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Comment by blackbrokkoli | Hacker News Reader

I was there earlier last year, and it was none too impressive.

Pretty shoddy brick walls (just straight blocks), crumbling at many places, constructed possibly along ancient foundations or maybe not, that you sort of walk through. Interesting things here and there. Couple of other tourists.

Walking through Saddam's palace next to it was much more fascinating; extreme grandeur morphed into a typical lost place with graffiti and empty bottles. The nearby town Al7illa certainly offered more to actually experience, like a mini theme park with the main attraction being (artificial) rain.

Anyways I genuinely wish the committed people all the best in the restoration, but I feel like the article is a tad over-enthusiastic and easily convinced.

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This site and the nearby Saddam palace were featured in the recent Michael Palin travelogue on Iraq.

https://www.themichaelpalin.com/watch/#section8

The reconstruction looked very bare and empty in the program. But I guess it is a work in progress.

BTW the Assyrian exhibits in the British museum are amazing and well worth visiting. Yes, I know, colonialism is bad and they probably shouldn't be in London. But I doubt they would be in anything like as good a state if they had been left in their original locations.

> But I doubt they would be in anything like as good a state if they had been left in their original locations.

I get it, but thats problem with 'good theft', its still amoral, and well we all know history and how things actually happened. Inability to even properly acknowledge fuckups of one's ancestors leaves little room for moving further and learning hard from that, instead of some shallow blah to not stick out of the crowd.

And an inability to acknowledge the ongoing fuckups of strangers(eg: see Taliban and ISIS destruction of archaeologically significant sites) that very well could have resulted in the same fate if they had been left in situ. None of us knows what would have actually happened, but at least standing out of the crowd earns some points.

I do agree that this is a complex topic but it is worth noting that the looting of Iraq was done by the British both times, making the argument a little circular.

Like good thing the British saved the relics from what might have happened from the aftermath of the invasion the British also engineered.

Not to mention that both Taliban and ISIS are Western-funded and supported terrorist groups.

> thats problem with 'good theft', its still amora

You may have meant immoral. But amoral puts it better.

From the perspective of common heritage, it’s better at the British Museum. From the perspective of ethnonational self determination, it should be returned to its origin even if that means its destruction.

I personally tend towards the latter for newer artefacts and the former for older ones. (The logic for the people living somewhere today having exclusive domain over something made millennia earlier falls apart if the present occupants may be barely more related to those forerunners than someone on another continent.)

But everything old was new at some point. If it can’t survive it’s youth then there is no real dilemma.

> everything old was new at some point

We live in the present. In the present, some things are old and others are new.

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