On the hillside during one of his many visits to the ruins, Jeff Allen, a conservationist working with the World Monuments Fund, said: “All this is unexcavated. There is great potential at this site. You could excavate the street plan of the entire city.”
That is certainly years away given the realities of today’s Iraq. But for the first time since the American invasion in 2003, archaeologists and preservationists have begun working to protect and even restore parts of Babylon and other ancient ruins of Mesopotamia. And there are new sites being excavated for the first time, mostly in secret to avoid attracting the attention of looters, who remain a scourge here.
The World Monuments Fund, working with Iraq’s State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, has drafted a conservation plan to combat any further deterioration of Babylon’s mud-brick ruins and reverse some of the effects of time and Hussein’s propagandistic and archaeologically specious re-creations.
In November, the State Department announced a new $2 million grant to begin work to preserve the site’s most impressive surviving ruins. The objective is to prepare the site and other ruins for what officials hope will someday be a flood of scientists, scholars and tourists that could contribute to Iraq’s economic revival almost as much as oil.
The task at hand is daunting, though, and the threats to the site abundant.
The World Monuments Fund has been carrying out what amounts to archaeological triage since it began its conservation plan in 2009. It has created computer scans to provide precise records of the damage to the ruins and identified the most pernicious threats, starting with erosion caused by salty groundwater. “What we’ve got to do is create a stable environment,” Mr. Allen said at the site in November. “Right now it’s on the fast road to falling apart.”
The wicking of groundwater into mud bricks, compounded by a modern concrete walkway and the excavations conducted by the German archaeologist Robert Koldewey more than a century ago, have already eaten away some of the 2,500-year-old brick reliefs at the Ishtar Gate’s base.
The grant from the United States will pay for repairs to channel the water away from the gate’s foundation, yards beneath the surrounding area. Similar repairs are planned for two of Babylon’s temples, Ninmakh and Nabu-sha-Khare, the most complete sets of ruins, though they too suffer from erosion and harmful restorations. “It’s difficult to say which is doing more,” Mr. Allen said, “but the two together are nearly toxic for the preservation of monuments.”
The American reconstruction team has refurbished a modern museum on the site, as well as a model of the Ishtar Gate that for decades served as a visitors’ entrance. The fate of Babylon is already being disputed by Iraqi leaders, with antiquities officials clashing with local authorities. Even now they are clashing over whether the admission fee should go to the antiquities board or the provincial government.
Another of the more dire threats to the site has been development inside the boundaries of the old city walls, enclosing nearly three square miles. Mr. Allen, who oversees the fund’s work, said the preservation of Babylon would require collaboration among competing constituencies that is extremely rare amid Iraq’s political instability.
“We’re looking at not just archaeology,” he said of the project. “We’re looking at the economic opportunities and viability for local people. They need to see something out of this site. That’s possible, and possible at the same time to preserve the integrity of the site.”
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