The Erbil Citadel stands about thirty metres above the streets of Erbil, in northern Iraq, and none of that height is natural. The mound is the town itself, stacked. For six thousand years people here built mudbrick houses on the rubble of the houses before them, and the debris lifted the whole settlement above the plain. That is why it is counted among the places never abandoned. In antiquity it was Arbela, an Assyrian religious centre with a famous cult of Ishtar, goddess of love and war. The name comes from the Akkadian Arba'ilu, the four gods, and the Kurdish Hewlêr is the same sounds reshuffled. No temple has been dug up, but ground-penetrating radar has found two large stone structures buried under the middle of the mound. The battle in which Alexander broke the Persian empire in 331 BC is still often called the Battle of Arbela, though the fighting was fifty kilometres away.
What stands on top now is Ottoman: a ring of houses along the rim whose backs make the face you see from the square below. Inside, merchants' courtyard houses have been rebuilt around quiet stone yards, with wooden doors, arched porticoes and carved facades. At the foot of the hill the Qaysari Bazaar runs under brick vaults, selling spices, gold and textiles as it has for centuries. The mound reads best from the southern ramparts rather than the gateway. Leaning over the parapet there, with the bazaar wrapped around the foot below you, you can see the whole town riding on its own ruins. The last hour of daylight is the one to take: the heat finally eases, the brick goes amber, and the lamps of the modern city come on underneath you. When the citadel was cleared for restoration in 2007, about 840 families were moved out. One was allowed to stay, so that six thousand years of unbroken habitation would not end on the paperwork of a building site.