ISIS Set to Destroy Biblical History
The Assyrian and Babylonian empires appear throughout the Old Testament as examples of ruthless grandeur and godless decadence. The Bible says Sennacheribs army was destroyed by the Angel of the Lord. The Israelites were carried off to Babylon, where they wept by the waters. And since the middle of the 19th century, archeologists have labored mightily to unearth the mythical and the verifiable past in the extraordinary cradle of civilizations they used to call Mesopotamia and now call Iraq.
No trace ever has been found of the Garden of Eden, said to have lain near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, but one of the great prizes the excavators did discover was Senaccheribs capital, Nineveh , which the biblical prophet Nahum called the city of blood, full of lies, full of plunder, never without victims!
Soon afterward the minions of the self-appointed caliph of the freshly self-declared Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi , paid a visit to the Mosul Museum. It has been closed for years for restoration, ever since it was looted along with many of Iraqs other institutions in the wake of the culturally oblivious American-led invasion of 2003. But the Mosul Museum was on the verge of reopening, at last, and the full collection had been stored there.
These groups of terroriststheir arrival was a brutal shock, with no warning, Iraqi National Museum Director Qais Hussein Rashid told me when he visited Paris last week with a mission pleading for international help. We were not able to take preventive measures.
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The excavations of the last 170 years found Senaccheribs Palace Without Rival. They discovered enormous winged bulls and winged lions with the faces of men, and they carted away the extraordinarily beautiful lion-hunt bas-reliefs that are in the British Museum. But there is so much more to find, so much of such phenomenal beauty and historical importance that a visitor to those ancient precincts might feel as if he or she were in touch physically, mystically with the world described in the Old Testament. If only the stones could survive.
And it's not just the monumental sculptures that are in danger, but thousands of artifacts and, also, ancient manuscripts from the many culturesIslamic, Christian, and paganthat inhabited the region of Mosul when it sat astride the caravan route that led from the Far East into the Near East and Europe.
Ironically, the Saudis have been destroying many Islamic cultural sites:
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A lot worse, but the Flight 93 Memorial site in Shanksville, Pennsylvania looked so much like an outdoor mosque crescent moon, it had to be changed.