Free Republic

"Topic: Investigating antiquity loss from the Baghdad Museum" Video available on C-SPAN of previous live teleconference with Col. Bogdanos. He offered many more details than previously available about the museum looting.

KUWAIT CITY — In a memo sent two weeks before the fall of Baghdad, the Pentagon office charged with rebuilding Iraq urged top commanders of U.S. ground forces to protect the Iraqi National Museum and other cultural sites from looters. "Coalition forces must secure these facilities in order to prevent looting and the resulting irreparable loss of cultural treasures," says the March 26 memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times. The Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), led by retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, sent the five-page memo to senior commanders at the Coalition...

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...