Mother Of All Road Trips (XV): Dust of Story, Dreams of Glory 

From the rarified air and drama of the Elburz mountains the road brought us down into a broad bowl embracing Iran’s capital, Tehran.  Second only to Cairo for size in the region, the city possessed an orderly air having risen almost from nothing in the course of a single century.  Unlike other cities we’d seen, it had hardly any medieval old-town.  But its broad boulevards and heroic monuments announced that memories of the Persian Empire and of an Islamic Golden Age still fired imaginations here, that there was grandeur to recover.  Still alive in collective memory are the mounted archers of Cyrus, the majesty of Persepolis – its temples and palaces, the once-gilded columns of Ecbatana and the flourish of poetry from the calligraphic hands of Ferdowsi and Omar Khayyam.  It seemed clear that the intended humiliations of geo-politics would likely not assuage Iranian hunger for a fitting place in the sun.

But unyielding travel departures awaiting us in Europe forced the pace as we crossed the city with little time to wander the Grand Bazaar or other points of interest.  The route led away into the Zagros mountains that had once sheltered Persia from restless armies on the west.  A half-day’s drive brought us to Hamadan (once called ‘Ecbatana’) whose laurels as a city could equal any of the other Silk Road sites we visited.  It had once been a capital of the Medes; it was the cradle of Sufi poet Baba ‘the Naked’ Tahir; it claimed Avicenna, father of early modern medicine; it was the birthplace of Shirin Ebadi, since a Nobel Peace laureate who has been a defender of human rights at great personal cost; and prominent on the skyline of Hamadan stood the purported tomb of no less than the biblical Queen Esther and her mentor-kinsman, Mordecai; a panel of iconic figures bestriding three millennia.

With such pedigree, it’s not surprising that a clutch of children pelted our scruffy caravan with roadside debris as we left the city.  Perhaps this was payback for CIA meddling in the insidious overthrow of an earlier elected prime minister.  Whatever the reason, it was clear we brought no lustre to a town of whose brilliance they were fiercely proud.  This unpleasant moment, though, was harbinger of an experience that awaited us in Baghdad beyond the mountains.

Having crossed through Kermanshah, and easing past nomad flocks on the hills, the road brought us to the watershed overlooking vast lowlands to the west.  Here, we found ourselves deep in the country of the Kurds, some 40-million strong, who have fought for a homeland of their own for centuries but remain piecemealed across six countries, always minorities subject to the whims of others.  To the southwest lay the oil fields that have roiled the politics of the region.  

Lost before us in the gauzy scene to the west, however, was a flatland unlike any other.  For all who feel besotted with the epic dramas and struggles of the human race, there exist few vistas more evocative, more imposing and weighty, than that spread at your feet from these ridges.  Out there in the haze flow the mythic Tigris and the Euphrates.  Out there lay the primordial sites of Ur, the hanging gardens of Babylon, the walls of Nineveh, and the modern city of Baghdad, every prominence an impossibly ancient ruin bathed in dust.  Traces of towers, temples, imperial gateways, canals, and royal highways lay everywhere at hand, all testimony to hoary aspiration and dreams.

Paul Salopek, who has set out to walk the trail of historic human migration which he calls ‘the earliest travel story’, from the Rift Valley to Tierra del Fuego, has captured that scene with these lines,

Lest we be dazzled by time-worn coins and imposing monuments alone, though, one humble corner of this vantage point is worth a mention.  Just across the frontier with Iraq, to the north, along a tributary of the Tigris lies what appears to be a homely field of stones.  It is a site called Jarmo, one of the earliest known human settlements to have busied itself with raising grain.  In the gallery of revered names for human pursuits, Jarmo should rank as patron saint of farmers.  Nine thousand years ago the families of Jarmo tended early fields of wheat and lentils, kept dogs and goats, and fashioned a life from stone tools.  Such were their gifts to us.

Feeling ever so much like bit players on this, the grandest of stages, we tiptoed off the heights of the Zagros and crept out across those plains.