Web site has Iraqi treasures, pre-looting

The exact number and description of ancient treasures carried off by looters at the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad may never be calculated. And the task of recovery won’t be any easier if it turns out that much of the documentation was also destroyed, as many experts fear.

Fortunately, scholars have studied the cultural history of Iraq for centuries and some have built archives that will help piece together an image-and-text version of the museum’s collection. One important state-of-the-art source is the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, an electronic documentation project, directed by Robert K. Englund, a professor of Near Eastern language and culture at UCLA, and Peter Damerow of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

Partly funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the project has been underway since 2000, Englund says, but it has suddenly achieved new status as a key to the recent destruction.

The Web site www.cdli.ucla.edu features 3,300 cuneiform tablets in the Baghdad museum before it was looted.

Englund hopes that a virtual museum of Iraq’s cultural heritage eventually can be created with the help of his peers at other institutions. For now, anyone can go to the Web site, he says, and gain some insight into “a crucial period for the development of advanced scientific thinking, the conceptual roots of mathematics, a monetary system and a system for compensating labor.”

-- Suzanne Muchnic