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Archeologists
accused the US of damaging “the cultural heritage of the whole
world.” (Reuters)
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CAIRO,
January 15 (IslamOnline.net) – The US-led occupation troops have
caused “substantial damage” to the ancient Iraqi city of Babylon,
home to one of the seven wonders of the world, after turning it to a
military base, a British Museum report has revealed.
“Babylon
is one of the most important archaeological sites in the world and the
damage caused by the military camp is a further blow for the cultural
heritage of Iraq,” said the report, reported Saturday, January 15,
by the Guardian.
Military
vehicles had crushed 2,600-year-old pavements in the city, said the
report, prepared by John Curtis, keeper of the British Museum's
Ancient Near East department.
Parts
of the old city were also disfigured by thousands of ugly sandbags and
metal mesh baskets built by vast amounts of sand and earth gouged from
the historical site, said the report.
US-led
occupation troops, estimated at 2,000, further contaminated the site
by bringing in large quantities of chemically-treated and compacted
sand from outside the city to build helipads, car parks, accommodation
and storage areas.
“This
is tantamount to establishing a military camp around the Great Pyramid
in Egypt or around Stonehenge in Britain,” said Curtis.
Visiting
the ancient city at the invitation of Iraqi antiquities experts, he
found cracks and gaps where somebody had tried to gouge out the
decorated bricks forming the famous dragons of the Ishtar Gate, which
is the eighth gate to city.
Curtis
further saw archaeological fragments scattered across the site and
trenches driven into ancient deposits.
“The
status of future information about these areas will therefore be
seriously compromised,” he concluded.
Babylon
is most famous for the Hanging Gardens, one of the seven wonders of
the ancient world.
“Dreadful”
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A
photo of a Babylonian wall
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“This
is one more legacy of the ongoing war in what was once Mesopotamia for
which we cannot avoid the responsibility,” said Dr Francis Deblauwe,
an independent Mesopotamian archaeologist based in Kansas City,
Missouri, US.
Deblauwe
runs the authoritative 2003 Iraq War & Archaeology Web site.
Lord
Redesdale, an archaeologist and head of the all-party parliamentary
archaeological group, told the Guardian that the US troops in
doing so were damaging “the cultural heritage of the whole world.”
“Outrage
is hardly the word, this is just dreadful,” he said.
Tim
Schadla Hall, reader in public archaeology at the Institute of
Archaeology at University College London, accused the US of taking
pleasure in violating international conventions.
“The
US has failed to take into account the requirements of the Hague
convention ... to protect major archaeological sites - just another
convention it seems happy to ignore.”
Iraq,
among the earliest cradles of civilization and home to the remains of
such ancient Mesopotamian cities as Babylon, Ur and Nineveh, has one
of the richest archaeological heritages in the world.
After
the unleash of the invasion in April 2003, UNESCO's chief, Koichiro
Matsuura, urged the US-led occupation authorities to protect the
country’s cultural heritage by monitoring and guarding archeological
sites and cultural institutions.
But
his appeal fell on deaf ears. Iraq's national museum fell prey to
looters in the lawless atmosphere that engulfed Baghdad after the
invasion.
Babylon’s
antiquities were also subjected to systematic plundering under the
occupation’s nose.
Iraqi
archeologists have accused the US occupation authorities of
perpetrating the cultural "crime of the century” by failing to
protect priceless Iraqi artifacts from looters and trampling
archeological sites during the invasion of the country.
“Cultural
Vandalism”
The
Guardian said that the damage wrought by the US-led occupation
troops was unnecessary and could have been avoided.
It
stressed that the damage “must rank as one of the most reckless acts
of cultural vandalism in recent memory.”
The
British daily said nothing would exonerate the occupation troops from
the “cultural barbarism carried out in their name by Kellog, Brown
and Root,” a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company formerly run by
US Vice president Dick Cheney.
The
occupation troops, it added, must now at least pay for their
“philistinian acts.”
The
city of Babylon, which was to be handed over to the Iraqi culture
ministry Saturday, was ruled by two of the most famous kings -
Hammurabi (1792 to 1750 BC) who introduced the world's first law code
and Nebuchadnezzar (604 to 562 BC) who built the famed Hanging
Gardens, the Guardian said.
The
ancient Greek historian Herodotus said the city was ornamented with
solid gold statues and protected by walls 56 miles long, more than 300
feet high and wide enough for two chariots.
During
Nebuchadnezzar's time, Babylon was the largest city of the world,
estimated to have covered over 2,500 acres (10,000 hectares), with the
Euphrates River flowing through it.
Babylon
was revamped by ousted president Saddam Hussein, who transformed it
into a modern tourist haven, a step that forced UNESCO to remove it
from its list of ancient archaeological sites.
“The
aggravated ruins of the city stand as a metaphor for the war itself
which has left modern Iraq as well as ancient Babylon in a much worse
state than they were before the saviors arrived,” the Guardian
said.
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