Raiders of the Lost Art…
When I was an elementary and high school student, I hated history. I couldn’t imagine how anything that occured before I was born had any relevance in my life. The American Civil War bored me. The lives of Marie Antoinette, Benjamin Franklin, and Abraham Lincoln interested me even less. Despite their concerted efforts, nothing any of my history teachers could do sparked any interest.
A decade later, my outlook has changed significantly. Now I enjoy learning about local history, despite that it is not very old since the West Coast doesn’t have a very long history; Egyptian culture is fascinating to me; and I find a particular fascination with ancient artifacts. Several years ago, I created the rather dry Daily Almanac channel on AvantGo, where it is now one of the most popular channels based on the number of subscribers — although less remarkable than it sounds due to being beaten by the Cat Chow channel. Even my most praised geocache creations (The American Way of Life, The Amazing Race, and the new Celebrity Mole) are based on little-known local history interspersed with contemporary culture.
My increased interest makes me very sad to hear of the tragedy of the losses incurred through the looting of the Iraqi national museum in Baghdad. Within the historic museum were more than 100,000 individuals pieces of art and artifacts, many of which were considered some of the first written records of humankind. Irreplaceable. The full resources of Interpol and the FBI will likely have little effect other than recovering a few dozen pieces — maybe even a hundred or so.
Two thousand years ago, the Royal Library of Alexandria was destroyed by unknown forces. Two thousand years from now, the looting of the legendary Library of “Babylon” will be remembered as being partially the responsibility of the Bush administration.
