The Cradle of Civilization

From Salon.com this morning comes this astounding headline: "Entire nation of Iraq on list of endangered sites." The World Monument Fund, which tries to protect and conserve important monuments from all time periods, antiquity up to the twentieth century, has placed what I was taught in school was the place where It All Began, the "Cradle of Civilization," the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, on their list of endangered places. THE ENTIRE COUNTRY.

"This is the first time we have listed a country as endangered, and I think that we can all understand that every site in Iraq that is significant in terms of cultural heritage is at risk today," Bonnie Burnham, president of the World Monuments Fund, said Tuesday. Thousands of important sites in Iraq, known as the cradle of civilization, are at risk from war, looting and neglect, Burnham said.

Arundhati Roy began an article that first appeared in The Guardian soon after the war began with words I shall never forget: "Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates. How many children, in how many classrooms, over how many centuries, have hang-glided through the past, transported on the wings of these words? And now the bombs are falling, incinerating and humiliating that ancient civilization." The human loss of this war is horrifying, to that loss we can now add a world loss of civilization's history.