LOST CUNEIFORM ARCHIVE:

"Looters May Have Destroyed Priceless Cuneiform Archive" (via the Biblical Archaeology Society)

Excerpt:

Looters at Iraq's National Museum of Antiquities pillaged and, perhaps, destroyed an archive of more than 100,000 cuneiform clay tablets -- a unique and priceless trove of ancient Mesopotamian writings that included the "Sippar Library," the oldest library ever found intact on its original shelves.

Experts described the archive as the world's least-studied large collection of cuneiform -- the oldest known writing on Earth -- a record that covers every aspect of Mesopotamian life over more than 3,000 years. The texts resided in numbered boxes each containing as many as 400 3-inch-by-2-inch tablets.

The Sippar Library, discovered in 1986 at a well-known neo-Babylonian site near Baghdad, was one of the archive's crown jewels. Dating from the sixth century B.C., it comprised only about 800 tablets, but it included hymns, prayers, lamentations, bits of epics, glossaries, astronomical and scientific texts, missing pieces of a flood legend that closely parallels the biblical story of Noah, and the prologue to the Code of Hammurabi, the ancient Babylonian lawgiver.

"This is the kind of discovery that one waits 100 years to see," said Yale's Benjamin Foster, curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection. "And now we'll never have another chance. It's a tragedy of the first order." Foster said only about two dozen of the Sippar Library tablets have been fully analyzed and published.