SHIFT Akkadian cylinder seal depicting Ishtar and the eight-sided sun. In the collection of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. N O L Y B A B Rouzbeh Akhbari The ancient Mesopotamian goddess, Ishtar, is primarily associated with desire, war, justice, territorial expansion and political power. Her cult was originally worshipped in Sumer and later adopted by Babylonians, amongst others. She was especially beloved by the Assyrians, who elevated her to become the highest deity in their pantheon, ranking above their own national god: Ashur. Unlike other gods, whose roles were static and whose domains were limited, the stories of Ishtar describe her as moving from conquest to conquest. She was a heavily-armed warrior often depicted with couchant lions at her feet. Warfare itself was occasionally referred to as the “dance of Ishtar” in Sumerian. One of her popular 59 REZA NEGARESTANI OF FELIN ES SHAPE SHIFT FELINES OF BABYLON ROUZBEH AKHBARI hymns declares: “She stirs speeding carnage and incites devastating poisons in deep waters, clothed in terrifying radiance. It is her game to speed conflict and battle, untiring.” Her primary attribute of being associated with lions stems from an illustration on a charcoal-coloured chlorite bowl found in the temple of Nippur, in which a large feline is depicted battling a giant snake. A cuneiform inscription accompanying the scene reads "Ishtar and the Serpent," indicating her legendary capacity to metamorphosize into a lioness. Ishtar's most famous chronicle revolves around her descent into Kur, the ancient Mesopotamian underworld. The Akkadian version begins with Ishtar approaching the gates of the underworld (supposedly located somewhere in the region of Ur) and demanding the gatekeeper to let her in: If you do not open the gate for me to come in, I shall smash the door and shatter the bolt, I shall smash the doorpost and overturn the doors, I shall raise up the dead and they shall eat the living: And the dead shall outnumber the living! In 1865, while daydreaming, German scientist Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz discovered the formula for Benzine, which he conceived as the image of a snake eating its own tail. The Ouroboros is an ancient Egyptian symbol relating to Alchemy. Fol. 279 of Codex Parisinus graecus 2327, a copy (made by Theodoros Pelecanos [Pelekanos] of Corfu in Khandak, Iraklio, Crete in 1478) of a lost manuscript of an early medieval tract which was attributed to Synosius (Synesius) of Cyrene (d. 412). The text of the tract is attributed to Stephanus of Alexandria (7th century). The seven judges of the underworlds order the Galla (demonic servers) to let Ishtar enter, on the condition that she leaves her accompanying lions, who were getting excessively ramped up by the interaction, deep inside a ditch dug next to the gates of the underworld. Multiple hypotheses point to the brutal battle of Susa as the first documented conflict involving hydrocarbons. At that time, the imperial capital of the Elamite society was sacked and razed to the ground under the auspices “The Destruction of Susa of Elam” by Ashurbanipal, 647 BC, relief. SUGAR 61 SHAPE Tanya Busse writes: “Looking towards the horizon, the noaidi had a vision of times past; a black beach, a black feline, an unnamed black liquid permeating lips, and lungs and hearts. The mountain the noaidi stood on, now hollow and without protectors, was previously a lush site of timber and trade, prior to it being afflicted with the dark disease. The starless night was a sign of the insatiable desire of war, power, and capital, for which the noaidi had yet to find a cure.” that a vast black creature had surfaced in the region of Ur and Shush. Although archaeological theories related to this event are grossly scattered and often shrouded in myths, purportedly the aim of the Assyrian invaders was to contain this underworldly substance before further outward spillage. The horrific massacre that followed was based on the belief that anyone coming in contact with the oozing matter was automatically complicit in its evil, and to be eradicated without hesitation. Ashurbanipal, the demon’s self-proclaimed cleanser and commander-in-chief of the encroaching army, ordered epigraphs to eternally monumentalize his deeds in Susa. He triumphantly iterated that in order to cleanse the earthly kingdom of the mixture with the underworld, he carried away the bones of the Elamite people toward the land of Ashur; exhuming their tombs, exposing their contents to the bleaching rays of the sun, and sowing the land with salt and quicklime. Not even the animals that came in contact with the Elamite society were ultimately granted a second chance at life. Younger experimental archaeologists speculate the possibility that the Assyrian army had devised a lasting plan to protect against the resurfacing of the creatures. These new hypotheses are often developed based on illegal excavations and primarily rely on regional myths. They commonly reference ancient legends detailing how the creators of Susa intentionally positioned lifesize sculptures of black lions fitted with human hands pointing to the sky wherever the unnamed substance surfaced. Academics haven’t been able to verify these legends through conventional linguistic