<< News >> Armies trash Babylon
Submitted by postman on Saturday, 15 January 2005 Page Views: 6818
Site WatchCountry: Iraq
The report said U.S. and Polish military vehicles had crushed 2,600-year-old pavements in the city, a cradle of civilisation and home to one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Archaeological fragments were used to fill sand bags, it added.
"This is tantamount to establishing a military camp around the Great Pyramid in Egypt or around Stonehenge in Britain," John Curtis, keeper of the museum's Ancient and Near East department, said in the report obtained by Reuters.
Curtis, invited to visit Babylon by Iraqi antiquities experts, said he had found cracks and gaps made by people who had apparently tried to gouge out the decorated bricks forming the famous dragons of the city's Ishtar Gate.
U.S. military commanders set up a base in Babylon in April 2003, just after the invasion to topple Saddam Hussein, and handed it over to a Polish-led force five months later. Poland said it had decided to remove troops from the area when Warsaw realised having a military base there was not "beneficial to the site". The camp will be formally handed over to the Iraqi Culture Ministry on Saturday.
"We have moved our operations from camp Babylon and returned that site to the Iraqi people and to scientists because of its importance, not only to Iraq, but to the world's cultural heritage," said a spokesman for the Polish-led forces in Iraq.
"We realised the existence of a military base there was not beneficial to that site and when an opportunity of moving to a new camp arose we decided to move," Lieutenant Colonel Artur Domanski said.
Babylon was the capital of ancient Babylonia, an early civilisation that existed from around 1,800 BC until 600 BC. Most famous for the Hanging Gardens built by Nebuchadnezzar, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, large parts of it were reconstructed by Saddam in an attempt to associate himself with his country's past glories.
In the report, Curtis described the decision to set up a base in the area as "regrettable".
"Babylon is one of the most important archaeological sites in the world and the damage caused by the military camp is a further blow for the cultural heritage of Iraq," he said.
About 300,000 square metres (3.2 million sq ft) of the site was covered in gravel, the report said, brought in from outside which was compacted and sometimes chemically treated to make helipads and car parks. The report said the gravel would contaminate previously undisturbed archaeological deposits
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