Lost Treasures
15 April 2003, 10:47 AM

It was so depressing to listen to my archeology lecture today as we went through the rise of civilizations in Mesopotamia. Every time my professor showed an artifact on the screen - clay tablets, gold helmets, a harp, statues, etc. - he noted that they were now gone. Looted. Pilfered. Plundered. Possibly even destroyed. :-( And there may have been professional thieves involved.

We still don't know the whereabouts of Hammurabi's Code one of mankind's earliest codes of law (it's not known if it was in the museum at the time.) But we do know that the four millennia-old copper head of an Akkadian king is gone.

And, irony upon irony, the museum in Mosul was also pilfered and then burned, setting afire and destroying one of the oldest surviving copies of the Quran.