The following is a description of Hatra as recollected by Gavin Young from his book "IRAQ Land of Two Rivers."

Hatra, the perfect ruin, or as the Arabs say, Hadhar.

View of Hatra (click to enlarge)

I say 'perfect ruin' because of Hatra's stunning beauty- you don't have to be a ruin-lover to appreciate that - and its most satisfactory size; there is plenty of it to look at but not too much. It has also been restored to a considerable extent, and although this will not please everybody, Hatra will be loved unreservedly, and at first sight, by anyone who needs more than a heap of bricks and dust to stimulate his historical imagination. Not that Hatra ever deteriorated into a mere muddle of bricks and mounds of earth, like Babylon. Hatra's remarkable survival is due to the fact that it is one of Iraq's few stone monuments- and its stones were never much carted away to be used in the construction of some later. town or palace.

Now you drive up a good road and suddenly see honey-colored walls and columns and arches. You are inclined to stop the car and sit, looking at this wonderful sight- in many people's opinion the loveliest ancient monument in Iraq from any period in that country's immensely long history.

The date of the 'first' Hatra is still unknown. It is supposed that things started with a smallish Assyrian settlement which then grew, in the second century BC, to become a fortress and a trading center, probably under the aegis of Christian Arab Kings. Inscriptions reveal the name of one Sanatruq whose title was King of the Arabs and who, it seems, completed the Temple of Shamash (the Sun God). The statuary of which Hatra is full shows Greek, Roman, Parthian and Persian influences. There, before you in stone, are the Hatran gods - Maran, Martan and Barmarin- 'Our Lord, our Lady, and the son of our Lord'. There is Hercules, with his knobbly club and a lion skin over his left arm, who here masquerades at times as an underworld god called Nergal. There is Poseidon, the Sea God, and Eros, and Hermes, and the great Apollo. Under the towering vaulted hails you move in a world of stone gods, larger- appropriately- than life, of Kings, princes, priests and notables. Here are deities for all men, from east and west, north and south. For Hatra stands at a crossroads: south of the Jebel Sinjar, near Wadi Tharthar, on the road running west to ancient Antioch, and on the road going east to the Parthian kingdom in north-east Persia. Hatra today has an adequate rest-house for tourists, and it is as well to arrive there in the late afternoon so that you avoid the heat and dust and see Hatra in a leisurely fashion at the two best possible times of day- evening and early morning.

The sun slants into Hatra's great iwans, the vaulted halls, open-fronted like Arab guest-tents. It warms the pillars and fallen stones and the staircase and the temples into a rich butterscotch tone. The restorers' stone, carefully matched with the old, becomes indistinguishable from the original. The sky is pale blue melding into a paler yellow near the horizon, then into a gold-tinged mauve. A child's voice floats across from a flock of sheep grazing on the green plain outside the walls where hawks and owls cry.

Here the Parthians came, west and north, filling a vacuum left by the disintegration of the empire of Alexander the Great in the second century before Christ. Parthians came from near the Afghan border and built their great city of Ctesiphon across the Tigris from Seleucia, where Alexander's successors had held uneasy court. Pushing north, they found Hatra, at that time well-watered and, for the age, very large in population, snugly surrounded by large walls and a moat with a circumference of three miles. They enriched it and enlarged it and built their own temples in it. And they fortitled it against the incursions of their most formidable rivals for dominion in Mesopotamia- the ambitious and warlike Romans.

Hatra resisted everything the Romans could devise to capture it. One after the other, Roman emperors took the invasion route from Syria to Babylon, sacking the Parthian capital at Ctesiphon each time but imposing no permanent rule. The contest of the two empires lurched- bloody, but futile- back and forth for years. Ctesiphon would be looted- the Parthians would move back and restore it; again, the Romans would sweat down the Euphrates or the Tigris to repeat their destruction, and again the Parthians would bide their time and then creep back. Trajan, in AD 117, marched to Ctesiphon and actually captured and shipped back to Antioch the golden throne of Osroes, the Parthian King. He then sailed on down the Tigris to the Gulf, but was obliged to hurry back when Osroes returned to the warpath. Coming down to take Ctesiphon Trajan had tried t9 take Hatra; going back to Antioch he tried again. Both attempts failed. The heat and the Hatran defense proved too much for his troops. Later Hadrian came to a peaceful ' agreement with Osroes. But soon Marcus Aurelius sent soldiers who duly sacked Ctesiphon in the Trajan tradition, and incidentally picked up a virulent germ in Babylon which spread plague through Italy when they reached home. Later, Septimus Severus tried to take Hatra but he, too, was foiled by naptha bombs thrown down by the defenders onto his men's heads. But both Rome and Parthia soon faded. And the distinguished British archaeologist, Seton Lloyd, comments, 'We have few material remains of Parthian culture; coins with the heads of quaint, episcopal-looking kings, sometimes drawn full-face, carved reliefs, almost always of horsemen, some pottery and a particular type of blue glazed "slipper-coffin", into which the corpse was apparently drawn by a cord tied round the ankles and passed through a hole in the "toe".'

It is good to take one's time in Hatra. There is so much to look at and the compulsion is to go on looking. The Sun and Moon Gods in the inner lofty stone chamber, for instance- the strong modeling of the frown, the cleft chin and the firm, no-nonsense mouth. (Unexpectedly, the Moon is sterner than the Sun. ) There is the marbled intricacy of the King's statue in the great hall. And the arrogant stone eagles in niches and on ledges unmoved by the shrill churring of the real hawks that infest the stone roofs like bats. There are pink stones and off-white stones, and the pillars in the temple faCades are not quite straight- they have a hardly perceptible bulge. The statues are impressive rather than endearing- pantalooned, belted, scabbarded, they wear their stone necklaces proudly, straight-backed in thick beards and curly hair and hats like night-caps. There are charming surprises: a slab bears, simply, a pair of ears, seen from the side.

All around are the hundreds of large stone blocks, sections of pillars, bits of wall or roof waiting to be restored to the positions in which two thousand years ago an architect decided he wanted them. In the spring, armies of caterpillars wriggle over the stones. My driver said, 'Those caterpillars mean it's spring in Mosul too.'

'Before Islam- perhaps just over two thousand years old.'

'They must have had machines to raise those big stones.' He looked closely at a statue. 'Is that really marble? Carved?' He laughed. 'Give me a million dinars and I couldn't do that.'

It was not easy to leave Hatra. Spring, of course, is the best time to visit-the countryside is green then. The lambs gambol around as you peer at Aramaic inscriptions or the bulls' heads of Mithras, and little owls, quite unafraid, perch on boulders and peer at you.

Superstitious persons might think the owls are the lingering inquisitive spirits of a place that flourished, in a flash, with great sweetness in the manner of a moonflower and then all of a sudden withered and died. Sapor, the Sassanian Persian King, put Hatra and its people to flame and the sword in AD 24 1. A hundred years later passers-by saw a mere jumble of ruins, long since abandoned. Ichabod: the glory has departed.

Bibliography:

• Young, Gavin. IRAQ Land of Two Rivers Collins St. James Place, London, 1980.