LAYER, William, & Ali Wahab.

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Iraq Royal Family. First edition, first printing, signed on both the English and Arabic title pages by one of the authors, "With best wishes, Ali Wahab". This is "a pictorial history of Iraq from the Ottoman period though the three generations of the Iraqi monarchy to its extinction by Karem Quassim's 1958 coup" (p. ii). Half a century after the fall of the Hashemite kings, and during the first years of the Iraq War, Lieutenant Colonel William Layer was shown to a trove of photographs of the old monarchy in the ruins of the Zuhur Palace. After cataloguing, digitizing, and translating any notes on the photographs, he left the collection with the Baghdad Museum. Ali Wahab writes in his introduction (in Arabic) that he was alerted to the existence of these photographs by Layer's 2013 article "Photos of the Hashemites", published in Asian Affairs, volume 44, number 1. After reaching out to Layer, Ali performed extensive archival research that formed the foundation of this present volume. It reproduces over 117 of the photographs, showing life for the royal family in Baghdad. There are aerial shots of the city, pictures of all three kings and their families with a variety of state visitors, and a large number of King Faisal II during his childhood in England.

• Printing: first

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