Berkeley Plans to Revive Looted Museum on Web

The project, still in the planning stages, would use computers to recreate the museum's smashed or stolen vases, statues and cuneiform tablets from archived photos and historical records.

The project would include images, for example, of such priceless artifacts as a 5,000-year-old marble head that is believed to be the first sculptured portrait of a living person. The life-size Warka head, a bust of a woman from the Sumerian city of Uruk, remains unaccounted for since the looting, although scholars hope it may be with other treasures in vaults that are still inaccessible. Also included would be a 4,000-year-old lyre decorated with the golden head of a bull that was excavated from the site of the ancient city of Ur. It has been badly damaged.

Scholars at UC Berkeley also hope to record and preserve other elements of Iraq's cultural heritage, including imperiled archeological sites and historical monuments, by creating a comprehensive "virtual museum" of the nation's treasures.

"The dream is to create a kind of virtual atlas of these cultural gems, and help keep any more of them from being lost," said Ruzena Bajcsy, the director of UC Berkeley's Center for Information Technology Research, which is leading the effort.

The center's project would expand on other scholarly initiatives worldwide aimed at preserving the images of treasures in the Baghdad museum, home to one of the world's richest collections of early civilization antiquities.

At least 38 of the national museum's major treasures are known to be missing, along with thousands of smaller, less valuable pieces. The facility is said to be so badly vandalized that it may take months or even years to figure out just what else was lost.

Academic and cultural institutions -- from the University of Pennsylvania to the British Museum and the United Nations -- are contributing to efforts to build a virtual catalog of the museum's holdings. The process has been hampered by the lack or loss of records at the site, including even photographs of some artifacts. But the outside researchers hope to solve that problem, at least in part, by delving into their own archives. The University of Chicago, which carried out excavations in Iraq dating to the 1920s and has among the most extensive photographic collections of such items in the world, launched a Web site with a slide show of artifacts soon after the looting, in part to help prevent the sale of stolen items.