Posted on 04/18/2003 2:10:35 AM PDT by wideminded
Looters at Iraq's National Museum of Antiquities pillaged and, perhaps, destroyed an archive of more than 100,000 cuneiform clay tablets -- a unique and priceless trove of ancient Mesopotamian writings that included the "Sippar Library," the oldest library ever found intact on its original shelves.
Experts described the archive as the world's least-studied large collection of cuneiform -- the oldest known writing on Earth -- a record that covers every aspect of Mesopotamian life over more than 3,000 years. The texts resided in numbered boxes each containing as many as 400 3-inch-by-2-inch tablets.
The Sippar Library, discovered in 1986 at a well-known neo-Babylonian site near Baghdad, was one of the archive's crown jewels. Dating from the sixth century B.C., it comprised only about 800 tablets, but it included hymns, prayers, lamentations, bits of epics, glossaries, astronomical and scientific texts, missing pieces of a flood legend that closely parallels the biblical story of Noah, and the prologue to the Code of Hammurabi, the ancient Babylonian lawgiver. ...
... Iraqi archaeologists found the library in a previously unexcavated section of temple ruins at Sippar, 20 miles southwest of Baghdad. "The room is approximately 4.5 meters [15 feet] by three meters [91/2 feet], lined with sets of pigeon holes" along the floor, said Jeremy Black of Oxford University's Oriental Institute. "The tablets were still in the pigeonholes, intact and in place. We'd never found such a thing before."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
That's what cd burners are for. Scan em in, burn em, and if you lose the originals you still have memorex.
Archeologists meet data storage and retrieval systems ..... data storage meet archeologists.
murdered people
raped women
imprisoned children
starved its own population
stole billions of dollars
But the media always says its the "looters" who destroyed the museums. It's as if the Bathe party had the right moral compass when it came to Art appreciation.
???
You desperately want to believe every " bad " article about what did or did not happen at the museum, yet, I see that you haven't bothered to post to the threads I pinged you to, which refute the extravigant falsehoods being told .
It was ungrammatical. Read it over carefully. Based on what I know of your opinions from previous posts I think you left out a word.
I see that you haven't bothered to post to the threads I pinged you to
You only pinged me to one article. I had already read it. I think same article may have been posted to a another thread. I believed the article. Some of the looters must have had keys. Since I had no criticisms of the article there was no reason for me to post. I don't have time to post everywhere anyway.
BTW, note that I pointed out that it is not necessarily true that all these tablets have been destroyed. It's amazing that an intact library of such a great age was found. I am hoping that the tablets were at least photographed.
Why do these idiots always try to associate some sort of cost to Human Dignity beyond the battle to free them?
Freedom was already paid for with the blood of our dearest. Now millions of Iraqis are freed from the evil perpauted upon them by an insanely evil dictator. Triuphant over their newfound liberty, they are jubilant and dancing in the streets while destroying any trace of the evil left behind.
Now some idiot crawls out from under a rock and says "Hey...you broke that!"
The RIAA represents the copyright holder of the cuneiform writings and demands a royalty for each recording made.
Almost, yes. Archaeology served Saddam's state purposes almost as well as nuclear physics served his or Stalin's. Saddam saw himself as the heir of Ashurbanipal, Hammurabi, and Nebuchadnezzar. Anything that bolstered the idea of Iraq's long and glorious past--and it was long and glorious--received the sanction of the Ba'athist regime.
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