Okay, it sounds like we were being sarcastic there, but the fact is crimes against cultural heritage really are considered a special kind of evil because you're destroying something irreplaceable that's of great significance and that should have outlasted all of us. So when, say, the US went into Iraq in 2003, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis may have resultantly died, but at least the Americans didn't go out of their way to raze millennia-old historical sites, right? Right?
The illustration above is not, in fact, some site in Iraq that existed right before the 2003 invasion but is the legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. We aren't totally sure if these gardens actually existed, but if they did, we have a good idea where they were. And if they didn't, the excavated city of Babylon still has thousands of years of history, going all the way to Hammurabi and beyond. In 2003, the US military built a base on the ruins.Â
Assessing the place years later, the UN pointed out all kinds of damage, and the US actually agreed to pay close to $1 million in response. "We had to occupy it to protect it!" an army spokesperson still insisted. Maybe that's true. But they also paved the site to build parking lots and helipads and built trenches and staked in barbed wire fences. They dug up dirt that held all kinds of archaeological fragments – fragments that, said one unnamed expert, "belong in a museum" – and then used that dirt to fill their sandbags.Â
If that bit about the sandbags sounded especially bad to you, wait till you hear this next story: