Rather than a silent object to be contemplated, Hanaa Malallah describes her artbook, The God Marduk (2008), as a game that invites interaction and dialogue. Although this extraordinary work lies dormant in an archival box on a British Museum storage shelf, its full artistic potential is realized in touch and movement, its full message reliant on the passage and manipulation of time. The privileged viewer, more appositely referred to as the book’s parallel performer, encounters first the ‘mushhushshu,’ a creature symbolic of ancient Babylon’s patron deity. The uneven, burned, torn, and marked pages then pull the viewer deeper into the stratigraphy of the book allowing the creature to disappear and reappear, to be destroyed and remade. The ‘mushhushshu’ is a beast from the past reanimated in the present by the layering and stripping away of the book’s pages. If Malallah meant the work to be an interactive game, then the objective or outcome is found in its archaeological vision, the motion of the interaction mirroring the practice of excavation, a task that assumes a cycle of creation, destruction, and recreation. The tactile ridges, pleats, and surfaces of Malallah’s work can be reimagined in this vision as Iraq’s temporal terrain wherein the past and present form a core sample of both a contemporary and historical identity. The evasive, ephemeral, and outright scarred expression of this identity echoes Iraq’s recent history of cultural degradation and violence. I argue that to excavate Malallah’s book is to enter an active meditation on Iraq’s shifting political and cultural geographies as marked in the actual and represented ruins of the country’s past and present. This paper further explores the archaeological vision of Malallah’s The God Marduk as an affective and haptic performance that moves beyond a specified politics and reframes the nation’s cultural triumphs and calamities as processes buried in history and realized in the fullness of time.