Saving Babylon

NY Times:

The most immediate threat to preserving the ruins of Babylon, the site of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, is water soaking the ground and undermining what is left in present-day Iraq of a great city from the time of King Nebuchadnezzar II.

It is also one of the oldest threats. The king himself faced water problems 2,600 years ago. Neglect, reckless reconstruction and wartime looting have also taken their toll in recent times, but archaeologists and experts in the preservation of cultural relics say nothing substantial should be done to correct that until the water problem is brought under control.

A current study, known as the Future of Babylon project, documents the damage from water mainly associated with the Euphrates River and irrigation systems nearby. The ground is saturated just below the surface at sites of the Ishtar Gate and the long-gone Hanging Gardens, one of the seven wonders. Bricks are crumbling, temples collapsing. The Tower of Babel, long since reduced to rubble, is surrounded by standing water.

Leaders of the international project, describing their findings in interviews and at a meeting this month in New York, said that any plan for reclaiming Babylon as a tourist attraction and a place for archaeological research must include water control as “the highest priority.”

The study, aimed at developing a master plan for the ancient city, was begun last year by the World Monuments Fund in collaboration with Iraq’s State Board of Antiquities and Heritage. A $700,000 grant from the United States Department of State is financing the initial two-year study and preliminary management plan. An official of the monuments fund said the entire effort could last five or six years.

“This is without doubt the most complex program we’ve ever had to organize,” said Bonnie Burnham, the fund’s president.

A few archaeologists have expressed concern about what they said was the project’s slow start. Project members said that they have had serious problems persuading foreign experts to go to Iraq and then clearing them and their instruments for work there.

Besides the wear of time that all ruins of antiquity are prey to, consider the depredations Babylon has suffered in recent history. German archaeologists who made the first careful study of the site, before World War I, recognized the despoiling inroads of irrigation waters drawn from a tributary of the Euphrates River, 50 miles south of modern Baghdad.

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Then, in the 1970s and ’80s, President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, casting himself as heir to Nebuchadnezzar’s greatness, had his own imposing palace built at Babylon along the lines of his royal predecessor’s. He even adopted the king’s practice of stamping his own name on the bricks for the reconstruction. Archaeologists were aghast. The new palace and a few other restorations, they say, are hardly authentic, and yet they dominate the site.

What to do with Hussein’s palace is another issue, said the co-director of the project, Jeff Allen. “How to balance integrity of the site with its use as a tourist attraction is the problem,” he explained, noting that Iraq counts on Babylon as a future source of foreign tourist income.

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The Iraqis do not seem to be as involved as the outsiders and that may be a problem for the success of any attempt to save the artifacts from continuing degradation. They have to want it as much as we do for this to work.

The story mentions some damage done by military vehicles while the US was guarding the site to prevent further looting by Iraqis. The US needs to do a better job of educating officers on the importance of preserving historical monuments as well as how they can do it. I am guessing there is no course on the subject at any level in the military. We do a good job of stressing to our troops that they are not to destroy such sites, but we don't do a good job of getting the chain of command to understand the importance of protecting the sites. This became important in Iraq, because the Iraqis were looting from these sites.

Ironically, in Afghanistan, some of the janitors protected artifacts from theft and destruction during the rule of the Taliban. Iraq had few if any similar examples.