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On April 10, 2003, as the world watched a statue of Saddam Hussein come crashing down in the heart of Baghdad, a mob of looters attacked the Iraq National Museum. Despite the presence of an American tank unit, the pillaging went unchecked, and more than 15,000 artifacts—some of the oldest evidence of human culture—disappeared into the shadowy worldwide market in illicit antiquities. In the five years since that day, the losses have only mounted, with gangs digging up roughly half a million artifacts that had previously been unexcavated; the loss to our shared human heritage is incalculable. With The Rape of Mesopotamia, Lawrence Rothfield answers the complicated question of how this wholesale thievery was allowed to occur. Drawing on extensive interviews with soldiers, bureaucrats, war planners, archaeologists, and collectors, Rothfield reconstructs the planning failures—originating at the highest levels of the U.S. government—that led to the invading forces’ utter indifference to the protection of Iraq’s cultural heritage from looters. Widespread incompetence and miscommunication on the part of the Pentagon, unchecked by the disappointingly weak advocacy efforts of worldwide preservation advocates, enabled a tragedy that continues even today, despite widespread public outrage. Bringing his story up to the present, Rothfield argues forcefully that the international community has yet to learn the lessons of Iraq—and that what happened there is liable to be repeated in future conflicts. A powerful, infuriating chronicle of the disastrous conjunction of military adventure and cultural destruction, The Rape of Mesopotamia is essential reading for all concerned with the future of our past.
As Saddam Hussein's government fell in April 2003, news accounts detailed the pillage of Iraq's National Museum. Less dramatic, though far more devastating, was the subsequent looting at thousands of archaeological sites around the country, which continues on a massive scale to this day. This book details the disasters that have befallen Iraq's cultural heritage, analyzes why all efforts to protect it have failed, and identifies new mechanisms and strategies to prevent the mistakes of Iraq from being replicated in other war-torn regions.
The Mesopotamian influence on Greek mythology in literary works of the epic period is considerable - yet it is a largely unexplored field. In this book Charles Penglase investigates major Mesopotamian and Greek myths. His examination concentrates on journey myths. A major breakthrough is achieved in the recognition of the extent of Mesopotamian influence and in the understanding of the colourful myths involved. The results are of significant interest, especially to scholars and students of ancient Greek and Near Eastern religion and mythology.
WINNER OF THE BLUE SHIELD AWARD 2012! Drawing on the results of a multidisciplinary research a first comprehensive picture of cultural property protection involving the military is presented. Practical, legal and contemplative aspects are considered while presenting a fascinating new discipline in heritage related studies.
Looting and Rape in Wartime examines the causes of the hundred-year gap between the prohibition against wartime looting and that against rape, theorizing the conditions necessary for the emergence of a global prohibition regime in which a particular practice is not tolerated.
This book provides an overview of social life in ancient Mesopotamia, bringing together leading experts to survey key social domains of daily life as well as major non-dominant social groups. It serves as a point of entry to the current research in this field.
"This splendid work of scholarship . . . sums up with economy and power all that the written record so far deciphered has to tell about the ancient and complementary civilizations of Babylon and Assyria."—Edward B. Garside, New York Times Book Review Ancient Mesopotamia—the area now called Iraq—has received less attention than ancient Egypt and other long-extinct and more spectacular civilizations. But numerous small clay tablets buried in the desert soil for thousands of years make it possible for us to know more about the people of ancient Mesopotamia than any other land in the early Near East. Professor Oppenheim, who studied these tablets for more than thirty years, used his intimate knowledge of long-dead languages to put together a distinctively personal picture of the Mesopotamians of some three thousand years ago. Following Oppenheim's death, Erica Reiner used the author's outline to complete the revisions he had begun. "To any serious student of Mesopotamian civilization, this is one of the most valuable books ever written."—Leonard Cottrell, Book Week "Leo Oppenheim has made a bold, brave, pioneering attempt to present a synthesis of the vast mass of philological and archaeological data that have accumulated over the past hundred years in the field of Assyriological research."—Samuel Noah Kramer, Archaeology A. Leo Oppenheim, one of the most distinguished Assyriologists of our time, was editor in charge of the Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute and John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Chicago.
