UR

Sulayman Al Bassam, Sulayman Al-Bassam

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781786825650
• eBook ISBN: 9781786825667
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

In Ancient Sumeria, a woman's desire for sexual sovereignty and radical vision of civic plurality draws the anger and outrage of the male status quo and unleashes catastrophe onto her city and her body. The seminal Lamentation for the Destruction of the City of Ur is the first poem written for a civic entity -- a city -- in the history of mankind. Writing scenes across multiple timelines that stretch from 2000 BC, to the European Imperialist fantasies of the late 19th Century, to the ISIS destruction of Palmyra in 2015, to a distorted Utopian vision of the future, Al Bassam's play is a riot of imagination and poetic archaeology, exploring themes of iconoclasm, civic space and feminine apotheosis. UR evokes the utopia and destruction of one of humanity's oldest cities, and is played by an ensemble composed of four Arabic actors working alongside four members of the Residenztheater ensemble.

Act One

SCENE 1: 1903

FRIEDRICH DELTIZCH’s dream of the opening ceremony of the Deutsches Orient-Gesellschaft.

DELITZCH: Honoured Sirs, members of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft. I present to you this map of Asia Minor and specifically the lands of Ancient Assyria and Mesopotamia. On these biblical lands, other great nations have established for themselves cantons of antique glory:

Persepolis, British.

Nimrud, British.

Ninevah; Khorsabad; French.

Borsippa and Ur, British.

Uruk and Larsa, British.

Kish; Telloh – the French.

Germany’s inferior position needs no emphatics: a flaccid inertia, in sharpest contrast to our burgeoning intellectual achievements in the fields of Akkadian, Babylonian, and Sumerian philology. Yet to what end, you ask, the toil and trouble of Great Nations in these distant-dangerous lands? Why this ransacking to the depths of Arab rubbish heaps where neither silver nor gold awaits? The answer, sirs, to both questions resounds: the Bible, our Bible.

Yes, Gentlemen, for in the Babylonian dung heaps lie the true origins of our own religion: in Babylon, I say, not Israel; in Mesopotamia, I tell you, not the Old Testament! Science agrees with me, yet some continue to assert the moral superiority of Jewish monotheism over pagan polytheism, and why? The Ten Commandments? Hammurabi made them long before Moses. Noah’s ark? ‘Tis Gilgamesh!

Babylonian texts, lost for many millennia, now opened by our zealous eyes, reveal Moses’ Pentateuch as little more than a jumbled assembly of inauthentic retellings and shoddy re-writes, these eyes unpick the signs, tap their mute forms and open their sealed lips, lift the veil, Gentlemen, lift the veil and see how the Evangelist granted to those Babylonian wise men – not, I tell you, not the self proclaiming, false, latter day prophets of the Israelites – to be the first to offer homage at the cradle of Christianity.

Miscomprehension of Mesopotamia: confusion in Christendom!

No small matter then – under the flaring nostrils of our Kaiser – this mission seeks to address and how it behooves the hand of German science to finger that dark mons of Babylon and revitalize the flesh of the Gospels that, as Goethe has already told you, ‘glisten and gleam’.

No more wet than Goethe is truth and truth is Goethe and in so far as our science is our moustache -painted or real- no less determined than the Herculean Von Siemens who lays steely pylons day and night to forge the railway that links Baghdad to its bosom sister Berlin; so we too venture East with earnest zeal, fear and trembling to seek God and Truth! Pitching that German tent into the palm-crowned banks of Paradise, burrowing a tunnel through time itself, propelling the Babylonian wise men’s semen deep into the flared nostrils of our father Wilhelm for Germany’s tumescent glory: cuneiform orgasms, heaven-shaking thunder! Blitz the scrolls of Mount Sinai out of the virginal jaws of our twentieth century movie machine – no schmutz, no schmaltz, no kitsch, no kvatz, no Golem, no Moses, no schlock. German Will! German Christian will! Hot as iron, pure as blood.

ARCHEOLIGISTS’ SONG:

To Babylon Now We Go
To Babylon Now We Go

Where The Earth Is Dark
And The Soil Is Wet
To Babylon Now We Go…

A Shovel Is A Shovel
And A Pick Is A Pick…
But What Lies Beneath
Ha Ha, Ha Ha…

O What Lies Beneath
Ha Ha, Ha Ha…

Is Nothing Less Than
A Conjuring Trick

Oh Oh Oh – Ah!

Oh Oh Oh – Ya!

This Stick – Who’s Stick –
His Stick! My Stick!

This Stick This Stick
Of Know – Ledge
Will bray away
The sha-a-dows!

Exit ARCHEOLOGISTS.

SCENE 2: 2015

A stick of lit dynamite is thrown onto the empty stage. The fuse burns halfway and then extinguishes itself. Enter SOLDIER 1, picking up the extinguished stick.

SOLDIER 1: (In colloquial Arabic.) Not like that, not like that! How’s that supposed to blow up a three thousand year old fucking pagan temple! Call yourself an explosives expert from fucking Germany! Come here, Einstein, let me put this stick up your arse!

SCENE 3: 1903

KOLDEWEY, ANDRAE, HAMMOUDI cataloging objects and fragmen...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• UR
• UR (Arabic Sections)