
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, February 11, 1991                   TAG: 9102110315
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SCHOLARS FEAR DESTRUCTION OF EARLY CIVILIZATIONS' RELICS

The allied bombing of Iraq, widely regarded as the richest country in archaeological remains, has caused anguish and division among specialists in Middle Eastern culture, many of whom have devoted their professional lives to studying the cradle of civilization.

Some scholars are demanding that the U.S. government stop the war, some have urged the government to try to protect the museums and archaeological monuments of Iraq, and some argue that it is callous to protest physical destruction when human lives hang in the balance.

Since 1925, when the eminent prehistorian and archaeologist Gordon Childe first published "The Dawn of European Civilization," scholars have regarded Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, as where man first took the step from village culture to high civilization in about 4000 B.C.

"Almost all of Iraq is an archaeological mound," said Selma al-Radi, a New York City consultant in archaeology with wide experience in the Middle East. "There are half-a-million archaeological sites from all periods. About 40,000 or 50,000 of them are considered quite important. Between 100 and 200 of them were ancient capital cities."

Notable sites include Erbil in the north, where traces of a town dating to 7000 B.C. have been found; the ancient Assyrian capital, Nineveh, which is believed to contain the tomb of Jonah; the 100-foot-high Arch of Ctesiphon, the ancient world's largest arch, which dates to the second century B.C.; the ancient city of Ur, where a third millennium B.C. royal cemetery was excavated in the 1920s, and Baghdad itself, where the Iraq Museum houses what is recognized as one of the world's finest collections of ancient and Islamic art.

"The difficulty is that the archaeological remains are in the urban fabric," Radi said. "When they bombed the Ministry of Defense the other day, did they know that the Abbasid Palace, which dates to the 10th century, is less than 100 yards away?"

Little is known outside of Iraq about what damage may have been done. On Jan. 28, the U.N. secretary-general, Javier Perez de Cuellar, received a letter from Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz of Iraq charging that during the first five days of bombing, the Iraq Museum in Baghdad had sustained large-scale damage.

In addition, Aziz declared, on Jan. 19 bombs damaged the country's oldest Christian shrine, the fourth-century Church of St. Thomas in the northern city of Mosul, and on Jan. 21 the eighth-century Al Abbasi mosque in the Dur district north of Baghdad was damaged. These reports have not been confirmed by outside observers.

Among the more outspoken scholars is McGuire Gibson, a professor of Mesopotamian archaeology at the University of Chicago who has spent 25 years excavating sites in Iraq, including the ancient city of Nippur south of Baghdad.

Gibson said that after Iraq invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, he and academic colleagues wrote dozens of letters to President Bush and senators and representatives to try to head off the war.

"It's very difficult to deal with this without looking like someone who is more concerned about destroying objects than killing people," he said, "but I oppose both. I want to stop the war, but I am also concerned about the destruction of archaeological sites and museums."

Recently an international group of specialists on Mesopotamia led by Robert McC. Adams, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, petitioned the government to "take every possible measure to protect" the museums and archaeological monuments of Iraq.

Adams, who is known for his studies of ancient irrigation systems in Iraq, said in an interview: "Everybody who signed our letter is acutely aware of the fact that human beings are suffering and dying over there, and that they include our friends, our colleagues and our former students. At the same time, we think the world should keep in mind that there are materials of permanent importance to our history and culture in Iraq."

Oleg Grabar, formerly a professor of Islamic art and architecture at Harvard and now at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, expressed a different view.

While voicing sympathy for Adams' concerns, Grabar said, "There is something distasteful to me when one is destroying people to be concerned about monuments."

by CNB