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Source: London Telegraph
The museum was ransacked in the chaotic aftermath of Saddam Hussein was deposed in April 2003. For six years, the plundered treasures have slowly trickled back to the museum, which only reopened to visitors early this year. Its director, Amira Edan, said around 5,000 of the estimated 15,000 artifacts that were looted have been recovered so far. Now, they will be available to the world, after Eric Schmidt, the Google chief, visited the museum with Christopher Hill, the US Ambassador to Iraq, on Tuesday.
"The history of the beginning of - literally - civilisation is made right here and is preserved here in this museum," Mr Schmidt said at a ceremony attended by Iraqi officials.
"I can think of no better use of our time and our resources than to make the images and ideas from your civilisation, from the very beginnings of time, available to billions of people worldwide," he said.
Mr Schmidt said Google had taken some 14,000 photographs of the museum and its artifacts, and the images will be available online in early 2010.
The antiquities in the museum's vast storage vaults and artifacts from other sites across the country will also be photographed as they become available and then put on the internet, he said.
The museum was among many institutions, including universities, hospitals, libraries and art galleries, that were looted or set ablaze across Iraq in the days and weeks that followed Saddam's ousting.
The museum holds artifacts from the Stone Age through the Babylonian, Assyrian and Islamic periods. The richness of its collection and its importance as a caretaker of the relics of early civilisation triggered an outcry around the world.
US troops, the sole power in the city at the time, were intensely criticised for not protecting the treasures at the museum and other cultural institutions like the national library and the Saddam Art Centre, a museum of modern Iraqi art. | 
