- PARIS (Reuters) - Leading
world archeologists will meet in Paris Thursday to work out how to rescue
Iraq's cultural heritage, after looters plundered Iraqi museums housing
priceless artifacts from the cradle of civilization.
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- Mounir Bouchenaki, a deputy director general at the U.N.
world cultural body, told Reuters on Monday Italy had donated $400,000
to help tackle the crisis in Iraq, site of the world's first major cities
and one of the earliest forms of writing.
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- "This is really terrible. I am in contact with Patrick
Boylan, who is one of our leading experts in the field of museums, and
he just sent me an e-mail saying this is really a catastrophe for the cultural
heritage of Iraq," he said.
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- The heads of archeological missions in Iraq from Britain,
Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, the United States have been invited
to an emergency meeting at UNESCO's Paris headquarters.
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- It will provide an initial assessment of the damage wreaked
by the days of lawlessness and looting that followed the toppling of President
Saddam Hussein by U.S.-led forces.
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- Looters torched the national library and archives and
ransacked the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad over the weekend, running
off with treasures thousands of years old.
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- The destruction prompted UNESCO Director General Koichiro
Matsuura to urge British and U.S. forces to protect Iraq's heritage --
experts say there are thousands of archeological sites of major interest
around the country.
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- "It's just horrific this totally wanton looting
of their own culture, and smashing of it," said Christopher Walker,
deputy keeper at the British Museum in London.
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- "It feels a bit like what the Taliban did to the
Bamiyan statues," he said. The Buddha statues were blown up by Afghanistan's
fundamentalist Islamic rulers in 2001.
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- Mesopotamia, part of modern-day Iraq, was among the earliest
civilizations. Its name in Greek means "between the rivers,"
a reference to the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers that made it a rich center
for agriculture, trade and a crossroads of civilizations.
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- Site of Nineveh and Babylon, whose hanging gardens were
one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the land was home to the
Sumerians who gave the world cuneiform -- the earliest form of Western
writing -- around 3100 BC.
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- Some 125,000 cuneiform tablets are housed in London's
British Museum, the pictographic writing scratched onto wet clay tablets
with a reed pen and then hardened.
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- The Sumerians were also among the world's first number-crunchers,
according to experts at Washington State University, who say their record-keeping
led them to a crude form of abstract mathematics and measurement of time.
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- "All this shows that Iraq has a very, very rich
cultural heritage which is unanimously respected by scholars as one of
the richest cultural heritages in the world," Bouchenaki said.
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- He said UNESCO planned to send a fact-finding mission
to Iraq within two to three weeks, "otherwise everything will be destroyed."
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