Unlike Egypt, Iraq accommodated not one but two provincial identities, the Assyrian and the Babylonian. Both cultures had of course suffered violent destruction on their fall a thousand years before the Arab conquests as Nabopolassar and the Medes turned Assyria into ' heaps and ruins' in 612 B.C. so Xerxes razed the walls of Babylon, expropriated its citizens and turned its god into bullion af...