I was there earlier last year, and it was none too impressive.
Pretty shoddy brick walls (just straight blocks), crumbling at many places, constructed possibly along ancient foundations or maybe not, that you sort of walk through. Interesting things here and there. Couple of other tourists.
Walking through Saddam's palace next to it was much more fascinating; extreme grandeur morphed into a typical lost place with graffiti and empty bottles. The nearby town Al7illa certainly offered more to actually experience, like a mini theme park with the main attraction being (artificial) rain.
Anyways I genuinely wish the committed people all the best in the restoration, but I feel like the article is a tad over-enthusiastic and easily convinced.
The reconstruction looked very bare and empty in the program. But I guess it is a work in progress.
BTW the Assyrian exhibits in the British museum are amazing and well worth visiting. Yes, I know, colonialism is bad and they probably shouldn't be in London. But I doubt they would be in anything like as good a state if they had been left in their original locations.
> But I doubt they would be in anything like as good a state if they had been left in their original locations.
I get it, but thats problem with 'good theft', its still amoral, and well we all know history and how things actually happened. Inability to even properly acknowledge fuckups of one's ancestors leaves little room for moving further and learning hard from that, instead of some shallow blah to not stick out of the crowd.
The ancient history of this region is fascinating, and the politics of that time were not so different from today. I highly recommend the “Fall of Civilizations Podcast”, episode 8. High quality work.
There is no way to restore the most precious sites which were destroyed intentionally.
Some a perfectly preserved sites.
It simply gone and will never returned.
Just look at the map in page 7 in the report below:
Sounds more like "reconstruction" than "restoration". I appreciate many original parts may be too damaged, but it risks becoming an archeological Disneyland.
Reconstruction is great provided archaeologists are done with the site and at least some of the tourism revenue generated is put towards archaeology.
Ancient Mesopotamia is, in my view, one of the most exciting fields out there, simply because their written records are imperishable. There's thousands of years of history, not pre-history, there. Much of it has already been discovered but, for want of money, not yet fully studied. Not yet deciphered. Not yet understood.
We know the approximate locations of important cities that have yet to be found. We know roughly where they are, but they're not in easy places to access due to remoteness as well as political instability and violence. We currently only have records from other places to tell us they exist, but we could find entire libraries and hear from these ancient people in their own words.
There are few other frontiers in all of archaeology that offer such potential for gaining intimate knowledge of ancient human societies. Anything that can inject a little much-needed funding into the field is welcome.
I don't see the problem. If a building is damaged we should not reconstruct it? I'd much rather see the Colosseum in its original state, covered in marble, than the current state, after centuries of neglect and looting from the italians.
That's still not the original state. In addition to not always knowing what exactly it was supposed to look like, using non-authentic materials and methods (power-tools) will effect the final outcome. If people are more interested in the experience than the genuine artifact, full-scale replicas can be created offsite without damaging ancient artifacts (BTW there's a 1:1 Parthenon replica in Tennessee, ive never been but I hear its impressive).
Also, the article barely mentioned this but the biggest source of damage to these specific ruins actually isn't being adjacent to major battles in two modern conflicts, it's Saddam-era "restorations". The reason why the zigguraut looks so much more pristine than any other ancient ruins is that what you're looking at was built in the 80s on top of the actual ancient ruins. It wasn't a particularly accurate restoration either; they used concrete and Saddam even made them stamp his face on some of the bricks so future generations would associate him with nebuchanezzar.
The value of ancient buildings is in what we learn from whatever survives. How can we rebuild the Coliseum to its original state without first learning what that state was? The Coliseum was operational for centuries and underwent constant modification. Which period should it be restored to, and to what end?
>To finally see the gladiators Zuckerberg vs Musk celebrity deathmatch obviously.
NGL, would love to see techbros battle to the death for our entertainment.
Hey, if we're already near the fall of the empire, we might as well get some bread and games out of it.
Though Suck and Bezos would easily kill Musk since Zuck is a martial arts expert and Bezos is roided out of his mind, while Musk is kinda doughy like a human slug monster.
As long as they're done faithfully; there's reproductions of old ships too for museum purposes, since the old ships just rotted away over time (I assume). Rebuilding them with modern knowledge of e.g. wood / rope / sail preservation will be valuable.
It also makes me think of a reddit question the other day - why did people cover up their beautiful wooden flooring with carpets? The answer is that they didn't have epoxy sealants and the like back then so it was maintenance heavy.
