The war in Iraq put at risk not only the lives of innocent Iraqi civilians but also a 4,000-year-old cultural heritage preserved at the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad and other sites around the country.
The Iraq Museum in central Baghdad reopened in 2001, after being closed for a decade after the first Persian Gulf War. At that time its collection included some 250,000 objects - from the earliest written documents, ancient religious sculptures, mathematical texts and artworks dating back to 7000 B.C. - that together represented the cultural patrimony of Western civilization.
"It's a world-class museum," said University of Chicago archaeologist Gibson McGuire, who has worked on excavation projects in Iraq since the early 1970s. "The majority of what they've got relates to ancient Mesopotamia, but the collection is very important from the Neolithic era around 9000 B.C. on."
FOR THE RECORD - In an article about the Baghdad museum in Thursday's editions of The Sun, the name of a University of Chicago Iraq scholar was stated incorrectly. His name is McGuire Gibson.
The Sun regrets the error.
In addition to the Iraq Museum - which ranks high on a list of historic and cultural sites U.S. forces are trying not to bomb - there are thousands of known archaeological sites scattered across the country, most of which have been only partially excavated. Thousands more sites remain undiscovered, and their destruction would represent an irreparable loss for scholars' understanding of past civilizations.
"We don't have a good picture of this history," said Regine Schulz, curator of ancient art at the Walters Art Museum. "But we do know there is much more to be discovered and that the material is important to our knowledge of the history as well as to our understanding of the country today."
Modern Iraq occupies the area once known as Mesopotamia -the "land between the rivers" - in the fertile valley of two great waterways, the Tigris and the Euphrates.
It was here that the Biblical cities of Nimrud, Nineveh, Assur and Babylon arose and flourished as great trading centers, that cuneiform ("wedge-shaped") writing on clay tablets was invented, and that the first monumental architecture was constructed in the Sumerian city of Uruk some 5,000 years ago.
Perpetual conflict
But unlike ancient Egypt, which emerged roughly around the same time and which grew up on a strip of fertile land along the Nile River protected from invasion by deserts on both sides, the region of the Tigris and Euphrates resembles a wide, shallow trough offering few natural defenses, making it vulnerable to attack from any direction.
