For many people, the history of astronomy is usually associated with ancient Greece, Renaissance Europe, or modern space agencies. Yet some of the earliest systematic observations of the sky emerged in Mesopotamia, in the region that is now Iraq. Babylonian astronomers recorded eclipses, planetary motions, and celestial cycles centuries before the development of modern scientific institutions. Despite this deep heritage, the modern scientific history of Iraq is too often discussed exclusively through the lens of war, sanctions, and institutional collapse.
This contrast was one of the central motivations behind writing this Comment for Nature Astronomy. I wanted to examine not only the ancient foundations of astronomy in Iraq, but also the remarkable continuity of scientific activity across repeated periods of disruption — and to ask what conditions allowed that continuity to persist at all.
While researching the article, I became increasingly drawn to the role of women in Iraqi astronomy, a dimension that is frequently absent from both regional and international historical narratives. The story of May Kaftan-Kassim stood out in particular. As the first Arab woman to earn a PhD in astronomy from Harvard University in 1958, and later a researcher who published in Nature, her career connected Iraq to the broader international astronomy community during a critical period of institutional development. But the article also sought to show that her contributions were not an isolated exception. Women's participation formed part of a broader and longer continuum within Iraqi scientific life — one that deserves recognition on its own terms.
One of the most demanding aspects of writing the article was reconstructing a coherent scientific narrative from fragmented and often inaccessible records. Many archives remain scattered, poorly digitised, or entirely lost. There were moments when a single footnote in an obscure publication became the only surviving evidence of an entire institutional era. In some cases, important episodes in Iraqi astronomy persist only through personal recollections, local documents, or brief references buried in international journals. Bringing together ancient history, modern bibliometric analysis, institutional records, and contemporary science policy into the tight structure of a Comment required difficult decisions about what to include and what to set aside.
The publication of this article in Nature Astronomy carries a significance that goes beyond the academic. It demonstrates that scientific discussions about Iraq can move beyond narratives of destruction alone. Iraq's scientific history includes interruption and loss, but it also includes continuity, adaptation, mentorship, and rebuilding. The recent growth in astronomy education, international collaboration, and publication activity in Iraq suggests that recovery is possible even under the most difficult conditions — and that scientific traditions, once rooted deeply enough, are extraordinarily hard to extinguish.
I hope this article encourages wider discussion about the preservation of scientific heritage, the rebuilding of research systems in fragile settings, and the importance of documenting scientific histories that rarely appear in global narratives. The full article is available in Nature Astronomy, and I warmly welcome responses from researchers working on related histories across the region and beyond.