INEVEH, Iraq - All that remains of the great palace of Sennacherib, who ruled this mighty Assyrian city when it was at civilization's center 2,700 years ago, are fragments of marble reliefs lining empty rooms dug from a hillside here.
The palace's treasures, its colossal winged bulls and lion-sphinxes, vanished long ago, to museums in Paris and London in the mid-19th century. Heavy bombing during the 1991 Gulf War cracked some of what remained. Looters, driven by crippling UN sanctions, plundered much of the rest.
Now, if another war occurs, archeologists here and abroad ponder Nineveh's fate - given that the seventh century BC palace is adjacent to a radar tower guarded by the Iraqi military and likely to draw US fire.
Nineveh is just one of thousands of historical sites, excavated and unexcavated, that have archeologists deeply worried. ''All of Iraq is an archeological site,'' said McGuire Gibson, a professor of Mesopotamian archeology at the University of Chicago.
There are more than 10,000 known archeological sites scattered across Iraq, a land whose ancient civilization gave birth to writing, codes of law, poetry, epic literature, and organized religion.
A Pentagon official confirmed a week ago that a group of archeologists had made a direct plea to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to consider protecting antiquities in Iraq. The official said Rumsfeld had invited the archeologists to supply any information about sensitive sites to military planners.
Ashton Hawkins, president of the American Council for Cultural Policy, and Maxwell Anderson, president of the American Association of Art Museum Directors, had appealed to the US military in a column in the Washington Post in November for such consideration.
''Our military and civilian leaderships should be aware of the location of Iraq's most significant cultural and religious sites and monuments,'' Hawkins and Anderson wrote, urging the Pentagon to create a communications channel between war planners and US scholars ''willing and able to assist in designating sites and locations of special cultural and religious importance.''
But archeologists admit the task is daunting. Some estimate Iraq has some half a million to a million sites, many unexcavated or unmarked.
Prehistoric cultures flourished here, 120,000 years ago. Recorded history began in the ancient city-state of Sumer. The kingdoms of the Amorites and the Assyrians, the Persians, Umayyads and the Abbasids, the Mongols, and the Ottomans then all washed across Iraq, each leaving the ruins of their empire behind.
''Everything we know about this foundation of who we are comes from archeological research'' in Iraq, said John Russell, an archeologist at the Massachusetts College of Art.
If the 1991 war is any guide, protecting this country's archeological treasures will not prove easy. Far more severe than bomb damage was post-war looting, which flooded the international art market with priceless pieces of mankind's past.
''Private collectors refer to this as the `Golden Age' of collecting,'' said Russell, who has excavated at Nineveh. ''Judging from what you see [at auctions], dozens of sites were looted, and some of them by bulldozer.''
Archeological and other cultural sites are protected in wartime against damage and theft under international humanitarian law. The 1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property, updated in 1977, safeguards everything from architectural monuments to books, making their destruction in battle - or their deliberate use as part of the war effort - a war crime.
But in reality, the prosecution of such cases is rare, although some German officials were charged with cultural crimes in the Nuremberg trials after World War II.
During the Gulf War, US officials accused the Iraqis of deliberately moving military equipment, such as airplanes, close to archeological sites, in an effort to make them difficult to hit - an allegation Iraqi officials reject.
But American and Iraqi archeologists concur there was no need for the Iraqi military to move anything at all, given the proximity of history's ruins to military encampments in Iraq. ''There are military sites just everywhere in Iraq, just as there are archeological sites,'' Russell said.
In Baghdad, Muayad Said, who was Iraq's director general of antiquities during the Gulf War, angrily ticks off damage to archeological sites he blames on the US-led campaign - an assessment echoed by some American archeologists.
American bombing raids, he said, left 400 holes in one side of the ancient ziggurat of Ur, circa 2142 BC, in southern Iraq, as well as large bomb craters nearby. At the nearby unexcavated site of Tell al-Lahm, US troops dug trenches in what they thought were hills but were actually mounds containing ruins. Even sites not targeted suffer. Cracks have appeared in the largest single-span brick arch in the world at Ctesiphon, about 18 miles south of Baghdad. ''These sites are hit indirectly by the bombs, because of vibrations from the bombs nearby,'' said Said, who now works at the Ministry of Culture.
North of Baghdad in the northern no-fly zone, US bombing also took its toll, Iraqi archeologists say. One example is the former Assyrian city of Nimrud, whose sculptures and reliefs fill museums elsewhere around the world.
One of the reliefs that remains - a massive, 15-foot-high sculpture featuring a man's head, a bull's body, falcon's wings, and lion's paws - was damaged, officials say, in the 1991 bombing of a technical university just down the road.
Assessing such allegations is difficult, American archeologists say. While some archeologists have defied UN sanctions and traveled to Iraq and recorded damage, there has been no formal assessment.
After the war, archeologists appealed to the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization to come to Iraq and study questions of war-time damage and post-war looting. But the UN Security Council sanctions committee stood in their way.
''There is serious damage to standing sites, but whether it is from neglect, the UN sanctions, or bomb damage is hard to prove,'' Russell said.
If archeologists are worried about the damage a US-led war might pose to archeological sites, they are even more worried about the looting that might occur once the war is over.
In the chaos that accompanied uprisings in Iraq's north and south after the Gulf War, for example, eight regional museums were ransacked, Iraqi and American archeologists say. Their collections included priceless antiquities transferred from the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad, which had come under heavy bombing as US warplanes targeted a telecommunications facility across the street.
Some 4,000 museum artifacts were lost to private collectors and museums abroad. Just a handful of them have been returned. One, a tablet with cuneiform, the handwriting of the Sumerians, made its way to the British Museum, Iraqi officials say.
''I'm frightened of the war,'' Dr. Nawala Al-Mutawalli, director of the Iraqi National Museum, said from her dark office in the Baghdad gallery. ''But I'm really frightened about the looting and the damage that might occur.'' The museum was closed for eight years before reopening in 2000.
With war preparations quickening, a handful of experts is planning to evacuate collections, barricade doors, and tape windows. Former antiquities director Said has another suggestion: sleep at the Iraqi Museum and the archeological sites. During the 1991 war, he spent every night at the museum.
Thanassis Cambanis of the Globe Staff contributed to this report from Washington.
