Michael Rakowtiz Makes a Bold Statement on the Origins of Civilization

On a 2004 trip to the iconic Brooklyn grocer Sahadi’s, Michael Rakowitz picked up a large red can of date syrup. “Your mother is going to love this,” Charlie Sahadi, the owner, told him. “It’s from Baghdad.” Indeed, Iraqi dates are by plenty accounts the best in the world. Rakowitz’s mother—whose family fled Iraq in 1946 alongside many other Jews—would speak of them fondly.

But from 1990 to 2003, Iraqi dates were impossible to find in the United States, because of sanctions. And even in 2004, the dates from Baghdad were labeled “product of Lebanon,” the country where they were packaged and shipped, to avoid the prohibitive tariffs that Iraqi imports faced.

Inspired by the exporters’ ingenuity, Rakowitz—whose grandfather had run an import/export business too—thought to turn “bad business into good art,” as he put it in his video Return (2004), on view in his survey “Allspice” at the Acropolis Museum in Athens. He wanted to see what it would take to import a product clearly labeled “product of Iraq,” so he opened a New York company to import an entire ton of Iraqi dates.

Rakowitz told his proprietor that theirs would be the first product on US shelves to plainly list “Iraq” as its country of origin in three decades. If you have a message to American consumers, he told them, put it on the box. To his delight, the message they chose was a sort of art history lesson: they printed photographs of the lion of Babylon, and of a reconstructed Ishtar gate (the original was by then long gone, looted by Germans for Berlin’s Pergamon Museum).

This unlikely choice of packaging was a comment, or so it seemed, on the Fertile Crescent’s most underappreciated export to the world: nothing short of the origins of civilization. This story has been robbed of Iraqis materially, under the guise of archaeology, and also narratively, in the sense that its importance is too little known in the West.

As for Rakowitz’s survey at the Acropolis Museum: the Greek city-state was founded several millennia after the world’s first, Uruk, in modern-day Iraq. Yet Athens nevertheless gets disproportional credit for its foundational contributions, owing to whitewashed narratives of history. A large chunk of Rakowitz’s show is dedicated to his series “The invisible enemy should not exist” (2007–), centered around reconstructions of objects from Baghdad’s National Museum of Iraq looted in the wake of the 2003 US invasion. They are made of Arabic food wrappers and newspapers, as if an homage to the date packaging’s art history lesson.

The pairing of artist and venue in “Allspice” is incredibly poignant. Not only does the show remind the hordes of tourists who flock to the Acropolis that the origins of the world as we know it go back much further than Athens, with Mesopotamia gifting us inventions like writing, the wheel, and agriculture, to name only a few. The show is also a gesture of solidarity and a joint statement against looting by Imperialist Anglo-American powers. The Acropolis Museum was founded in 2003 for the express purpose of housing the Parthenon Marbles, then (as now) on view at the British Museum in London, where they were shipped in 1801. When the British replied to Greek demands for restitution by describing Athenians as incapable of caring for the objects, the local government responded boldly, building a museum for that very purpose. Giant sparse plinths await their return.

Rakowitz also worked with the Acropolis Museum’s incredible collection. Among its holdings, he found a stone Cypriot head with large eyes and a curlicue beard that looked staunchly Assyrian in style. (The artist, initially trained as a stone carver, has a keen eye for such things.) He displayed the head in a vitrine, then sketched onto the plexiglass the outline of a lamassu: that protective Assyrian deity who takes the shape of a winged bull with a human head. The work extends the museum’s gesture of cross-cultural solidarity and reminds that such relationships have a history too.

Like most relationships, this one is complicated, to say the very least. One reconstuctred relief, from the Northwest Palace of Kalhu in Nimrud, is made from the cover of Nineveh Magazine, published in Modern Assyrian and English. Careful of the ways emphases on origins can make a culture seem lost to the past, Rakowitz included nods to Assyrian endurance. The choice holds weight in the Mediterranean world, where just a century ago, the Ottoman Empire committed genocide against the Assyrian people. Meaningfully, the nation of Greece has yet to formally recognize the atrocity, though Athens is home to a sizeable Assyrian community.

Throughout, the show evokes the ways that ethnic cleansing and cultural destruction too often conspire, as in another new commission involving Rakowitz’s efforts to preserve his Iraqi Jewish heritage. The need is urgent: a recent census counted fewer than five Jews living in Iraq. So for A Baghdadi Amba Dictionary (2025), he made amba—an Iraqi pickled mango condiment—that he jarred while talking to his mom on the phone. As they spoke, he wrote down a glossary of terms in their Jewish dialect of Iraqi Arabic directly onto the jars.

The amba is on display in a vitrine next to several objects loaned from the University of Chicago’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Culture, including the Chicago Assyrian dictionary—a comprehensive record of Akkadian, the earliest recorded language born in present-day Iraq, that strenuously decoded the cuneiform. The vitrines also include a 1935 Jewish prayer book from Iraq that combines Arabic and Hebrew writing. The volume was badly damaged, and the Jewish tradition of genizah dictates that sacred texts, when tattered, be buried. Instead, feeling that he’d already buried enough, Rakowitz had the book delicately restored by a master bookbinder. Preserving such Arab Jewish objects are of deep personal significance to the artist, but are profoundly political too, a reminder of life in the region before the horrors of the mid-20th century.

If history is written by the victors, their script too often goes like this: undermine the enemy’s culture to justify violence, war, and genocide. The word “Barbaric” is often used to mean “uncivilized,” but originally, it simply meant “not-Greek”: an ahistorical diss, to say the least. Rakowitz’s intervention is to flip the script, preserving and reconstituting culture under threat. His work is sharp, caring, and deeply ethical, but never self-righteous. Instead, it remains humble yet unflinching—preserving humaneness itself, against the odds.