RUFUS FEARS THE MIDDLE EAST THE GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES RUPERT CHAPMAN COMMENT

"Stimulating and thought provoking as per usual! I have only one comment, which is on the Middle East, which is my own specialization. The situation today in the Middle East is precisely the same as it has been for the last 5,000 years. I have, for many years, referred to it as either 'the 5,000 year war', or as 'stable instability'. To explain what I mean, some 5,000 years ago the Stela of the Vultures is the earliest record of a war - between the Sumerians, in what is today southern Iraq, and the Elamites, in what is today southern Iran. In Iraq itself, for the last 5,000 years there has been tension, and frequently open warfare, between the south, Sumer/Babylonia, and the north, Assyria. The mountains of the northeast have always been a separate culture area, as they are with the Kurds (known there since at least the 4th century A.D.) today, at war with the powers in the plains. The second great enemy of the Assyrians, after the Elamites and the Persians, was the kingdom of Urartu in what is now eastern Turkey, later the independent kingdom of Armenia. In the heyday of Sumerian culture, between 3500 and 2000 B.C., the Sumerians had colonies along the Middle Euphrates in what is today Syria. The Syrians and the Mesopotamians traded and intermittently fought wars against each other. Syria itself has been a single culture, east of the mountains which mark the northern extension of the Great Rift Valley along the Mediterranean Coast, but never a unified country until the French created one. War between the Syrian city-states was endemic throughout all periods of antiquity when they were not under the control of some external power. The Mediterranean Coastal Region was always culturally separate from Inland Syria, and always an economic trading culture between the great powers which surrounded it. Further south, what is today Israel and the West Bank was always either at war with Transjordan, or in an uneasy peace, and likewise in relation to Syria and what is now Lebanon, and to Egypt, the nearest great power, and the dominant culture. What keeps all of these relations of conflict and limited co-operation in place is, to me, one of the most interesting unasked, and, therefore, unanswered questions of historical studies."