The most immediate threat to preserving the ruins of Babylon, the site of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, is water soaking the ground and undermining what is left in present-day Iraq of a great city from the time of King Nebuchadnezzar II.

It is also one of the oldest threats. The king himself faced water problems 2,600 years ago. Neglect, reckless reconstruction and wartime looting have also taken their toll but archaeologists and experts in the preservation of cultural relics say nothing substantial should be done to correct that until the water problem is brought under control.

‘The highest priority’

A current study, known as the Future of Babylon project, documents the damage from water mainly associated with the Euphrates River and irrigation systems nearby. The ground is saturated just below the surface at sites of the Ishtar Gate and the long-gone Hanging Gardens. The Tower of Babel, long since reduced to rubble, is surrounded by standing water.

Leaders of the international project said that any plan for reclaiming Babylon as a tourist attraction and a place for archaeological research must include water control as “the highest priority.”

The study, aimed at developing a master plan for the ancient city, was begun last year by the World Monuments Fund in collaboration with Iraq’s State Board of Antiquities and Heritage. A $700,000 grant from the U.S. Department of State is financing the initial two-year study and preliminary management plan.

“This is without doubt the most complex program we’ve ever had to organize,” said Bonnie Burnham, the fund’s president. Project members said they have had serious problems persuading foreign experts to go to Iraq, and then clearing them and their instruments for work there.

A city under siege

Consider the depredations Babylon has suffered in recent history. German archaeologists who made the first careful study of the site, before World War I, recognized the despoiling inroads of irrigation waters from a tributary of the Euphrates River.

McGuire Gibson, a specialist in Mesopotamian archaeology at the University of Chicago, who is not involved in the project, agreed that water is Babylon’s “major problem,” made worse in recent years when a lake and canal were dug as part of a campaign to lure tourists.

The first German investigators reported finding extensive water damage to mud-brick struc- tures, and the intrusion of fields and villages into the boundaries of the original city. People had carted off bricks and stones, leaving almost nothing of the Ziggurat, known from the historian Herodotus and the Bible as the Tower of Babel. The Germans themselves hauled off the Ishtar Gate to a Berlin museum.

Then, in the 1970s and ’80s, Saddam Hussein, casting himself as heir to Nebuchadnezzar’s greatness, had his own imposing palace built at Babylon along the lines of his royal predecessor’s. Archaeologists were aghast.

Further damage was incurred during the Iraq War, started in 2003. Looting was prevalent there and at other archaeological sites. The U.S. military occupied Babylon for several years, protecting it from plundering but leaving other scars.

Making progress

Jeff Allen, co-director of the Future of Babylon project, and Lisa Ackerman, executive vice president of the monuments fund, said the project had already surveyed the remains, building by building, and started the restoration of two museums.

Although Iraq has a large corps of trained archaeologists, they said, an immediate need is to instruct others in the conservation of ruins, and bring in structural engineers and hydrologists to handle the water problem.