You mean they need to be true believers of Anu, Enlil and Istar?
Yeah, that would likely help the spirit of restoration efforts..
"why did people cover up their beautiful wooden flooring with carpets?"
Don't carpets also provide good insulation? When you are cold and do not have automatic heating build into the ground ... most people appreciate warm feed over aesthetics.
> why did people cover up their beautiful wooden flooring with carpets
For a minute there i thought you were talking about the 70s.
Considering the Greek's love of what modern people consider garishly colored statues, my first instinct would have been that it's for decorative reasons.
Like Newgrange in Ireland. “Reconstructed” in the ‘60s and ‘70s based largely on the opinions of one person in a matter now considered to be mostly speculative. After 5 millennia, it now seems that “conservation” efforts have completed destroyed its original form.
It would be far more facinating to fund something like the ongoing construction of a true mideval castle in France, where they are re creating the teqcniques used by building and then testing for accuracy, and refining there methods by letting thins weather and be used in daily operations to be able to compare wearmarks and longevity to original archiological evidence, in France there work and workers have directly been used in the rebuilding of the great chapell burned down in paris a decade ago.
So a full on mesoptaimian city on the banks of the Euphraties, and maybe we can find out what on earth "the things of stone" are, among other almost infuriating criptic references that leave us grasping for meaning, like a bunch of dweebs listening to the cool kids talking about getting down with the gods themselves
Screw the tourists, bring in the archeologists, maybe start by resuming excavations at Eridu. 99% of our history is buried or looted. And the one or two Assyriologists in the world need new material to study.
That is so sad.
Iraq, Uruk, Mesopotamia, Babylon...
The birthplace of so many nations and cultures in the region.
The cultural and commercial hub for centuries.
After several years, Iraqi Hezbollah recently released their Princeton researcher hostage (granted, she is a dual Israeli citizen). Maybe that will encourage more archeologists to visit.
Tourism is such a wasteful tax on society. I met an Egyptologist who had been leading tours for two years so he could feed his family but he longed to go back to Egyptology and go and study the ruins even though it didn’t pay well
Hate to break it to you, but every other tour guide in Egypt will tell you that they actually are an "Egyptologist". It's a common scam. Of course I don't know the situation of your specific tour guide though, they might have been genuine.
He could read hieroglyphics. And we asked him much more technical questions which he was able to answer.
We had a second tour guide for a different area. He was not an archaeologist. But he was like one of those nerdy guys who study the subject really well and then explain it. His passion and tour guiding was very different than the first, more academic in nature.
lol. Sure I felt happy that he had something else to keep his family fed. But I as a tourist with more valuable cash come into this country with an artificially low value cash, take up the very resources of that country to … give me a tour! This guy is probably a skilled archeologist who made a huge effort to learn history of an ancient civilization and was actually able to translate whatever we asked him to translate.
And here he is could be doing something so much more valuable … than giving this idiot (me) a “tour”.
I am appreciative that I met him. And that he was my guide. But my money didn’t give him an income. It took away the finite resources of his country.
People generally become tour guides because alternative jobs don't exist. It's extremely common for the local workers who help with excavation to become tour guides for the areas they've helped excavate. Many of these people are more knowledgeable (in certain respects) than the archaeologists they're helping.
I'm fairly certain you weren't taking him away from something more valuable that he would have been doing in your absence.
In Egypt, archaeology is funded by foreign governments and universities who use the discoveries to write papers. Before they would also extract the treasures until a law was made that prohibited that.
I was there earlier last year, and it was none too impressive.
Pretty shoddy brick walls (just straight blocks), crumbling at many places, constructed possibly along ancient foundations or maybe not, that you sort of walk through. Interesting things here and there. Couple of other tourists.
Walking through Saddam's palace next to it was much more fascinating; extreme grandeur morphed into a typical lost place with graffiti and empty bottles. The nearby town Al7illa certainly offered more to actually experience, like a mini theme park with the main attraction being (artificial) rain.
Anyways I genuinely wish the committed people all the best in the restoration, but I feel like the article is a tad over-enthusiastic and easily convinced.
This site and the nearby Saddam palace were featured in the recent Michael Palin travelogue on Iraq.
https://www.themichaelpalin.com/watch/#section8
The reconstruction looked very bare and empty in the program. But I guess it is a work in progress.
