Marines work to rebuild ancient capital of Hammurabi

BABYLON, Iraq -- This 4,300-year-old town -- now mainly an archaeological ruin and two important museums -- knows political and military upheaval well. Dynasties have risen and have fallen here since the earliest days of settled human civilization.

King Hammurabi wrote his famous code of laws here.

Nebuchadnezzar sent his vast army from here to Jerusalem to put down an uprising and bring the Jews back as slaves.

Some say Alexander the Great, who led his army out of Macedonia to conquer most of the known world, died here in 332 B.C.

The American military is just the latest to pass through the Euphrates River city. And now U.S. soldiers and civilian occupation officials struggle with mixed success to put the city -- with its deep resonance in so many important cultures -- back together yet again.

The newest of the conquerors who have swept through the fertile crescent for millennia have held the site of the Hanging Gardens -- one of the seven wonders of the ancient world -- for a mere 3 1/2 months.

The Americans are cleaning up after mobs of looters who ransacked the city's two museums, but fortunately got away mainly with small display copies of ancient artifacts. Museum managers, fearing looting as the U.S.-led coalition threatened war, had bricked up the museum windows.

The looters yanked air conditioners from walls and climbed through holes, carting off display copies of humankind's earliest handiwork. Most of the real artifacts were stored in vaults at the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, which also was looted. It is not known what portion of the stored Babylonian museum treasures were taken in looting of the Iraqi capital.

The holes also were too small for looters to escape with the large pieces in the city's two museums, named after Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar.

Camp Babylon

Nearly two weeks after Saddam Hussein's regime fell on April 9, U.S. Marines entered Babylon to find dozens of vendors had flooded into the streets as looters robbed the museums, souvenir shops, a restaurant and the police station. U.S. troops said they moved swiftly to stop lawlessness.

"On my first day here, I caught many people," said U.S. Navy Chaplain Cmdr. Emilio Marrero, a project official of the site. A few looters were arrested, he added, and U.S. authorities "pushed everybody outside the gate so that we could preserve the city."

Babylon has since been closed to the public, but the Marines hope to reopen the site within two months, said Marrero, a New York City native. The Marines have created a major base at the city, calling it Camp Babylon.

Marrero said only three relics were displayed in the Nebuchadnezzar museum. They disappeared with the display copies. He said the Americans were trying to recover the pieces and had found some.

"So many things were looted. The whole antiquities department, the library -- full of historical books, and the city's ancient archive -- were stolen then burned. Why did they burn it?" asked Mariam Omran, director of Babylon's two museums, as she stood in one of Nebuchadnezzar Museum's four large rooms as workers painted the walls.

The Coalition Provisional Authority, headed by L. Paul Bremer, has spent $60,000 to repair the damage, an amount expected to double when the work is finished.

"The first phase of reconstruction was to ensure that the museum was protected so we installed an alarm system in the museum. We repainted it, repaired it, fixed the roof ... cleaned it up after the looters," Marrero said.

The souvenir shop, a small ticket office and the police station were repaired as well.

More than two decades of war, U.N. sanctions and international ostracism of the Saddam regime nearly killed tourism to Iraq's unparalleled archaeological sites. Since the regime fell the country has remained unsafe for tourists.

Still, more than 10,600 U.S. Marines, sailors, soldiers, aid workers and journalists have passed through ancient Babylon since April 26, Marrero said.

Saddam stamped in bricks

Those who visit the ruin in the years to come will be reading the name of Saddam, stamped into the bricks used in reconstructing Nebuchadnezzar's Southern Palace, the seat of the king's ancient empire.

When reconstruction began, the palace walls had crumbled to a fourth of their original height. On Saddam's orders the walls were reconstructed between 1982 and 1987.

Some of the mud bricks in the original wall carried the seal of Nebuchadnezzar. The bricks used in the Saddam reconstruction, not to be outdone by the likes of the ancient king, read:

"The City of Babylon was reconstructed during the era of the victorious Saddam Hussein, President of the Republic, protector of the great Iraq, the modernizer of its renaissance and builder of its civilization."

The Marines are getting ready to leave the area soon and will hand security over to Polish troops, Marrero said. But until then U.S. troops are enjoying the site.

"I think its pretty cool. I mean I used to watch the Discovery Channel but never thought I'll actually be where they are. It's kind of cool. I enjoy it," Marine Lance Cpl. Rod Brooks of Chicago, said as he looked at the 2,600 year-old Lion of Babylon, symbol of Babylon's strength against invaders.