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ON the walls of Babylon, 80 kilometres south of Baghdad, glazed bricks proclaim that in 1989 Saddam Hussein completed the reconstruction of the city begun by Nebuchadnezzar in 605 BC. This link between the ancient world and Saddam’s rule had devastating consequences not only for the people of Iraq but for the material remains of its past. Rebels destroyed state-funded museums, and in the war to depose Saddam a few hours of looting destroyed unprotected national collections, part of the world’s heritage. In this scholarly book, Bernhardsson shows how archaeology became symbolic glue bonding a disparate group of peoples into…