Assama was the jumping-off place for invasion because an east-west road spills irregularly across the Rub al-Khali, from the beak of the chicken to its tail. But the legionaries from Europe or Asia spent little time in the Empty Zone. Didn’t take them long to determine that the southerly wasteland, scalding by day, freezing by night, had little to offer. There were no beads or bangles to snatch, no fields of bright minerals to pluck. Nothing to fossick for or fight over. Consequently, Assama achieved neither fame nor notoriety as a battlefield; rather it supplied a warpath to an access road running north, along the chicken’s midsection. It led to the flush and fabled cities of antiquity—Baghdad, Babylon, Ur, Urik, Nineveh, Samara. The intruders plundered one or another of them or as many as they could.

King Rim-sin of Larsa (Ellasar in the Old Testament) defeated Babylonia in 2076 BC. His successors were decimated by Hammurabi around 1770 BC. Tiglath-pileser I, ruler of the Elamites, took Babylon in 1110 BC, calling himself “King of the World.” Shortly thereafter he lost the world title, along with the city-state, to the Assyrians. Doggedly the Elamites tried to retake it, finally succeeding under Tiglath III in 728 BC. Then came Sennacherib, King of Assyria, who spent most of his reign (705–681) warring against Babylonia.

In 586 BC, King Nebuchadnezzar of the Chaldeans took Babylon; Cyrus the Great took it from the Chaldeans in 539 and founded the Persian empire. King Xerxes of Persia took the road west, leading an expedition against the Greeks. He was slaughtered at Salamis in 480.

Alexander of Macedon took Babylon in 381 BC, defeating Darius III of Persia. The Persians took another dreadful beating by a Roman army invading Mesopotamia in 242 AD. A raggedy-assed swarm of Arabs conquered southern Mesopotamia (at the site of present-day Iraq) in 640 AD. The Saracens crossed the road and got as far as Tours before the Franks, led by Charles Martel, Charlemagne’s grandfather, crushed them in 732 AD.

Saladin defeated Saif ud-Din to take Mosul in 1176 AD. Hulagu Khan, grandson of Jenghiz, sacked and burned Baghdad in 1258. The mongul Tamerlane, who hated jokes and was said to have been born with bloody clenched fists, took Baghdad in 1400.

The British arrived in 1915 and took over the territory six years later when they invented Iraq by gerrymandering a large, irregular cut—as much as they could grab—of Mesopotamia, which is why Assama looks like a chicken. Cartography was determined by oil; it was known that just about all the rest of Iraq gushed with the stuff, but somehow it had given Assama the slip. Damn place was indeed a desert eccentrically surrounded by a vast oasis of oil.