A Street in Baghdad, photo by A. Kerim, 1925.

Can you picture a Baghdad street without damage from the ongoing war in which shrapnel and broken glass draw the blood or ordinary Iraqis of all persuasions? One way is to return to the past more than 80 years ago to the year before the Baghdad Museum was created. The website Iraq Museum International has a number of interesting pages on the archaeological and pictoral history of Iraq. One of these is an online exposition of 72 sepiatone photographs taken by A. Kerim in 1925, published by the Hasso Brothers in Baghdad and printed by Rotophot A.G. in Berlin. These photographs are currently in the Harvard Semitic Museum Photographic Archives. The photographs cover all aspects of life, architecture and daily life and are well worth looking at or using in a classroom.