Sherry Chandler

One of the things that I’ve found heartbreaking about the current war in Iraq is how destructive it has been of the ancient culture, and it is heartbreaking because, whatever you may think of the war, the cultural destruction could have been avoided with some care.

This report from The Independent gives some indication how bad it was:

Evidence of how quickly and irretrievably a country can be stripped of its cultural heritage came with the Iraq war in 2003.

The latest figures, presented to the art crime conference yesterday by John Curtis of the British Museum, suggested that half of the 40 iconic items from the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad still had not been retrieved. And of at least 15,000 items looted from its storerooms, about 8,000 have yet to be traced.

About 4,000 of the objects taken from the museum had been recovered in Iraq. But illustrating the international demand for such antiquities, Dr Curtis said around 1,000 had been confiscated in the US, 500 pieces had been impounded in France, 250 in Switzerland and 200 or so in Jordan.

Juan Cole identifies the piece pictured as The Lady of Uruk (3100 B.C.) Recovered September 2003 north of Baghdad. Uruk was the great city of Gilgamesh. Here are the ending words of that epic:

Gilgamesh said to Urshanabi, the ferryman:
“Go up, Urshanabi, onto the wall of Uruk and walk around.
Examine its foundation, inspect its brickwork thoroughly–
is not (even the core of) the brick structure of kiln-fired brick,
and did not the Seven Sages themselves lay out its plan!
One league city, one league palm gardens, one league lowlands, the open area(?) of the Ishtar Temple,
three leagues and the open area(?) of Uruk it encloses.

Over at his Live Journal, my son asks a couple of questions about “Revenge of the Sith:

And by the end of the movie, I was ready to bludgeon Yoda with a stack of grammar textbooks. He’s tolerable in small doses, but come on. Every other species in the galaxy managed to get a grasp on basic English grammar. Those not restricted to grunts and growls, anyway. Why can’t Yoda?

Darth Vader: Evil in a Crunchy Candy Shell

{These people have the knowledge to build ships that can jump between planets in a heartbeat, but they can’t do reconstructive surgery?}