Plünderer waren auch da zu Besuch laut CBS und bedienten sich an den Wühltischen...: The copper head of an Akkadian king, four millennia old. Gone. Golden bowls and colossal statues. Gone. Ancient manuscripts and bejeweled lyres. All gone. (...) In a frenzied rampage that began Thursday, the thieves took everything: Babylonian, Sumerian and Assyrian collections that chronicled and celebrated the Cradle of Civilization. (...)

Gordon Newby, a historian and professor of Middle Eastern studies at Emory University in Atlanta, said the museum's most famous holding may have been tablets with Hammurabi's Code (engl. Uebersetzung des Gesetzes) - one of mankind's earliest codes of law. It could not be determined whether the tablets were at the museum when the war broke out.