As the threat of war grows, archaeologists make plea to spare Iraq's treasures

The names evoke ancient kingdoms past, the empires of Babylon and Assyria from the times of Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander the Great.

Most of the palaces and temples and mosques of those ancient civilisations crumbled many centuries ago. But something between 10,000 and 100,000 archaeological sites hold the enduring remains.

They are, of course, in modern-day Iraq. And, as the United States prepares for war, an international band of curators and historians anxious not to repeat the damage inflicted on Iraqi treasures during the Gulf War 11 years ago are appealing to the American government to take the historic sites into account.

Specialists concerned about potential threats to the thousands of archaeological ruins and architectural monuments scattered throughout Iraq are supplying maps and other information to the American Defence Department.

And the initiative, co-ordinated by Arthur Houghton, a former antiquities curator at the J Paul Getty Museum, aims to highlight the most important with the hope that the military might just be able to give them a miss.

"Based on the last Desert Storm, if a battle plan involved an invasion from Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, there would certainly be a likelihood of emplacement or trenching in sites," John Malcolm Russell, an American archaeologist told The Art newspaper.

"In southern Iraq, the highest ground is often on top of archaeological sites. If you have bulldozers creating earthworks on these sites, that's going to destroy things."

The threat is very real. Many treasures lie close to air bases or oil refineries or laboratories that were targeted in the Gulf War.

The Kerbala Shia shrine to Imam al-Hussein, the most renowned of Iraq's sacred Islamic attractions, lies near a chemical weapons plant and missile range that were bombed in 1991. Ur, Iraq's most famous site and perhaps the earliest city in the world, is near a major air base that was also attacked. At Basra al-Qurna, a gnarled old tree, known as Adam's tree, stands on the reputed site of the Garden of Eden. A chemical weapons plant stands nearby.

Helen McDonald, of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, based at Cambridge University, said that last time the Iraqis had tried to move a great deal of their most important objects out into stores in the countryside. They have already begun to do so again.

"But some things are immovable – such as huge stones. If a bomb hits a museum or something, that would be it," she said.

The consequence is the potential obliteration of generation after generation of history stretching back to 4,000 years before Christ.

"The Near East in general, including Iraq, is one of the first areas to be settled by agricultural communities, one of the first areas to have civilisations with cities and writing and complicated structures like temples," Ms McDonald said.

"People talk about Egypt but there were lots of similar but different things going on in Mesopotamia. If people go to the British Museum and see the Assyrian reliefs – they come from places in Iraq. And there are still reliefs like that in the National Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad.

"The British School of Archaeology in Iraq has written [about this]. They wrote to the Foreign Office during the Gulf War to express concern, not just on the humanitarian grounds but the effects that it would have on the culture."

It is not only bombing that is a danger. Charles Tripp, of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, warned that in the wake of the Gulf War, sanctions had inadvertently caused as much damage to the archaeological sites of Iraq as direct attack.

The conditions of poverty had led to much looting of archaeological sites and site museums, which often contained significant finds even after the best items were removed to Baghdad. Numerous finds have turned up on the art market in the West. "There is a lot of temptation in a destitute country to rip something out that has a saleable value in the West," Dr Tripp said.

American scholars are pointing to the Hague Convention of 1954, which prohibits the targeting of cultural and religious sites in war, to further their cause with the American government.

Washington never ratified the accord but there were efforts during the Gulf War to avoid cultural monuments – although the experts feared that American commanders did not have the archaeological information they needed to know which sites to avoid.

Britain signed the convention but did not ratify it so is not legally binding. However, a Foreign Office spokeswoman said it did abide by international statutes, including Article 53 of the 1st Additional Protocol to the Geneva Convention, that prohibited acts of hostility against historic monuments, artworks and places of worship. "Obviously we do our utmost to honour our international obligations," she said.

A Ministry of Defence spokesman said it could not discuss the situation in Iraq. The official British line remains that we are not preparing for conflict. But, in general terms, British forces attempt to be sensitive to cultural sites, the spokesman said.

"In the targeting process, places of historical, religious or cultural significance are always taken into consideration as is their vicinity to legitimate military targets. The process is kept under constant review."

The irony is that it is the British who helped encourage an Iraqi interest in its history and it has been British scholars, such as Max Mallowan, the husband of Agatha Christie, who have helped research many of the sites.

Dr Tripp said: "From the time the state was founded by the British in the early 1920s, there was a very determined effort to develop something of an Iraqi identity by impressing upon them the incredible richness of the land they lived in."

Saddam Hussein had gone on to use the past glories of the country to help build his nation, encouraging the people of the north to revel in the glories of Ninevah and those of the south to acknowledge the great history of the city of Ur.

Dr Tripp added a grim prediction. He said: "Old Mesopotamia was the birth of civilisation. Clearly what might happen there is quite ghastly."