BTW the Assyrian exhibits in the British museum are amazing and well worth visiting. Yes, I know, colonialism is bad and they probably shouldn't be in London. But I doubt they would be in anything like as good a state if they had been left in their original locations.
> But I doubt they would be in anything like as good a state if they had been left in their original locations.
I get it, but thats problem with 'good theft', its still amoral, and well we all know history and how things actually happened. Inability to even properly acknowledge fuckups of one's ancestors leaves little room for moving further and learning hard from that, instead of some shallow blah to not stick out of the crowd.
The ancient history of this region is fascinating, and the politics of that time were not so different from today. I highly recommend the “Fall of Civilizations Podcast”, episode 8. High quality work.
https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/2019/10/25/episode-8-...
Seconded. The “Fall of Civilizations” Podcast is a masterpiece.
There is no way to restore the most precious sites which were destroyed intentionally. Some a perfectly preserved sites. It simply gone and will never returned.
Just look at the map in page 7 in the report below:
https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Issues/C...
What they are doing here is "rebuilding"
Sounds more like "reconstruction" than "restoration". I appreciate many original parts may be too damaged, but it risks becoming an archeological Disneyland.
Reconstruction is great provided archaeologists are done with the site and at least some of the tourism revenue generated is put towards archaeology.
Ancient Mesopotamia is, in my view, one of the most exciting fields out there, simply because their written records are imperishable. There's thousands of years of history, not pre-history, there. Much of it has already been discovered but, for want of money, not yet fully studied. Not yet deciphered. Not yet understood.
We know the approximate locations of important cities that have yet to be found. We know roughly where they are, but they're not in easy places to access due to remoteness as well as political instability and violence. We currently only have records from other places to tell us they exist, but we could find entire libraries and hear from these ancient people in their own words.
There are few other frontiers in all of archaeology that offer such potential for gaining intimate knowledge of ancient human societies. Anything that can inject a little much-needed funding into the field is welcome.
I don't see the problem. If a building is damaged we should not reconstruct it? I'd much rather see the Colosseum in its original state, covered in marble, than the current state, after centuries of neglect and looting from the italians.
That's still not the original state. In addition to not always knowing what exactly it was supposed to look like, using non-authentic materials and methods (power-tools) will effect the final outcome. If people are more interested in the experience than the genuine artifact, full-scale replicas can be created offsite without damaging ancient artifacts (BTW there's a 1:1 Parthenon replica in Tennessee, ive never been but I hear its impressive).
Also, the article barely mentioned this but the biggest source of damage to these specific ruins actually isn't being adjacent to major battles in two modern conflicts, it's Saddam-era "restorations". The reason why the zigguraut looks so much more pristine than any other ancient ruins is that what you're looking at was built in the 80s on top of the actual ancient ruins. It wasn't a particularly accurate restoration either; they used concrete and Saddam even made them stamp his face on some of the bricks so future generations would associate him with nebuchanezzar.
The value of ancient buildings is in what we learn from whatever survives. How can we rebuild the Coliseum to its original state without first learning what that state was? The Coliseum was operational for centuries and underwent constant modification. Which period should it be restored to, and to what end?
"Which period should it be restored to, and to what end?"
Rome at peak power around year 100. And why? To finally see the gladiators Zuckerberg vs Musk celebrity deathmatch obviously.
I suspect it would end like the gladiator match in 'The Life of Brian', with Musk having a heart attack before he could even get in striking range.
>To finally see the gladiators Zuckerberg vs Musk celebrity deathmatch obviously.
NGL, would love to see techbros battle to the death for our entertainment.
Hey, if we're already near the fall of the empire, we might as well get some bread and games out of it.
Though Suck and Bezos would easily kill Musk since Zuck is a martial arts expert and Bezos is roided out of his mind, while Musk is kinda doughy like a human slug monster.
As long as they're done faithfully; there's reproductions of old ships too for museum purposes, since the old ships just rotted away over time (I assume). Rebuilding them with modern knowledge of e.g. wood / rope / sail preservation will be valuable.
It also makes me think of a reddit question the other day - why did people cover up their beautiful wooden flooring with carpets? The answer is that they didn't have epoxy sealants and the like back then so it was maintenance heavy.
"As long as they're done faithfully"
You mean they need to be true believers of Anu, Enlil and Istar? Yeah, that would likely help the spirit of restoration efforts..
"why did people cover up their beautiful wooden flooring with carpets?"
Don't carpets also provide good insulation? When you are cold and do not have automatic heating build into the ground ... most people appreciate warm feed over aesthetics.
