January 23, 2003	Thursday	Ziqa’ad 19, 1423

UR (Iraq): Swirling desert sands lead to the ancient rose-coloured temple mound of Ur in south Iraq, a Sumerian city which has survived century upon century of turmoil.

Within a few weeks Ur could find itself in the midst of a high-tech modern war, as US tanks and troops roll by and laser-guided missiles streak overhead in an invasion of Iraq.

The US is massing troops in the Gulf ahead of a possible war over weapons of mass destruction it says President Saddam Hussein is hiding, and experts say that puts Iraq’s wealth of ancient treasures at more risk.

Kuwait, from where a US attack could be launched, is barely 100 km to the south over flat desert from this 4,000-year-old city which in Jewish, Christian and Muslim tradition was the birthplace of the biblical patriarch Abraham.

Pope John Paul II shelved plans to visit Abraham’s birthplace in 2000 as part of a millennium tour of Middle East holy sites, over concerns about his safety in the area, where US and British planes maintain an Iraqi no-fly zone.

An Iraqi excavation team which began work here in 1999 has apparently quit the site, leaving soldiers from a series of military installations around it and the odd Asian tour group the only figures on the horizon.

“This is a place of civilisation, not war,” said site guard Dayef Mohsen, pointing to a series of holes on the wall of the temple, or ziggurat, which he explained were caused by shrapnel from bombs dropped by US planes during the 1991 Gulf War.

The horizon is dominated by the ziggurat of Ur — testament to the sophistication of the Sumerian people. Signs explain that an ancient building renovated by an Iraqi team four years ago is the home of Abraham, whom Muslims regard as the father of the prophets.

“When we talk about Abraham as the father of the prophets that means that all the prophets were Iraqi in origin,” reads one sign, quoting comments by Saddam.

MUSEUMS TAKE PRECAUTIONS: Preparations have been made to protect priceless museum collections from looting and bombing that saw the theft of some 4,000 pieces in 1991, said Nawala al-Mutawalli, a Sumerian language expert at Baghdad’s Iraq Museum.

If there is another war, “we’ll take all the items and pack them away again, as much as we can,” she said, adding that some would be taken to “secret locations”. The Iraq Museum, with its priceless collection from Iraq’s Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian and Islamic eras, opened only two years ago after the Gulf War closed its doors.

The museum, which has been closed for 14 of the last 20 years because of successive wars, was damaged during the bombing of a neighbouring telephone exchange. Most of its stunning statues and wall reliefs from the Babylonian and Assyrian era will have to stay put because of their size and make do with special covers, Mutawalli said.

Objects removed before the 1991 war to museums in outlying areas were stolen by Iraqis during the chaos of defeat and a popular uprising in the south.

SACK OF NINEVEH: The theft has continued since then, Mutawalli said. Assyrian sculptures from ancient Nineveh and Nimrud around Mosul appeared on the international antiquities market during the 1990s, in what US expert John Malcolm Russell has called the “modern sack of Nineveh”, referring to the destruction of the famed city mentioned in the Bible.

Around four years ago, locals sneaked into the site of another Assyrian city and broke the head of a huge part-man- part-beast wall sculpture into 13 pieces for smuggling, before local police caught them, Mutawalli said. The head now sits in pieces on the floor of one of the Iraq Museum’s display rooms. For Iraqis, it is the latest chapter in a long history of theft of their heritage, and many suspect senior officials.

“There is not enough awareness about their history. It’s only among the cream of society. If you look on television, there are no programmes about these things to make people aware,” said Fadel Ahmed, a Baghdadi cigarette seller.

The British Museum, the Louvre in Paris and the Berlin Museum are full of Iraqi treasures, including the original massive Ishtar Gate of Babylon and a Babylonian stele bearing the Hammurabi code, the earliest documentation of a legal code.

Mutawalli said a Babylonian tablet which disappeared after 1991 was returned by the British Museum in 1995, one of Iraq’s few successes in recovering its losses. Around 20 foreign excavation teams finally returned to the country in 2000. War is the last thing Iraq needs in its fight to protect its history, Mutawalli said.—Reuters