Dar Sharrukin

Khorsabad, Iraq

June 19, 2023

I had met Lynne in the transit lounge at the airport, waiting on my flight to Baghdad almost a month ago. We jabbered the entire flight and stayed in touch. Lynne lives and works in Mosul and was a willing partner-in-crime to my odd notions of places to visit.

It was Sargon I who first united the Mesopotamian city states into the Akkadian empire (2334-2193 BCE) and established a capital at Akkad. So legendary was this king, that more than a thousand years later, in circa 721 BCE the king of the Neo Assyrian empire styled himself Sargon II. He began building Dar Sharrukin – Fort of Sargon in a place next to the present-day village of Khorsabad. And it is this that we set off to see.

A judicious mix of google maps and occasional help from locals had us arriving at the site. We were greeted by bumpy dirt tracks, fields stretching in front of us dotted with sheep and vague hillocks beyond the fields. Nothing seemed to have any resemblance to the map in the book I am carting around.

But wait, isn’t this dirt road the same as on this on maps.me? So, that must mean this opening in the ridge is one of the eastern gates. And that mound is the citadel. And that mound in the distance must be the arsenal. Yes! It matches. Suddenly the whole map make sense. I am thrilled!

Courtesy of Maps. me

Courtesy of University of Chicago, Institute for Study of Ancient Cultures

Courtesy of Mosul Cultural Museum

Lynne, kind soul that she is, humored me and trudged along. We clambered up the highest mound, the site of the original ziggurat and surveyed what lay before. We could still parts of the wall on the ground and what must have been the tops of the walls – large stone slabs with cut in a stepped fashion perhaps lying where the wall had once stood.

A lot of what had been excavated is in the Iraqi Museum in Baghdad, thankfully not looted like much else in April 2003. I can see them in my mind’s eye. I do not see the fields or the sheep or the dirt tracks.

I see instead, the bas-relief carvings of the Sargon II in his chariot, the sculpted friezes of subjects carrying tributes on the walls and the winged bulls at the entrance.