Downing Street has asked a leading academic from Britain’s national archaeological collection in Bloomsbury to draw up a list of antiquities that may have been looted from the Baghdad museum so that details can be distributed to soldiers patrolling the borders of Iraq.

Iraq’s priceless national collection traced the origins of modern civilisation in ancient Mesopotamia — the birthplace of writing, cities, codified law, mathematics, medicine and astronomy. Its virtual destruction in little more than a day of lawlessness is seen as a disaster comparable to the 5th-century destruction of the library at Alexandria, or an earlier sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258.

The pillage of the collection is considered to be not just Iraq’s loss but the world’s, and has distressed Western archaeologists and historians as much as those in Iraq. One — Professor John Russell, of the Massachusetts College of Art, in Boston — broke down in tears yesterday as he described the treasures lost.

There are hopes, however, that at least some of the collection may be recovered if the looters can be intercepted before they leave Iraq.

The United States will take a “leading role” in protecting Iraqi antiquities and will help to repair damage to artefacts and the National Museum of Iraq, which was looted last week, Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, said.

“The United States will be working with a number of individuals and organisations not only to secure the facility, but to recover that which has been taken and also to participate in restoring that which has been broken.

“The United States understands its obligations and will be taking a leading role with respect to antiquities in general, but this museum in particular.”

Ndeye Fall, the Unesco director in Amman, Jordan, said: “From what the museum officials said, there are about 170,000 items that have been looted or destroyed. That has to be assessed. As soon as Unesco is in a position to get inside Iraq, we are going to have an assessment team do so.”

Last Friday a mob looted the National Museum in Baghdad, the largest in Iraq, amid a breakdown in civil authority that followed the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime two days earlier. Damage was also reported in other museums.

John Curtis, the British Museum’s Keeper of the Department of the Ancient Near East, was asked yesterday to provide information about treasures from the cradle of ancient civilisation, the site of the fabled cities of Ur, Babylon and Nineveh.

Dr Curtis, who has directed excavations at eight different sites in Iraq on behalf of the British Museum, noted that humanitarian concerns are uppermost at the moment, but that there are also extreme worries about the threat to Iraq’s important archaeological heritage.

Rumours were circulating yesterday that some of the treasures had already been seen in Paris, just as archaeologists and historians had warned governments before the war. An extensive network of smugglers has long been operating in Iraq, a legacy of the first Gulf War.

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