That's what cd burners are for. Scan em in, burn em, and if you lose the originals you still have memorex.
The RIAA represents the copyright holder of the cuneiform writings and demands a royalty for each recording made.
That's what should have happened, yes, and I still hold out some hope that some of this was done. There are several barriers to that, though. First, they probably didn't have the trained manpower to tackle what would have been a huge and delicate undertaking. Second, they probably would have stored the results on-site, in which case they may be lost, too. They didn't want copies of these texts floating around, because they wanted to reserve the right at first translation and publication.
Unfortunately, they had made very little progress towards that end, because translating Sumerian is an extraordinarily difficult task. One reason is because there was no Sumerian dictionary until very recently. At the end of 2002, the University of Pennsylvania announced the completion of the first such dictionary.
Hard to believe, isn't it, that a "unique and priceless trove..." never would have been photographed, catalogued or otherwise copied precisely for protection from ramdom destruction?
Isn't Iraq subject to frequent and periodic devastating earthquakes?
Political instability?
Invasion by aliens?
Did the world change the definitions of "priceless" and "unique" while I wasn't looking?
Archeologists and the other soft sciences have got to have the brightest people with the least common sense and sense of priorities of any human beings on earth.
Do they get tested for this?
OK, maybe not CD burners, but photography, microfilm and sketch books have been around for at least a hundred years!