The Devastation of Iraq's Past

"What is currently taking place in southern Iraq," Gil Stein, the director of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, writes in the catalog to "Catastrophe!," the institute's disturbing new exhibition on the subject, "is nothing less than the eradication of the material record of the world's first urban, literate civilization."

The New York Review of Books has a long article on the looting and destruction of Iraq's cultural heritage.