hardened the clay and preserved the words. Thanks to fire, the clay tablets still tell what they told thousands of years ago in that land of two rivers.
In our days, George W. Bush, perhaps believing that writing was invented in Texas, launched with joyful impunity a war to exterminate Iraq. There were thousands upon thousands of victims, and not all of them were flesh and blood. A great deal of memory was murdered too.
Living history in the form of numerous clay tablets were stolen or destroyed by bombs.
One of the tablets said:
We are dust and nothing
All that we do is no more than wind.
Mirrors, stories of almost everyone, Eduardo Galeano (translated by Mark Fried)