Chronicle | Lost Kings of the Desert

Professor Colin Renfrew examines the forgotten city of Hatra. The programme shows how this stone metropolis retained its buildings, unlike the mud-bricked city of Nineveh, which is now just a large mound or 'tell'. Renfrew visits the reconstructed gates and figures of winged bull-men that are all that is left of Nineveh, before illustrating the extraordinary society that existed at Hatra, which was influenced by the Romans yet remained independent.

Now known as al-Hadr, Hatra has been a Unesco World Heritage Site since 1985. In 2008, a Unesco mission visited and found some evidence of damage that had been done during the Second Gulf War. This was the same year that a team from the British Museum also visited archaeological sites in southern Iraq to assess damage with Iraqi colleagues.