Iraqi officials are arguing over whether priority should be given to preserving ancient Babylon or making money off of it.

Local officials want swift work done to restore the crumbling ruins and start building restaurants and gift shops to draw in tourists, while antiquities officials in Baghdad favor a more painstaking approach to avoid the gaudy restoration mistakes of the past.

The ruins of the millennia-old city, famed for its Hanging Gardens and the Tower of Babel, have suffered heavily over the past decades. Deep in Iraq’s verdant south, the cluster of excavated temples and palaces were mostly rebuilt by former ruler Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, using modern yellow brick to erect towering structures that marred the fragile remains of the original mud brick ruins. After Saddam’s fall in 2003, a U.S. military base on the site did further damage.

The site is filled with overgrown hillocks hiding the estimated 95 percent of the city that remains unexcavated — which archaeologists hope could eventually be uncovered.

But for that to happen, they argue, the slow and meticulous work needs to be done to train Iraqis in conservation and draw up a preservation plan that can be used to drum up international funds and get the site UNESCO World Heritage status.

[Full story]

A team of archaeologists has arrived to commence excavations at Arbil in Northern Iraq, the first to be performed in the area after seven years of conflict.

Iraq, which the ancient Greeks called Mesopotamia or ‘land between the rivers’ because of the Tigris and Euphrates that flow through it, is regarded by archaeologists as a cradle of civilization.

But historic sites have been neglected and damaged by decades of war, sanctions and looting and Iraqi officials say the country needs millions of dollars to reverse the damage.

“Cultural heritage is an essential element of development,” France’s foreign ministry spokesman said in a briefing on Wednesday after excavations began Tuesday.

The French-led team, also responsible for training local archaeologists, will initially carry out digs for a month in Arbil. Iraq’s third-largest city, whose existence can be traced back to the 23rd century BC, is located east of the Tigris.

The excavations will take place on the site of an existing citadel and the hill on which it is built.

According to the United Nations cultural organization, Unesco, the citadel is more than 8,000 years old and successive layers of settlements have formed the mound that comprises an area of about 10 hectares (10,000 meters sq).

[Full story]

The remains of a 150,000-year-old settlement has been found in Arbil, north Iraq. It is, so far, the oldest uncovered settlement found in that part of Mesopotamia.

The archaeologists revealed a high number of items, mainly prehistoric stone tools, about nine metres under the ground in Arbil, capital of the Kurdish autonomous region, said archaeologist Novacek, from the University of West Bohemia in Plzen.

The eight-member expedition returned from Iraq at the end of last year. The team comprised experts from the University of West Bohemia, academic and university institutions in Prague and two companies.

Czech experts have succeeded in finding evidence of the oldest human settlement in the locality as all other finds of American expeditions working there 50 years ago are probably younger.

“We have been the first foreign expedition in this area since the second Gulf War in 2006,” Novacek added.

[Full story] [Discuss here]

We can expect an influx of remarkable findings as archaeologists are beginning to working again on the ancient city of Ur in war torn Iraq.

“When the (large-scale) excavations restart, tons of antiquities will see the light of day, filling entire museum wings,” enthused Dhaif Moussin, who is in charge of protecting a site that has been prone to looting.

“This site will become perhaps more important than Giza,” he added, referring to the plateau outside the Egyptian capital of Cairo where some of mankind’s most treasured antiquities have been unearthed, including the Sphinx and several notable pyramids.

That may not be just an idle boast.

In the early 1900s, American archaeologist Charles Leonard Woolley made some stunning finds when he unearthed 16 tombs of Ur’s elite.

Inside he found some of the greatest treasures of antiquity, including a golden dagger encrusted with lapis lazuli, an intricately carved golden statue of a ram caught in a thicket, a lyre decorated with a bull’s head and the gold headdress of a Sumerian queen.

Those treasures have been compared to the riches from the tomb of the Egyptian boy-king, Tutankhamun, but they excite archaeologists even more because the graves at Ur are more than 1,000 years older.

Archaeologically, the most astonishing find of Ur has been a remarkably well-preserved stepped platform, or ziggurat, which dates back to the third millennium BC, when it was part of a temple complex that served as the administrative centre of the Sumerian capital.

To date, hardly 20 percent of the site has been excavated, mainly by American and British archaeologists.

[Full story] [Discuss here]

An ancient Sumerian settlement has been found in southern Iraq.

The site, in the southern province of Dhi Qar, is in the desert near ancient Ur, the biblical birthplace of Abraham.

“There are walls and cornerstones carrying Sumerian writings, dating back to the era of the third Sumerian dynasty,” said Abdul Amir al-Hamdani, head of the provincial government’s archaeology department.

Hamdani said the artefacts, which included sickles and knives, largely dated back to around 2000 BC, during the rule of King Amarsin, the third king of the third Sumerian dynasty.

[Full story]