Invaders from the south and west seize the great cities on the Tigris and Euphrates. A despots capital falls to sudden assault. A warlord from Tikrit vows to rally the Muslim world. This weeks news? No: 2000 B.C., 539 B.C and 1187.As American troops roll through the remnants of Saddam Husseins crumbling forces, they will pass reminders hard to recognize, perhaps, but omnipresent that ours is not the first army to seize Mesopotamia, the ancient land between the rivers. Many of the hallmarks of our civilization, if not of civilization itself, were created in the land that Saddam has ruled since 1975. Near the oil fields of Basra rose some of the worlds first cities, more than 5,000 years ago: Ur, Lagash, Uruk, Eridu. It was when Uruk flourished around 3300 B.C. that some of the earliest surviving examples of writing were made, wedge shapes pressed into clay tablets. The style of writing called cuneiform preserved in the long-dead Sumerian and Akkadian languages the myths and history of a people who lived in a world we would recognize, in its essentials: a culture that alternately traded and warred with its neighbors, relied on a complex law code to settle disputes (marriage contracts and liability agreements have survived), and looked to religion to give a sense of the past and an understanding of how the world worked. Among the surviving mythological texts are passages startlingly reminiscent of the Bible, including a flood epic that predates the Old Testaments composition by 2,000 years. Two ancient civilizations in modern Iraq laid foundation stones in the western tradition of civilization, said Richard Weigel, head of the History Department at Western Kentucky University. The Sumerians and Akkadians, whose civilization faded from history almost 4,000 years ago, not only were among the first to develop writing, but made the first steps into literature and higher mathematics. Their hexadecimal counting system (based on 60 instead of 100) survives even now in our time and geometric measurements: 60 seconds to a minute, 60 minutes to an hour, 360 degrees in a circle, Weigel said. One of the most famous legal documents is the comprehensive law code of Hammurabi, one of the early kings of Babylon, who reigned from 1792 to 1750 B.C. His code stands out because it was discovered earlier than others, and is so well-preserved, but drew on far older Sumerian laws that have since come to light, Weigel said. The notion of personal responsibility was paramount in these ancient law codes, anticipating modern concepts of liability and detailing hundreds of legal situations, he said. Saddam Husseins mania for statues and self-aggrandizing monuments would be nothing new to the Assyrians, who built an empire centering on the city of Nineveh in northern Iraq. Mighty Assyrian monarchs like Sargon II and Assurbanipal left monumental images of themselves, and perhaps the first propaganda: carved monuments depicting the gruesome torture and death of Assyrias foes. Babylon was once the greatest city in the world, and rose to prominence twice once under Hammurabi and his contemporaries, and then a thousand years later under Neo-Babylonian rulers including Nebuchadnezzar, whose name appears in the Bible. Indeed, the Biblical book of Daniel is set in the very end of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, when the armies of Cyrus the Persian overthrew Nabonidus in 539 B.C.With the rise of Islam in the early seventh century, the ancient round city of Baghdad, just north of the modern site, was built. It dates to the most brilliant period of the Abbasid Caliphate, when Haroun al-Rashid ruled an empire stretching from Spain to India. It is in this glittering period that most of the fantastic tales of the Arabian Nights are set, and in this time the Muslim world far excelled the west in art, architecture, math, medicine and other sciences. Heavy fighting was reported last week at the Muslim holy sites of Karbala and Najaf, the significance of which comes from the major split in modern Islam between Sunni and Shiite. The branches split in an argument over who was the rightful Caliph, or successor to the Prophet Muhammad. The Shiite claimant, named Hussein, fought the Sunni faction at Karbala in 680. He lost, and he and nearly his entire family were slaughtered. Claimant Husseins father Ali had been murdered in 661, and was entombed in the nearby city of Najaf. Both of those sites are still important to Shiites, who make up about 60 percent of Iraqs population, said John Long, head of the Philosophy and Religion Department at Western and a specialist on Islam. Alis gold-domed tomb and attached mosque date from the ninth century, and have made Najaf a center of learning and Shiite revivalism, Long said. It is considered to be a very special city, and I believe thats the prime reason why, he said. Najaf and Karbala are on a common Shiite pilgrimage route, Long said. Last week, the U.S. Army drove Iraqi paramilitaries out of Najaf, without damaging the tomb. But Friday afternoon, a Shiite leader was shot and stabbed to death in the mosque itself. He had been urging residents to cooperate with U.S. troops. Saddam Hussein has spent vast sums to restore the monuments of Babylon, fancying himself a modern Nebuchadnezzar, but there is another figure