Later covers

I would, eventually, like to do some treatment of the Ba’ath era — the material is readily available and presents a charmingly (if intimidatingly) varied set of postmarks and usages. So far I’ve mostly just been taking notes, and saving images of auction lots for later reference, but I’ve picked up a few covers along the way, and I show these below. For the moment I present these without commentary — that’ll follow once I have a better handle on the material.

I must note —with considerable embarrassment— that I do not know a solitary word of Arabic, and such translations (or, as they seem to me, decipherments) as appear on this site come courtesy of friends, well-wishers, and the occasional bit of illiterate pattern-matching on my own part. This is a crude system but it, more or less, suffices for the Hashemite era, where postmarks tend to be bilingual, and surviving covers are, overwhelmingly, addressed in the Roman script to western countries. This method breaks down to a large extent after 1958: all-Arabic postmarks begin to appear, becoming predominant after the 1991 war, and an increasing proportion of the corpus becomes covers addressed in Arabic to middle eastern destinations. I hope to eventually gain more fluency in Arabic or, at the very least, a more consistent hook-up for translations — but, until then, I pray abjectly for my readers’ mercy towards the erroneous attributions which will inevitably ensue here.

Baghdad 🠚 Anaheim, January 1980

Al-Diwaniyah 🠚 Dhilwan, 9 March 1981

Al-Diwaniyah 🠚 Dhilwan, 10 March 1981

Basra 🠚 Srinagar, 28 November 1982

BAGHDAD 🠚 Frankfurt, 21 June 1990

Baghdad 🠚 Karachi, 1 December 1998

Hillah 🠚 [Egypt], 18 June 2001