For lovers of the ancient world, this sort of thing is more news worthy than a visit from Vatican City's Holiest. Sola lingua bona mortua est...
huskyr above called out the use of ancient.eu's social buttons as being a distraction. But to be honest I've rarely seen a web or native digital library of ancient sources experience that was acceptable to non-scholastic audiences. Take a look at UCLA's CDLI - Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative:
A search for "Gilgamesh" yields a trip back to an ancient page layout Endukugga himself might have been more comfortable browsing. I realize these are digital humanities projects funded with scarce grant resources. But I can't help thinking they would appeal to a much wider audience, that would be enriched tremendously by the wisdom of the ancients, if only presented in a more user-friendly manner.
They would have wound up in the hands of rich collectors, where they'd probably be a lot safer than they are in Baghdad right now, a few hundred km from an army which would happily destroy all pre-Islamic artefacts.
Especially this one, which is a story with other gods in it! Can't get much more unislamic than that...
So yeah, as long as ISIS or any of its successors never takes Baghdad it's safe. I'd rather it were in some rich dude's house though.
Baghdad is still relatively safe, but could be better. I could see them loaning it to the National Museum at some point, but only temporarily, and not for many years.
If they make it to a museum, then the information on the tablets becomes public and therefore very safe. Discovering and preserving the story is more important than the physical tablets.
The looting in question was an acute episode resulting from the US invasion of Iraq and the rapid disintegration of public institutions and order that followed.
I don't know enough about the epic of Gilgamesh but the Fate series tends to take a lot of freedoms with its interpretation of mythical figures, so it might not be accurate enough for some people.
I really don't want to be 'that' guy, but this article is pretty much unreadable due to the fact that there are six social media buttons hovering over the text. Madness.
huskyr above called out the use of ancient.eu's social buttons as being a distraction. But to be honest I've rarely seen a web or native digital library of ancient sources experience that was acceptable to non-scholastic audiences. Take a look at UCLA's CDLI - Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative:
http://cdli.ucla.edu/
A search for "Gilgamesh" yields a trip back to an ancient page layout Endukugga himself might have been more comfortable browsing. I realize these are digital humanities projects funded with scarce grant resources. But I can't help thinking they would appeal to a much wider audience, that would be enriched tremendously by the wisdom of the ancients, if only presented in a more user-friendly manner.