Only the bas-relief bull and serpent-dragon gods were present to see the two flak-jacketed German surveyors and their security guards painstakingly moving laser equipment through Iraq’s most famous archaeological site, the ruins of ancient Babylon.
Nervous about working in a country that had been tearing itself apart for years, Dirk Häusleigner and Erwin Christofori concentrated on the four-day task in hand — laser-scanning the towering 2,600-year-old walls of Ishtar Gate and the nearby Nabu-sha-Khare Temple which was partly, and damagingly, reconstructed during Saddam Hussein’s era.