means, but these SUGAR researchers/chroniclers claim that the deteriorating artefacts they excavated have been masterfully infused with a residual black powder that has remained intact over millennia. Older Bakhtiari communities on the peripheries of Susa today maintain a belief that Ashurbanipal— out of fear for a correlation between the lion monoliths and the channels leading to the underworld— ordered the collection of every single monument to be disposed of in the southern seas. Supposedly, somewhere along the short journey to the Persian Gulf, an armed dispute erupted between his commanders; subsequently, the victorious ones ended up burying all the monuments before murdering the rest of the troops, spoliating the burial evidence, and fleeing north toward South Caucasus Mountains. Former Royal Navy officer, Lt. John McCluer, was contracted by British East India Company to produce a series of visual reports pertaining to the empire’s future commercial interests in southern Persia. He undertook the journey aboard the Scorpion and created a set of 71 illustrations, reports and hydrographical maps from the Sea of Oman and the Persian Gulf’s shores, along with all islands and peninsulas. 63 ROUZBEH AKHBARI FELINES OF BABYLON Pluto/Hades was god of the underworld, ruling the petroleum underground rivers in Roman mythology. Oil mogul John D. Rockefeller, the world's most cited example of a plutocrat, made his fortune by concentrating on oil refining rather than drilling, conceptually removing the industry further from the visible violence of empirical extraction and towards the obscured mechanism of refinement. SHIFT Section of “Views of Persia,” taken by Lt. John McCluer. Photo credit: [Collection of British Maritime Museum. Photo supplied by the author.] Sketch of an Assyrian lion weight by Fredric Madden. Originally published in History of Jewish Coinage, and of Money in the Old and New Testament. Photo credit: [Public Domain.] In the packages sent to India and the Royal Navy’s central hydrography command in Gibraltar, the twelfth illustration was of a rocky shoreline titled: Cape Jacques. Along with the survey of the site, he included a series of detailed reports relating to seasonal undercurrents and visibility conditions during the period the drawings were produced. Most oddly, he included a sentence reading: “When you come westward of this view, is very strange and irregular. Strewn boulders seem to be covered in tar. For experienced sailors, impossible to miss rampant cliff carvings.” The Assyrian lion weights are a group of bronze measuring units varying in size from 30cm to 2cm in length. The weights were originally discovered in excavations at SUGAR SHIFT the gateways of Nimrud (in today’s Iraq) buried under a stratum of dust and debris. Identical weights were later excavated at the Iranian site of Susa by French archeologist, Jacques de Morgan, who later shipped the artifacts, along with condition reports and his scientific articles, to the Louvre. De Morgan travelled to Susa in an attempt to retrace the routes of the Assyrian military campaigns. As he explored the ruins outside the small village of Shush, a high hill known as the Citadel aroused his curiosity. A careful examination of that mound led to the discovery of these bronze lions. Following this discovery, while he awaited French diplomatic efforts to secure a monopolized concession for archaeological excavations in Persia, he published his Mission Scientifique en Perse (1895). The work included four volumes of detailed geological studies; two volumes of archaeological studies on tombstones; one volume dedicated to Kurdish dialects and the languages of northern Persia; and two volumes of geographical studies focused on industrial mining opportunities. His geological reports became a major source of inspiration for early investors in Middle Eastern oil expeditions, and acted as a scientific guide for experts including the region’s very first oil driller, George B. Reynolds. Immediately following the conclusion of his work in southern Persia, he relocated to Russian Armenia, accepted the managerial responsibility of Akhtala copper mines, and aggressively expanded their operations in the surrounding South Caucasus Mountains. The National Archives at Kew maintains all Foreign Office minutes and communications regarding a commercial concession to explore and extract hydrocarbons in Iran. These specific documents were released to the public in 65 Dust is not singular nor inanimate, it embodies complex systems and is formed of multiplicities of differentiated matter. Negarestani narrates dust as a sort of “super weapon” in the Middle East: Dust is all we have here in the Middle East, it is all that we can consume without fear of ever losing it.” Parsani’s response begins. “Breathe as deeply as you will, dust will never be depleted. If the profound hostility of the Middle East towards being settled even as geographic entity cannot be fully grasped, this is because even its terrestrial bedrock, its concrete ground, is progressively eroding and degenerating into dust.” Parsani names dust “the middleeastern unit of information,” or sometimes even “that middleeastern relic from which nothing can escape.” If the tendency of dust lies in the direction of becoming-particle (naught-ness) as well as wetness (dust is hydrophilic by nature) because its emergence is accompanied by dehydration and evaporation of moisture, then the term xero-(dry) plus data might relay the full import of Parsani’s reference to dust. Xero-data, or dust, swarms planetary bodies as the primal flux of data… (Negarestani, 2008) ROUZBEH AKHBARI FELINES OF BABYLON SHAPE the 1970s. They include huge volumes of diplomatic and legal jargon travelling through less-than-efficient telegraphic cables from the British Embassy in Tehran to colonial offices in Baghdad, Delhi and London. A considerable amount of communications in these files are duplicates of notes shared between the Exploration Syndicate’s staff in Iran and the company’s headquarters at 44 Grosvenor Sq. Expectedly, the majority of notes revolve around progress reports reflecting on the crew’s technical and fiscal obstacles; and explaining the slow drilling work undertaken in the test fields between Masjid-I-Suleiman and the village of Shush. The engineers’ reports derail from their tedious, uneventful trajectory near the end of the third volume. In a series of four telegrams, the Syndicate’s head driller, George B. Reynolds speaks of unusual sightings near the drilling fields. In contrast to everything else that was sent to the Syndicate’s main office and the Foreign Office headquarters, this package was cc’d to “Stanmore Hall.” Worried for the health of his colleagues, Reynolds begins the letter by referencing his junior staff’s claims indicating that in the earlier weeks multiple accounts of hallucinations were reported. Apparently, these illusions were in the shape of seeing nonexistent lion silhouettes on distant horizons, and only experienced by the land surveyors. Reynolds dismisses the rumours in the last telegram as “undoubtedly associated with Susa’s maddening summer heat” and encourages the syndicate financiers to invest in an ice-producing unit to be built in proximity to the exploration fields. SHIFT Shortly after the occupation of southern Iran by British forces, and at the zenith of labor disputes over BP’s appalling working conditions and apartheid building practices in Abadan, the company hired an architect to come up with spatial solutions to ease the tensions and quench the flames of dissatisfaction amongst the insurgencies. In addition to designing new residential neighborhoods that theoretically encouraged more “harmonious” interactions between workers of different races, the company’s ROUZBEH AKHBARI FELINES OF BABYLON SHAPE British geologist George B. Reynolds and his Bakhtiari assistant surveying for oil drilling in Masjed Soleyman. Photo credit: [License for publication purchased from Critical Past.] SUGAR 67 SHAPE SHIFT ROUZBEH AKHBARI FELINES OF BABYLON We travelled frequently from Kuwait City to Abadan. The myths were common between the Arab residents on the other side of the border too. One of the company’s leaseholders in Al-Ahmadi brought up similar sightings. It was in an unofficial setting and through poor translation, but he spoke of incidents indicating the appearance of non-native black lions over irrigation canals amongst dense palm plantations. One of his younger servants insisted that he’d seen them with his own eyes, and that the encounter was fatal for three of his colleagues working the fields. Abadan’s Cinema Taj. Photo credit: [Public domain.] architect, James M. Wilson, constructed a large cinema. This unique redbrick structure was situated precisely where BP’s enclaves bordered the districts developed vernacularly by the city’s immigrant residents. Although the cinema was soon designated for the exclusive use of British and Indian expatriates, the initial aspiration behind the project was for individuals of different races to gather inside the cinema and fix their gazes upon a common screen. Wilson, an architect with extensive expertise in scientific management and colonial planning in India, Iraq, Kuwait and Iran was quoted on multiple occasions narrating a story as the inspiration behind Cinema Taj’s formal resemblance to a couchant sphinx: Derelict T-72, commonly known as Lion of Babylon. [Public domain.] SUGAR 69 SHIFT The Iraqi Oil Minister, Jabar al-Luaibi, announced on May 1st, during a news conference that the last oil wells set on fire more than three years ago have finally been extinguished. Luaibi confirmed that the well at Ajil, an oilfield located south of Nimrud, was now under the control of Iraqi authorities. He also iterated that the Iraqi forces who briefly reopened the road between Bashiqa and Bardarash yesterday quickly closed it again. The road between Duhok and Nineveh provinces northeast of Mosul also remained closed after the events leading to successive defeats brought upon the insurgencies by coalition air forces. In a separate news conference held in Baghdad’s Victory Base on the same day, General Lloyd Austin’s aids confirmed the purchase and shipment of large quantities of decommissioned Lions of Babylon (the colloquial term given to Saddam Hussein’s adapted Soviet T-72 tanks) to American scrapping companies. A considerable number of these derelict war machines later entered the army’s desert training camps in Arizona for distant target practice. SUGAR ROUZBEH AKHBARI FELINES OF BABYLON SHAPE 71