> why did people cover up their beautiful wooden flooring with carpets
For a minute there i thought you were talking about the 70s.
Considering the Greek's love of what modern people consider garishly colored statues, my first instinct would have been that it's for decorative reasons.
Like Newgrange in Ireland. “Reconstructed” in the ‘60s and ‘70s based largely on the opinions of one person in a matter now considered to be mostly speculative. After 5 millennia, it now seems that “conservation” efforts have completed destroyed its original form.
It would be far more facinating to fund something like the ongoing construction of a true mideval castle in France, where they are re creating the teqcniques used by building and then testing for accuracy, and refining there methods by letting thins weather and be used in daily operations to be able to compare wearmarks and longevity to original archiological evidence, in France there work and workers have directly been used in the rebuilding of the great chapell burned down in paris a decade ago. So a full on mesoptaimian city on the banks of the Euphraties, and maybe we can find out what on earth "the things of stone" are, among other almost infuriating criptic references that leave us grasping for meaning, like a bunch of dweebs listening to the cool kids talking about getting down with the gods themselves
There is a prophecy in the Bible that says Babylon will never successfully be rebuilt. Isa 13:19, 20.
I'll settle for what came long before it.
It's amazing we're living in a time again where we have to know the bible to predict government policy
Yeah, meanwhile what happened to Gilgamesh's tomb? What is left to see in Iraq/Uruk is less than a shadow of what was excavated.
Screw the tourists, bring in the archeologists, maybe start by resuming excavations at Eridu. 99% of our history is buried or looted. And the one or two Assyriologists in the world need new material to study.
That is so sad. Iraq, Uruk, Mesopotamia, Babylon... The birthplace of so many nations and cultures in the region. The cultural and commercial hub for centuries.
https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Issues/C...
After several years, Iraqi Hezbollah recently released their Princeton researcher hostage (granted, she is a dual Israeli citizen). Maybe that will encourage more archeologists to visit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Tsurkov
Thanks for the info and please pardon my previous ignorance of it. I'm grateful for her release.
no worries. There's a whole lot of news happening. No need to be up to date with everything.
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Lovely place to be kidnapped
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Tourism is such a wasteful tax on society. I met an Egyptologist who had been leading tours for two years so he could feed his family but he longed to go back to Egyptology and go and study the ruins even though it didn’t pay well
Hate to break it to you, but every other tour guide in Egypt will tell you that they actually are an "Egyptologist". It's a common scam. Of course I don't know the situation of your specific tour guide though, they might have been genuine.
He could read hieroglyphics. And we asked him much more technical questions which he was able to answer.
We had a second tour guide for a different area. He was not an archaeologist. But he was like one of those nerdy guys who study the subject really well and then explain it. His passion and tour guiding was very different than the first, more academic in nature.
And after meeting that person you thought, "wow I wish this person didn't have an alternative income stream that allows them to feed their family"?
Many people in this world wish they could do something different with their lives, but to blame the activity they're currently doing is shortsighted.
lol. Sure I felt happy that he had something else to keep his family fed. But I as a tourist with more valuable cash come into this country with an artificially low value cash, take up the very resources of that country to … give me a tour! This guy is probably a skilled archeologist who made a huge effort to learn history of an ancient civilization and was actually able to translate whatever we asked him to translate.
And here he is could be doing something so much more valuable … than giving this idiot (me) a “tour”.
I am appreciative that I met him. And that he was my guide. But my money didn’t give him an income. It took away the finite resources of his country.
People generally become tour guides because alternative jobs don't exist. It's extremely common for the local workers who help with excavation to become tour guides for the areas they've helped excavate. Many of these people are more knowledgeable (in certain respects) than the archaeologists they're helping.
I'm fairly certain you weren't taking him away from something more valuable that he would have been doing in your absence.
If there was less tourism there would be even less demand for archeologists and the guy would have likely been forced into an even lower skilled job
In Egypt, archaeology is funded by foreign governments and universities who use the discoveries to write papers. Before they would also extract the treasures until a law was made that prohibited that.
Nothing stops you from giving the guy a donation.
What stopped him from doing his work? A more lucrative alternative field. Only one of the works is more worthwhile.
You can fund a full time Egyptologist for the amount of money a turned receives in a year.
The Taliban and other theocratic totalitarian regimes should take notes.
'Building yesteryear's history today' for tourism, like so many "historical" sites.
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