A brief but arresting guide to interwar Baghdad, which ventures beyond the usual scope of the tourist literature of the time.
In and Around Baghdad was one of the few cloth-bound books produced by the Times Press (which primarily published English-language newspapers) and was clearly intended for the growing number of British visitors to the city. It begins with adverts for businesses and services catering to such visitors, and the opening chapters cover expected subjects: the desert road from Damascus, the main shopping streets (New Street and River Street), the bazaars, and the Baghdad Races. The latter provides an interesting overview of the horse breeding industry, including short profiles of the most important Iraqi breeders.
The author then wanders to sites less in-keeping with the casual tourist’s fancy. The reader is taken case-by-case through the Iraq Museum (and if he or she is a collector of antiquities, a list of licensed dealers in Baghdad, Mosul and Nasiriyah is offered), then to the new X-ray department of the Royal Hospital, and on to the Boy’s Reformatory School and adult jail, where inmates were busy weaving copies of Persian carpets. Main describes all of the above vividly and, with a few exceptions of lazy (but sadly typical) stereotyping, gives a positive and balanced view of the local people.
The last chapter moves out from the rush and din of the urban centre — the Coppersmith’s quarter is said to be “like the Clyde or the Tyne for noise” (p.13) — to the Diyala plain, fifty miles North-East of the city. There Main observes the excavations of ancient Eshunna at Tell Asmar, which were being carried out by the Chicago Oriental Institute. Poring over specific finds, he insists on the importance of the site as a whole, for how its parts come together to give “…an idea of what these ancient civilisations were like, and also how one stage of civilisation followed on and developed out of another stage” (p.84).
Scarce. LibraryHub locates three copies, at the British Library (two copies) and SOAS. OCLC adds six more, at UCLA, UCSB, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and NYU Abu Dhabi.
