I have always had a passion for Ancient Egyptian culture, ever since I was a child. I started researching originally what was being done to save Egyptian monuments when I was picking out a topic. As I started to learn more, I saw that while looting was a large problem, there was something much darker going just a little further west, in Iraq and Afghanistan. In some of the articles I have read so far, it seems like our armed forces haven’t done much to staunch the flow of artifacts being stolen from museums we are trying to protect and the destruction of cultural heritage sites. Some questions I have after doing some initial research; what is the history of looting and what effect does it have, how extensive is the damage and how much of that is directly caused by war, can anything be done to stop the damage to our history or what is being done, and what types of prevention can we implement to save it? My topic really connects to what we have been talking about in class. While some buildings can be up for discussion about wether or not they should be saved, I don’t think there really needs to be much of a discussion about some of the monuments and sites in the Middle East. Especially concerning the ones we haven’t been able to properly look at because of politics or war, these sites could contain valuable information about our past and deserve to be saved so that we might learn from them. As far as the ones that we have studied already, I think that the ones with the most cultural significance or the ones in the most danger should be top priority, such as Babylon or the Great Mosque of Samarra. I believe that these sites shouldn’t be used the way they are and that as a global community we should have more respect for our past and our cultural history.
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