Antiquities Saved With Lasers
Only the bas- relief bull and serpent- dragon gods were present to see the two flak-jacketed German surveyors painstakingly moving laser equipment through Iraq’s most famous archaeological site, the ruins of ancient Babylon.
Nervous about working in a country in the midst of conflict, Dirk Häusleigner and Erwin Christofori concentrated on the four- day task at hand — laser-scanning the towering 2,600-year- old walls of Ishtar Gate and the nearby Nabu- sha- Khare Temple, which was partly, and damagingly, reconstructed during Saddam Hussein’s era.
“We were a little bit nervous, yes,” Mr. Häusleigner said about his trip to what was once the neo-Babylonian capital of Nebuchadnezzar II, the biblical king. It’s now a pile of partly excavated remnants 80 kilometers south of Baghdad. “But you feel honored to see this place and to preserve it, because it is world heritage.”
The trip was in 2010, before the rise of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, with its relentless campaign to destroy and loot ancient sites in Iraq and Syria.
Babylon survived because it lies farther south and east than its ancient neighbors of Nimrud, Hatra and Palmyra, which are within the jihadists’ self- proclaimed Islamic caliphate.
But what seemed back then to be a straightforward job of conservation planning today appears to have been a prescient use of digital technology in a conflict zone. Now other cultural organizations are trying to create 3-D records of heritage sites to pre- serve them, at least in digital form, for future generations.
“We were ahead of the curve on this,” said Jeff Allen of the World Monuments Fund, the New Yorkbased nonprofit charity that commissioned the laser scan and works at Babylon with the Iraq State Board of Antiquities and Heritage.
The damage inflicted on antiquities in Iraq and Syria pales beside the hundreds of thousands of people killed and millions uprooted in the region. But attacks on people and their cultural heritage are inextricably linked, experts say.
“Cultural cleansing” is a war crime that “is now used as a tactic of war,” said Irina Bokova of Unesco, the United Nations cultural agency, in November. “This is not a choice between protecting people or protecting culture. It is part of the same responsibility because culture is about belonging, identity, values, common history and the kind of world that we want to live in.”
Cultural organizations are working with Iraqi and Syrian experts, drawing on local knowledge and providing equipment and training, to create digital records of ancient sites. Among the pioneers is the Institute for Digital Archaeology, which is putting together an opensource Million Image Database. Its aim is to use images taken before the destruction of sites such as Palmyra to record and even rebuild some monuments.
Its director of technology, Alexy Karenowska, a physicist at Oxford University, said that the institute was supplying volunteers with 5,000 lightweight 3- D cameras to document at- risk cultural sites throughout the Middle East and North Africa. In April, at Trafalgar Square in London, it will install a temporary full- scale replica of the Arch of the Temple of Baal in Palmyra based on its 3-D digital model. The arch’s status is uncertain, but much of the temple appears to have been destroyed.
Dr. Karenowska said a reproduction can only be second best. But, he added, “if we are in a situation where it is all that we have, I do think we should embrace the possibility of having that.”
Tens of thousands of Babylonian artifacts lie far from ISIS’s reach in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. They were excavated by German archaeologists in the early 1900s.
Markus Hilgert of the Pergamon said it would be possible one day to 3-D scan the material in Berlin, combine it with the digital model already done in Babylon and create an exhibition. “The idea is to have a virtual reunification of the archaeological objects,” Dr. Hilgert said. “We have to learn again that cultural objects, elements of culture, have very much to do with who we are, what we identify with, how we orient ourselves in this world.”
Preserving, in digital form, ancient sites threatened by ISIS.