Iraq came into being because the Ottoman Empire backed the wrong side in World War I, and when the fighting ended Britain and France divied up the Turkish dominion, and one of the tidbits—declared a British mandate by the helpful League of Nations—was a piece of Mesopotamia that comprised the independent provinces of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul (Shia, mixed, and Kurd, respectively); and the British, under a doctrine with the counterintuitive name “unite and rule,” bound these into “Iraq”—a native colloquialism used to describe the southern Mesopotamian river delta.

After the British and French, the central beneficiary of this sectoring was the Arabian Hashemite clan, led by Hussein bin Ali, who began the war an Ottoman subject and middling tribal leader in what is now western Saudi Arabia, but who, guided by T.E. Lawrence, declared rebellion against Istanbul. In return, Hussein expected the Allies to one day reward him with a hunk of Ottoman Empire large enough to accommodate a Hashemite empire from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean that he would rule along with his two oldest sons—“three wee kings of Orient,” as one British wit put it. The Brits had other ideas. Hussein was allowed to declare himself monarch of his home territory, while his son Abdullah received the kingdom of Transjordan (where Hussein soon took refuge after the Saud family chased him from the peninsula). For his part, Faisal, Hussein’s younger son, received the kingdom of Syria without being told that Britain had several years earlier secretly ceded the place to the French. Faisal got out of Damascus just ahead of French artillery shells and, after months of remonstrations with the British, received the consolation prize of Iraq. The British had to then clear a path to his crowning by bombing mutinous Kurdish and Arab villages and arresting and deporting for life Faisal’s most able “Iraqi” competitor for the throne, on the grounds that he had said something seditious at a dinner party. “Feisal [sic] offers hope of best and cheapest solution,” cabled War Secretary Winston Churchill to Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Shortly thereafter, a local plebiscite was held under British administration, and Faisal—who in photographs of the time has the look of an Orthodox rabbinical student who’s just been told that Passover vacation has been cancelled—received the endorsement of 96 percent of those queried as to his royal suitability, a proportion that would stand as a Mesopotamian election record until Saddam Hussein began racking up more than 99 percent of the vote some decades later.

Empires had, of course, been part of Mesopotamian history for millennia, and in 1922, a year after Faisal came ashore in Basra under British protection, that history was extended backward past 2600 B.C., with the discovery of the city of Ur, part of the lost Kingdom of Sumer, beneath a sand-covered mound some 220 miles south of Baghdad. Its “digger” (as he liked to refer to himself) was C. Leonard Woolley, a brilliant British Museum archaeologist who would spend 12 years at Ur, unearthing a civilization that featured music, schools, ambassadors, historians, jokes, epics, laments, temples, trade regulations, laws protecting widows and orphans, and technological innovations such as the potter’s wheel (but not, as was once claimed, the vehicular wheel). Their most important innovation, of course, and the one that allows us to know much of what we know about the Sumerians, was a form of writing called cuneiform that replaced cumbersome pictograms with abstracted “letters” that could be used to convey infinite varieties of meaning.

The exact range of the Sumerian empire is not known, but its kings exercised influence in just about every piece of territory later coveted by Hussein bin Ali, and the kingdom itself lasted for some 800 years. And then the sands covered it over for 4,000 years, a matter that ought to have given pause to Churchill and Lloyd George but probably didn’t.

In 1936, a citizen of the realm and a member of the Indian Imperial Police named George Orwell did pause to consider the meaning of imperial rule, when he wrote a brief elucidation of the subject titled “Shooting An Elephant.” It begins, “In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people.” The essay then describes how ordinary villagers, out of a combination of mischief and boredom, one day baited Orwell, a “sub-divisional police officer,” into shooting an elephant that didn’t need shooting—a fact that Orwell recognized before he raised his rifle. “I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him.” Orwell, however, committed the murder, firing three shots to bring the elephant down, and then in a fury of remorse and anger, “poured shot after shot into [the wounded elephant’s] heart and down his throat.” And still the beast didn’t die. Of the ultimate fate of the man who represents empire, Orwell concluded, “He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”

John Agresto’s story of his encounter with occupied Iraq begins here.

Read more by Ben Birnbaum