In the months leading up to the Iraq war, US scholars repeatedly urged the Defence Department to protect Iraq's priceless archaeological heritage from looters, and warned specifically that the National Museum of Antiquities was the single most important site in the country, writes Guy Gugliotta in Washington
Late in January, a number of scholars, museum directors, art collectors and antiquities dealers went to the Pentagon to discuss their misgivings. Mr McGuire Gibson, an Iraq specialist at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, said that he went back twice more.
"We told [the Pentagon that\] looting was the biggest danger ... I thought I was given assurances that sites and museums would be protected," Mr Gibson said. Instead, looters breached the museum and smashed or stole thousands of artifacts dating from the founding of ancient Sumer around 3,500 B.C. to the end of Islam's Abbasid Caliphate in A.D. 1258.
Iraq has a cultural heritage that extends for thousands of years. The National Museum houses, or used to, the 5,000-year-old alabaster Uruk Vase, which shows a procession entering a temple - the earliest known depiction of a ritual. Also from Uruk is the "White Lady," the stone face of a woman that looks as if it was carved during the Greek Classic period but is 5,500 years old, one of the earliest known examples of representational sculpture.
The bust of an Akkadian king, dated 2300 B.C., is the earliest copper casting ever found. The Neolithic collection, of items about 9,000 years old, includes small sculptures of birds' heads from Nemrik, north of Mosul.
Museum staff hid some items in storage rooms and vaults, but looters found them. A spectacular cache of gold artifacts from the burial tombs of Assyrian queens in Nimrud should also have been safe.
"They were sent away to the Central Bank, and I told the Pentagon about those, too," Mr Gibson said. "But I hear they looted the Central Bank as well." - (Washington Post service)