Word: mesopotamia
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...Defense (DOD) in January that something like this might happen. The organized looting of ancient artifacts has been rampant in Iraq ever since U.N. sanctions choked off the country's legal streams of revenue following the 1991 Gulf War. "We wanted to make them aware of the importance of Mesopotamia and familiarize them with important sites," says McGuire Gibson, an archaeologist at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, who participated in the talks. He says he gave DOD officials a list of critical sites to avoid bombing, and explicitly warned them about the possibility of looting at the Iraq...
...Iraqis have proved resistant to "reconstruction" efforts in the past. Three years after the British tried to tame Mesopotamia, the Times of London complained about the futility of the project and--Karl Rove, take note--about its impact on domestic British politics: "While [the government] has spent nearly £150,000,000 since the Armistice upon semi-nomads in Mesopotamia [it] can find only £200,000 a year for the regeneration of our slums, and have had to forbid all expenditure under the Education Act of 1918." (The government was defeated by Labor...
Without access to inventory lists, it has been difficult to calculate the damage to the vast treasury of the Iraqi National Museum, which contained the discoveries of a century of intensive archeology in the lands of ancient Mesopotamia. But news reports suggest that looters nearly completely ransacked the museum, taking advantage of the chaos attending the American occupation of Baghdad earlier this month...
...Iraqis have proved resistant to "reconstruction" efforts in the past. Three years after the British tried to tame Mesopotamia, the Times of London complained about the futility of the project and - Karl Rove, take note - about its impact on domestic British politics: "While [the government] has spent nearly ?150,000,000 since the Armistice upon semi-nomads in Mesopotamia [it] can find only ?200,000 a year for the regeneration of our slums, and have had to forbid all expenditure under the Education Act of 1918." (The government was defeated by Labor...
...carve-up of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, London thought that the best way to secure routes to India, the jewel in its imperial crown, was to dominate Mesopotamia. To that end, the treaty at the close of the war cobbled together Iraq from three Ottoman provinces, one Kurdish, one Sunni Muslim and another Shi'ite Muslim. The British moved in under a League of Nations mandate. They didn't have a clue. In 1920 a full-scale revolt broke out. By one account, Britain lost 450 in the rebellion; other sources put the figure...