Hatra

On the open steppe of northern Mesopotamia, the vaulted halls and columned temple fronts of Hatra still rise out of a ring of ancient walls. Some 1,800 years ago this was a fortified caravan city on the frontier between Rome and Parthia, and its ruins are regarded as the richest site of the Parthian era known today. Hatra has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985.

The city flourished in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD as a centre of trade and religion, and later became the capital of the Kingdom of Hatra, a semi-independent buffer state on the western edge of the Parthian Empire ruled by Arab princes, whose later rulers styled themselves "king of the Arabs". Its round plan was enclosed by an inner and an outer wall nearly 2 km across, reinforced by more than 160 towers. Those defences held: Hatra withstood sieges by the Roman emperors Trajan in 116/117 and Septimius Severus in 198/199. It fell only in 241 to the Sasanian king Shapur I, was destroyed and then abandoned. Local tradition tells that the city was betrayed by al-Nadirah, a king's daughter who fell in love with Shapur — and was later put to death by him for her disloyalty to her own father.

At the heart of the city lay a vast sacred enclosure of about 1.2 hectares, dominated by the Great Temple, whose vaults and columns once stood about 30 metres high. Its great open-fronted halls, or iwans, are characteristic of Parthian architecture. Hatra was famous for the mixture of its gods: the sun god Shamash, the city's principal deity, was worshipped alongside the Mesopotamian Nergal, the Greek Hermes, the Syrian Atargatis and the Arabian goddess Allat, and inscriptions in the local Hatran Aramaic record many others. The statues found here — kings, nobles and soldiers shown frontally, with richly patterned clothes — are now among the treasures of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad and other collections.

The ruins were first surveyed by the German archaeologist Walter Andrae between 1906 and 1911, and systematic excavation by Iraqi archaeologists began in 1951, later joined by Italian and Polish teams. The site served as the setting for the opening scene of the 1973 film The Exorcist. In 2015, during the occupation of the region by the Islamic State, many sculptures were smashed and the site was looted; when the area was retaken in 2017, archaeologists found the walls, towers and most buildings still standing.

Getting there

Hatra lies in Nineveh Governorate, about 110 km south-west of Mosul and about 290 km north-west of Baghdad; the nearest town is Ash Sharqat, about 47 km away. The nearest airport is Erbil International (EBL), about 132 km away in a straight line.