The Déesse and the Dam: Extractive Audacity, Montage, and the Politics of Ecological Devastation on the Euphrates

A montage in Syrian filmmaker and activist Omar Amiralay’s Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam (1970) juxtaposes the dam’s industrial machinery with an eighteenth-century bce limestone statue of the goddess Ishtar, excavated from the Syrian site of Mari on the Euphrates River and known as the déesse au vase jaillissant (goddess with a flowing vase). This article analyses Amiralay’s visual and semiotic conflation of the dam’s architectural infrastructure and the déesse, raising questions regarding the politics of preservation under the Syrian Assad family regime (1971–present). Amiralay’s film valorises industrial labour while presenting a view of the rural lifeways that surround the Euphrates through the lens of salvage ethnography, suggesting that the advent of the dam will render these rural ways obsolete. The documentary records the months before over 60,000 people evacuated the region that would soon become the dam’s reservoir, Lake Assad. I argue that, read alongside film and literature that recentres the dam’s displaced (al-maghmurin; the drowned), Film Essay offers a counter-narrative to the ‘climate thesis’ of the Syrian Civil War (2011–present) and ties the conflict to longer histories of false promises and political subjugation embodied by the Tabqa Dam project.