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US-led forces damaged ancient Babylon: British Report

By: Nabil Raza

LONDON, Britain: A damning report by the British Museum revealed on Saturday that US-led forces in Iraq have caused irreparable damage to the site of the ancient city of Babylon, contaminating the soil and artifacts dating back thousands of years, and destroying precious archaeological evidence.

According to John Curtis, curator of the museum's Ancient Near East department, the site has suffered "substantial damage" while being used as a military depot by American and Polish forces for the past two years.

"This is tantamount to establishing a military camp around the Great Pyramid in Egypt or around Stonehenge in Britain," Curtis charged in his report, quoted by Saturday's edition of The Guardian newspaper.

"The status of future information about these areas will therefore be seriously compromised," he warned.

Entire sections of the city had been flattened and gravelled over, Curtis said, warning that it would be impossible to remove the gravel without causing serious damage to the archaeological layers underneath.

The report said that 2,600-year-old paving stones had been crushed by military vehicles driving through the ancient Mesopotamian city, one of the world's most important archaeological sites dating from the third millennium BC.

Curtis also reported that the decorated bricks forming the modeled dragons of the city's celebrated Ishtar Gate were cracked and dislodged, where people had tried to prise them out from the wall.

Huge amounts of sand and earth, mixed with precious archaeological fragments, had been dug up to fill military sandbags, while fuel had seeped down from tanks into the soil layers beneath, the report said.

He also found broken bricks inscribed with the name of Nebuchadnezzar, ruler from 604 to 562 BC, who rebuilt and expanded the city and built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

The British Museum report follows an assessment mission carried out in Iraq in December at the request of a group of Iraqi antiquities experts.

Curtis has called for an international investigation to be carried out by archaeologists chosen by the Iraqi authorities, to compile a full inventory of damage sustained at the site, 100 kilometres (60 miles) south of Baghdad.

The report admitted that in the early stages after the overthrow of Iraqi leader Saddam, US-led forces had helped protect the site from looters, but he regretted the decision to base 2,000 troops on the Babylon site.

In an interview Saturday with Associated Press Television News, Iraq's Minister of Culture Mufeed Al-Jazairee said coalition troops in Babylon had used "armored vehicles and helicopters that land and take off freely. In addition to that, the forces also set up other facilities and changes."

He added: "I expect that the archaeological city of Babylon has sustained damage but I don't know exactly the size of such damage."

For more than 1,000 years, Babylon was one of the world's premier cities, where King Nebuchadnezzar II built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

The city declined and fell into ruin after it was conquered by the Persians under Cyrus the Great around 538 B.C.

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