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This is a pretty amazing find. Prehistoric building found in modern Israeli city I know it is pretty cool living in Europe, which has so much history but it must be awesome to live in the Middle east where civilization started. I remember being awed by the walls and ruins of Ancient Samara, which were just outside my FOB in Iraq. It was cool driving through 4-6,000 year old ruins and getting to see them firsthand. the only bad part was hunting insurgents through them. We actually caught some insurgents using the burial chamber at the top of ziggurat as an observation point for mortar fire, luckily we did not have to shoot at the ziggurat and could wait until they came out to fire them up.
But I think that to a certain extent, one almost values historical works more when they're so foreign to one's daily living. For example, I think it's really cool to see a building in my city which was built in the 1880s. How much more am I amazed by buildings constructed hundreds of years before that. Your reference to the insurgents hiding in the ziggurat reminds me of the army (I think the Greek army) which had its arsenal in the Parthenon in the Acropolis in the 17th century. Apparently the Parthenon was in relatively good shape up until then when the Turkish army fired on it. Think of all the historical information we lost because of that destruction.
When I was in Iraq part of our standing orders was to try and preserve historical artifacts and structures to the greatest extent possible consistent with the preservation of our soldiers. This was an order I heartily agreed with. We did not fire on historical structures unless there was no other choice. As a matter of fact I cannot remember ever having to fire on one, got close a couple of times but never actually had to.
If you had fired on and destroyed some ancient structures, you may have become a footnote in some journal article written sometime in the future. In my field, which focuses on the built structure, we rely on the preservation of old works in order to learn about the past…too bad that more structures have not been saved from the ravages of time.
Oh, I am sure my unit will be, if anyone writes an article about the condition of ancient Samarra. I said we never had to fire any of the major buildings up, we did drive our tracked vehicles over the low remains of building walls while chasing insurgents and caused damage to them in the process. We tried to use the lanes of the ancient streets but that was not always possible and Mrs. Shrier's little boy is not getting killed to preserve a 4,000 year old pile of dirt.
