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 brining 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 by 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”
“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 no 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.