The current conventional Mesopotamian timeline of dynastic Mesopotamia is impossible. Believing in it means endorsing the idea the Egyptians lagged thousand years behind the Sumerians technologically during the Middle Kingdom. This timeline forces the bronze age Harappan civilization to have existed as recently as 1200 BC, even as an iron age civilization had existed on the Ganges since at least 1800 BC. It is also not what the ancient Sumerians actually recorded, so believing it means believing that modern Assyriologists know more about ancient Sumer than the ancient Sumerians themselves. Given that the ancient Sumerians lived through it, and all Assyriologists have to go on is random bits of clay-tablets and mostly ruined city-mounds, this seems like an incredible stretch of the imagination. The fact is Assyriologists cant' and don't need to explain the anachronisms, because the Mesopotamian timeline is synchronized with the Egyptian timeline, which Egyptologists insist on keeping as short as possible. The idea that the ancient Sumerians built their earliest cities in the marshlands of Southern Iraq using stone imported from other countries is entirely illogical, they would have simply built them using mud-bricks as they did in the later periods. As the stone had to have been locally quarried, the region could not have been a marshland when the earliest cities built, meaning that the oldest levels of Uruk and Eridu must date back to before the region began turning into a marshland circa 9,000 years ago. The fact that they switched to using mud-bricks simply proves that the water-levels rose during the course of Sumerian history, flooding their farmlands, and ultimately forcing the Mesopotamian cultures to migrate northward to Akkadia, Babylonia, and Assyria. The fact that Assyriologists ignore the ancient Sumerian records of the antediluvian era is probably for the best, as they cannot even accept that the 1st Kish Dynasty went back to 25,000 BC, even though it has been proven that grains was being farmed in the region at that time. Unfortunately, the timeline of Egypt and Sumer are the two pillars that ancient history is built around. As the early Sumerians were trading with the early Egyptians, Assyriologists have been forced to synchronize the Mesopotamian timeline with the preposterous timeline used by Egyptologists. While this means that most of Sumerian history is has to be ignored, is also effects the timelines of all other Eurasian cultures in contact with the Mesopotamian. The Harappan civilization of ancient India was trading with the Sumerians throughout its history and went into decline around the end of the Sumero-Akkadian dynastic period, which means the entire Harappan civilization is forced to correlate with the short Conventional Mesopotamian Timeline. This forced the entire Harappan timeline into a period of 2000 years, even though some of the archaeological sites in Pakistan and India have been carbon-dated back to over 8000 BC. These broken timelines then fan out further pulling the Minoans and Greeks, Iranians, and Chinese into this confusing mess.
Based on the Book of Genesis, Dinah shares her perspective on religious practices and sexul politics.
Tells the story of archaeological travel and excavation in Iraq -- then Mesopotamia -- from the time of the great Arab geographers to the 2003 devastation of the Iraq National Museum. Fagan tells of Henry Rawlinson, Jules Oppert, and Edward Hincks, decipherers of cuneiform; Claudius and Mary Rich, observers of Nineveh and Babylon; and Émile Botta and Austen Henry Layard, who revealed the Assyrian civilisation to an astonished world. Here, also, are men like Hormuzd Rassam, whose illegal digging and plundering horrified local officials, and Wallis Budge, consummate smuggler of cuneiform tablets. Fagan also recounts the careers of the multi-talented administrator Gertrude Bell, a primary influence in the creation of the nation of Iraq, and of Leonard Woolley, renowned for his excavation of Sumerian civilisation at Ur. Bringing this remarkable history up to date, Fagan chronicles the development of scientific archaeology in Mesopotamia, the growing Iraqi involvement in archaeology, and the tragic events of recent years that led to the looting of the Iraq National Museum and many archaeological sites.