PARIS: The Louvre Museum has opened a new room devoted to Mesopotamia of the second century B.C.

The permanent exhibit is centred about the Code of Hammurabi, one of the Louvre’s most fabulous treasures which takes the form of a stela, an upright pillar on which is engraved one of the most important historically significant bodies of law associated with the ancient orient.

A spokesman for the Louvre says that the museum has also decided to organize a series of workshops open to children and adults to allow them to become acquainted with Mesopotamia as well as Hammurabi’s code and Babylon, located in modern-day Iraq.

The decision by the Louvre to augment significantly the exhibition space it devotes to the Middle East and South Asia comes apparently at the behest of President Jacques Chirac.

BAMIYAN BUDDHAS: At the very moment that the Louvre and other French museums decided to step up their activities with regard to Asia and the Middle East, a team of French archeologists belonging to the Musee Guimet were at Bamiyan, the Afghan locality best associated with two giant standing Buddhas that were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.

The archaeologists say that it should be “a matter of weeks” before they are able to locate a third Buddha, this one in a reclining position, whose existence is affirmed in the writings of a Chinese pilgrim discovered in the archives of the Musee Guimet in Paris.