[mburbank]

Abbcdzzx: You'r a huge one to bicth and moan about people not respecting your knowledge base. Now it's my turn.

Your statement about the relative merits of the Bahgdad Museum collection, it's comparison to the Cairo museum, the idea that it had already been plundered or sold, the idea that it can be restored are all highly missinformed and ignorant.

I'm a Museum professional and have spent the last hlf year wworking with currators from the Cairo Museum on the largest touring collection of artifcats from Egypt ever, "The Quest for Immortality". The subject of the Bahgdad collection came up quite frequently.

Moreover, whatever else one finds wrong with Sadham Hussein (and there's plent) not making this collection open and available to scholars just isn't true. The Museum has been an active center of scholarship and was up until few days before the bombing began, open to both Eastern and Western scholars. Your statement that the collection probably not that important is completely without merit and could easily have been checked.

The importance of this collection is inestemable and even the Egyptian currators I worked with acknowedlged it's historical significance as more important than their own. Among other things it included artifacts from the worlds first city and examples of the worlds first writting.

While the larger artifacts may well be recovered, the museum storehouses were also looted, seperating shards, fragments and other tiny artifcats from the notes on where they were dicovered, what strata they were in, what they were found along wth, etc. The Museum was protected until we overthrew the regime. They could have and should have taken precautions to remove and protct it. Their own people looted it. But we did nothing to prevent it. I think theirs plenty of blame to spread around for the loss of the single most important arhceological collection in existance.