in history who he emulates: Saladin, the Muslim leader during the Third Crusade who briefly attempted to reunify a fracturing Islamic world to repel the Christian invaders. Saddam like Saladin was born in the town of Tikrit; he draws heavily on 900-year-old rhetoric to rally Arabs against modern Crusaders from the United States. The remaining Iraqi troops were massing around Tikrit on Friday, apparently preparing for a last stand. But the parallels are not exact. Saladin was honorable and merciful, respected by even his fiercest foes. And he was, ironically, a Kurd a member of the northern Iraqi ethnic group now fighting beside American troops to overthrow Saddams regime. For that matter, very little of the Crusades took place in Iraq, said Rick Keyser, assistant professor of history at Western, who is teaching a course on the Crusades. When the First Crusade was launched in 1098, they found not Arabs ruling the Mideast but Turks, who had reduced the Arab Caliph to a figurehead in 1055.Since the Turks only recently took over, the Muslim world was divided between Sunni and Fatimid factions; thats why comparatively small armies of Crusaders were relatively successful, at least for a while, Keyser said. They fought against each other all the time, he said. Indeed, once established in Christian principalities in what is now Israel, Lebanon and Syria, the Crusaders sometimes hired out as mercenaries to local Muslim states or hired friendly Muslim rulers to assist them against their own Crusader rivals. Arabs made up the settled population of the towns, but the Crusaders mostly fought Turks who are now Americas NATO allies. In the current war, massive firepower poses a danger to crumbling monuments of brick and ancient artifacts of clay. But the U.S. military has promised to limit damage to such sites whenever possible. We faced the same problem in 1991, said Ron Veenker, partially retired professor of philosophy and religion at Western, who is an expert on Sumerian and Babylonian religion. It was actually scarier in 1991, because it was or first experience with this kind of thing. One of the worlds great sites, archeologically, is a city called Ur, Veenker said. Part of a ziggurat a multi-stepped temple platform found in every ancient Mesopotamian city, and which may have inspired the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel still stood in the ruins of Ur. During the first Gulf War, Saddam parked several MiG fighter jets in the shadow of the ziggurat, he said. Destroying those planes was a high priority for the U.S. But what would happen to a priceless artifact built of baked brick?All of my archaeological friends that do archaeology in Iraq, or did, were very concerned about that, Veenker said. Veenkers friend, Paul Zimansky, an archaeologist at Boston University, persuaded a doctor friend of his to make a side trip from his volunteer humanitarian mission to check on the ziggurat. He found that the ancient structure had been pocked by .50-caliber machine-gun fire and small rockets, but was essentially intact, Veenker said. I havent heard any news about the current incursion, but my guess is that the greater damage has already been done, and were not going to see any serious fallout from this, he said. If the damage done to Iraqi antiquities was limited to a few more bullet holes in buildings, it could be accepted, Veenker said. But the real danger is to small artifacts, the meat and drink of modern archaeology. The great surprise to all of us … was what happened to the antiquities of Iraq after 1991, he said. Figuring that the allies would bomb Baghdad, Saddam moved many of the nations great treasures out of the National Museum of Iraq to smaller sites in outlying towns. In the chaos that followed the American invasion and withdrawal, Iraqis looted those museums and began selling ancient artifacts on the black market. Go to eBay, and you can find very valuable things, Veenker said stolen from Iraqi museums a decade ago. When Saddam held power over Iraqi Kurdistan, the northern third of the country, he posted Republican Guards to protect major archaeological sites, many of which had never been excavated. But the guards were withdrawn during the first Gulf War and not allowed to return; the U.S. promoted an autonomous Kurdish region and established a no-fly zone to protect it. That opened the sites for massive grave robbing, Veenker said. The most alarming thing is that newly unearthed items are turning up on the antiquities market, with no record of where or when they came from. Taken without systematic excavation, they cant be studied in context with the items and buildings that surround them and determining how one item relates to another is one of the most important goals of modern archaeology. Last week, Veenker signed a petition to UNESCO United Nation Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization urging the U.S. military to take special care around museums, libraries and historic sites, and to guard them from damage and pillage. But in a nation where one government has collapsed and the new administrators are still asserting control, petitions apparently matter little. Shortly after Veenker spoke to the Daily News, he called back, having seen a news report that mobs were looting the National Museum.