The surviving relics of the Sumerians and the world's first great civilisation have been and are being destroyed by the Iraq war. What follows is an extract from "It is the death of History "by Robert Fisk - 17th September 2007 - the Independent"
Four thousand year old Sumerian cities are being torn apart and plundered by robbers. The walls of the mighty Ur of the Chaldees are cracking under the strain of massive troop movements, while looting is privatised as landlords buy up the remaining sites of ancient Mesopotamia and strip them of their artefacts and wealth.
The very near total destruction of Iraq's historic past, the cradle of human civilisation, has emerged as one of the most shameful symbols of the disastrous occupation.
In a long and devastating appraisal to be published in December Lebanese archaelogist, Joanne N Farchak, says that armies of looters have not spared "one metre of the Sumerian capitals that have been buried under the sand for thousands of years. They have systematically destroyed the remains of this civilisation in their tireless search for saleable artefacts in ancient cities covering an estimated surface area of 20 square kilometres, which if properly excavated could have provided extensive new information concerning the development of the human race.
Humankind is losing its past for a cuneiform tablet, or a sculpture, or a piece of jewellery a dealer buys and pays for in cash in a country devastated by war. Humankind is losing its history for the pleasure of private collectors living safely in their luxurious houses and ordering specific objects for their collection."
Of all the ancient cities of present-day Iraq, Ur is regarded as the most important in the history of man. Founded in about 4000 BC its Sumerian people established the principles of irrigation, agriculture and metal working.
United States officers have repeatedly said that a large American base built at Babylon was to protect the site, but Iraqi archaelogist, Zainab Bah-Rani, a professor of art history and archaeology at Colombia University says this beggars belief. The damage done to Babylon is both extensive and irreparable and even if US forces had wanted to protect it placing guards around the site would have been far more sensible than bulldozing it and setting up the largest coalition military headquarters in the region."
The wholesale looting of 5000 years of Mesopotamian antiquities is on a par with the Spanish eradication of the written records of the Meso-American civilisations and the British burning of 3000-years worth of Chinese books, historical records and documents during the second Opium War.
The barbaric lack of respect for the most important heritages of mankind speaks volumes about the mind set o those wielding power. As does the deliberate down grade of culture by the eradication of Latin and Greek, in which the majority of western languages have their roots, from the curriculum of schools.
The "fertile crescent" of modern-day Iraq that has suffered so grieviously through the machinations of the internationalist bankers that rule the United States and Great Britain, was where around 6500 years ago the Sumerians constructed the first large irrigation systems.
Diverting water from the rivers Tigris and Euphrates down long canals and erecting earth defences against the spring floods, they began to build great cities like Ur, Kish and Uruk where the first writing was produced and the first sciences developed.
Why did Sumer, once a vast granary, dwindle to nothing? Why did Sumerian fields gradually become blighted and the bumper harvests to fail? Wheat gave way to barley until that too failed and the fields became barren and the land returned to desert.
The reason seems to have been the same as is happening to-day through the irresponsible control of rivers - brief prosperity and then disaster. Tiny amounts of salt came down the rivers, accumulated over the centuries and eventually poisoned the crops. Cuneiform tablets of 3,800 years ago describe a farm system in its death throes, recording black fields becoming white, and plants choked with salt.