by Jon Lackman | 21 February 2007 | Ancient
From The Chronicle of Higher Education: “When he saw the letter, Donny George Youkhanna knew it was time to get out of Iraq. It was late this July, and someone had dropped an envelope containing a bullet on his parents’ driveway in Baghdad … he filed for retirement from the Iraq State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, where he was president, and the Iraq Museum, in Baghdad, where he was director general. After that he packed a few suitcases, locked the family apartment, and left. With that, the country lost its most prominent archaeologist. Since the U.S.-led invasion of Baghdad, in 2003, Mr. George had made it his business to remind the occupiers that Iraq was the same Fertile Crescent they had read about in schoolbooks. (He was lecturing American troops about ancient Mesopotamia one day at the Baghdad airport when a soldier asked him, “Where’s Mesopotamia?”) … Five months after leaving Baghdad, on a bitter-cold morning on Long Island, Mr. George stood before a group of sleepy undergraduates in one of Stony Brook’s classroom buildings, wearing an eggplant-colored sweater. It was 8:20 a.m., and he had never taught American college students before.”
