As tanks maneuver through drill practices and bulldozers scoop up the desert floor preparing for ground war in the Middle East, McGuire Gibson cringes at the sight; where others see troops digging foxholes Gibson sees the pulverization of thousands of years of human society.
Working in the late 1970s in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, Gibson uncovered fragments of pottery that originated hundreds of miles away in the ancient city of Ur. “Nothing really extraordinary in terms of world history,” Gibson concedes, “but in terms of the understanding of the early history of civilization–we know that there are certain sites that are just in absolute contact with what’s going on up in Mesopotamia. There’s pottery being found down there that we know is coming from the site of Ur. That area has maybe 100, 150 sites that we have in fact located.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Gibson says the most important site in Kuwait is an island called Falaika. “The entire island is a site. We know that’s being bombed, that was in the news the other day.”
He suddenly remembers another tablet collection in the museum: “Proverbs!” he exclaims. “There are things akin to our ‘A stitch in time saves nine.’ Proverbs like that. There’s all this stuff on wisdom. There are texts on ideals of justice, ideals of right. Ideas of how to be a good king. Ideas of how to be a good individual.
“More important than that,” Gibson continues, “is the fact that directly across from the Ministry of Defense, within 100 yards, is the biggest hospital complex in Iraq, called Medical City.” He describes it as a modern building with walls of glass. “It wouldn’t have been a nice place to be in the hospital,” he says.
He has repeatedly tried to contact his colleagues in Iraq. “The U.S. government cut all telephone and mailings and everything way back in August,” he says, though he has gotten second- and third-hand messages from Jordanian, Palestinian, and Egyptian refugees fleeing Iraq at the outset of war.
