While U.S. military planners were compiling a list of missile sites, communications centers, bunkers and weapons factories to target during the air campaign against Iraq, American archeologists were putting together their own list of more than 4,000 "do not bomb" sites.
The detailed list of museums, monuments, archeological digs and other key sites embedded in cities and nestled among the shifting dunes of the Iraqi desert is a virtual Baedeker guide to the cultural history not only of Iraq but of Western civilization. It is a heritage that archeologists hope to preserve amid the destruction of battle.
The artifacts housed in Iraqi museums and buried at unexplored sites "are products of human imagination and skill," said Gus Van Beek, curator of Old World archeology at the Smithsonian Institution. "They have a life of their own. They certainly have a right to survive."
Ancient Mesopotamia, nestled in the extremely rich soil between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, is the birthplace of Western writing, mathematics, astronomy, agriculture and Hammurabi's historic code of law.
Long before the empires of Egypt, Greece and Rome, the early Mesopotamians and the Sumerians who followed them developed the wedge-shaped alphabet known as cuneiform, produced mathematics on a base-60 system that is used today to measure time and angles, invented the plow and the wheel and developed a method to calculate and predict lunar eclipses. The constellations of the zodiac originated there, as did the idea of a horoscope.
Over the centuries, the country thrived under a succession of rulers that included not only Hammurabi, but also Nebuchadnezzar, Gilgamesh, Cyrus and Alexander the Great, who conquered the region and died there eight years later. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has frequently cited this glorious history as proof of Iraq's place in modern society.
The history of this evolution is enshrined in tens of thousands of archeological sites scattered over a country a little larger than California.
Destruction of large numbers of these sites would be "cultural genocide," says archeologist McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago. "Measured against human suffering, material items seem less significant," he said, but these archeological treasures represent "an important part of the world's cultural heritage" and every possible effort should be made to preserve them.
