Philadelphia – Archaeologists studying ancient civilizations in northern Iraq in the 1930s also became friends with the neighboring Yazidi community, documenting their daily life in photographs that were rediscovered after the militant group of the Islamic State has devastated the tiny religious minority.
The black and white images ended up dispersing among the 2000 photographs of the excavation kept at the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology of the University of Pennsylvania, which led the ambitious excavation.
A photo – A Yézidi sanctuary – drew the student’s attention to the Penn doctorate, Marc Marin Webb, in 2022, almost a decade after destroying it is the extremists plundering the region. Webb and others began to browse the museum files and gathered nearly 300 photos to create a visual archive of the Yezidian people, one of the oldest religious minorities in Iraq.
Systematic attacks, which the United Nations called a genocide, killed thousands of Yezidis and sent thousands of others in exile or in sexual slavery. He also destroyed a large part of their heritage and their cultural history built, and the small community has since become broken in the world.
Ansam Basher, now a teacher in England, was overwhelmed with emotion when she saw the photos, in particular a lot of her grandparents’ wedding day in the early 1930s.
“No one imagined that a person of my age would lose their history because of the attack on the Islamic State,” said the 43 -year -old man, using an acronym for the extremist group. Basher’s grandfather lived with her family as she grew up in Bashiqa, a city outside Mosul. The city fell in 2014.
“My albums, my childhood photos, all the videos, the wedding videos of my two brothers (and) the photos, have disappeared. And now to see that my grandfather and my great-grandfather are suddenly, immediately comes back for life, it’s something that I am really happy,” she said. “Everyone is.”
The archives document the Yezidian people, the places and traditions that have sought to erase. Marin Webb is working with Nathaniel Brunt, a documentary maker from Toronto, to share it with the community, both through exhibitions in the region and in digital form with the Yazidi diaspora.
“When they arrived in Sinjar, they went around and destroyed all the religious and heritage sites, so that these photographs themselves have very strong resistance against this act of destruction,” said Brunt, a postdoctoral student at the libraries of the University of Victoria. The city of Sinjar is the ancestral homeland of the Yézidis near the Syrian border.
The first exhibitions took place in the region in April, when the Yézidis meet to celebrate the new year. Some were held outside in the very areas that the photos documented almost a century earlier.
“(He) was perceived as a good way to bring back the memory, a memory that was directly threatened by the ethnic cleaning campaign,” said Marin Webb.
Basher’s brother visited his hometown from Germany when he saw the exhibition and recognized his grandparents. This helped researchers fill certain whites.
Wedding photos show a deeply dressed bride as she stands anxiously in the door of her house, proceeds to her dowry in the village of her husband and finally enters her family home while a crowd looks.
“I see my sister in black and white,” said Basher, noting the green eyes and the similar complexion that her sister shares with their grandmother, Naama Sulayman.
His grandfather, Bashir Sadiq Rashid al-Rashidani, came from an eminent family and often welcomed Penn’s archeology teams in his cafe. He and his brother, like other local men, also worked on excavations, which prompted him to invite Westerners to his marriage. In turn, they took the photos and even lent a car to the couple for the occasion, the family said.
Some photos were taken by Ephraim Avigdor Speiser, the archaeologist of the Penn Museum who directed excavations in two former Mesopotamian sites of the region, Tepe Gawra and Tell Billa.
“My grandfather was talking a lot about that time,” said Basher, who used a different spelling of the family name than other relatives.
His father, Mohin Bashir Sadiq, 77, a retired teacher who now lives in Cologne, Germany, thinks that marriage was the first time that anyone in the city has used a car, which he described as a model of 1927. He can be seen at the back of the wedding procession.
Basher shared photos on social networks to educate people on his homeland.
“The idea or image they have in their minds on Iraq is so different from reality,” she said. “We have suffered a lot, but we still have history.”
Other photos of the collection show that people at home, at work, during religious rallies.
At Marin Webb, an architect from Barcelona, they show the Yezidis as they lived, instead of assimilating them to the violence they endured later. The inhabitants who saw the exhibition told him that “shows the world that we are also people”.
An isolated minority, the Yezidis have been persecuted for centuries. Many Muslim sects consider them unfaithful; Many Iraqis falsely see them as worshipers of Satan. They speak Kurds and their traditions are merged, borrowing from Christianity, Islam and the old Persian religion of Zoroastrism.
Basher is grateful, the photos have remained safe – if they are largely out of sight – at the museum all this time. Alessandro Pezzati, the museum’s senior archivist, was one of the many people who helped webb sailor to comb through the files to identify them.
“Many of these collections sleep until they woke up by people like him,” said Pezzati.
