Bush burns the Royal Alexandria Library!

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/03/20/iraq_roundtable/index.html

Great, but long article in Salon today about the looting of the National Museum in Baghdad and of some of the world's most important archaeological digs. I'm going to break my own politics embargo to talk about it.

One of the first things that happened in this misbegotten war that made an indelible impression on me was the ransacking of the National Museum. Since I have an interest in history and archeology and anthropology, the looting of treasures from the ancient world caused me intense distress. This is in every way the cradle of human life and civilization. Mesopotamia, and Southern Iraq in particular is where the earliest record of human recorded history, of evidence of math and science and poetry, have been found. Even the garden of Eden is supposed to be in that neighborhood, the rivers Tigris and Euphrates passing through it.

I remember going out to lunch with a friend at the time, and saying to her that this was the worst cultural devastation since the burning of the Royal Alexandria Library. That the loss of those artifacts, hundreds of thousands of them, represents priceless information about the origins of human civilization that may never be recovered. I was gutted over it. If I recall correctly, she misunderstood my concern and admonished me that some old pottery was not as important as the human lives being lost.

True, "The Epic of Gilgamesh" is not a person. It also will not render oil if you squeeze it, or explode if your fire it out of a gun. Sumerian religion is profoundly Anti-Christian in a lot of ways, and contains goddesses who are dynamic and powerful in their own right, and exult in their sexuality as well as their prowess in battle. Inanna wasn't any body's meek and modest mother. She was a fearsome and powerful spiritual force.

But if not for the Sumerians, we wouldn't have the Bible. Much of the Old Testament and early Jewish lore is generally believed to have been cribbed from even earlier Sumerian and Assyrian works. They had a flood and everything. The similarities are staggering.

That the modern world turns its back on this cultural genocide just makes us more vulnerable to the barbarism that precipitates actual genocide. Losing the clay tablets buried in the earth robs us of a piece of our humanity. That our leaders don't understand it is a travesty. It really shows what their priorities are.

After all, people don't render oil when you squeeze them, either.