You'd be forgiven for guessing that a man whose name is Donny George must be the owner of at least one electric guitar, and a wardrobe full of leather. He's not, though, he is an Iraqi - the Research Director of Antiquities at the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad. He's the man who accused American forces of committing the "Crime of the Century" by failing to guard his Museum when Baghdad fell. He said that failure allowed looters to steal or destroy 170,000 pieces from one of the largest and most important collections of artifacts from Mesopotamia - the Cradle of our Civilization.

Museum guards and other staff of the museum were reported by newspapers from all over the world to have wept as they told terrible stories of an orgy of looting and destruction by Iraqi mobs. The world was horrified by what they said, as one might have expected. Offers of help and messages of sympathy poured in to Baghdad. Police and Customs organisations around the world began making urgent efforts to trace and recover the lost items.

Two of the most senior cultural advisors to the United States Government in Washington resigned - in dismay, they said. But in a matter of weeks, Mr. George's story began to unravel. A senior American officer, assigned to assess the damage, said that on the basis of the information Mr. George and his staff had been able to give him within days of the events, the number of stolen artefacts might be closer to 35 than it was to 170,000.

There were complaints that the Museum Director and his staff were trying to hinder investigators looking into their claims. It became clear that the figure 170,000 related to the total number of artefacts in the Museum - and that therefore the number looted must be considerably smaller. A perspiring Mr. George went in front of the press again to say he'd been misunderstood on that point - but it was quite clear that he had not been misunderstood at all.

In the middle of June, 130 of the 185 staff of the state board of antiquities' office in Baghdad signed a petition demanding the resignation of its directors. They said they believed some of the thefts from the museum were an inside job. As if that wasn't enough, they accused Mr. George of having handed weapons out to them as US forces arrived in Baghdad, and of having ordered them to fight US soldiers.

Mr. George and other Directors did not bother for weeks to tell American forces, or the press, that many of the Museum's most valuable pieces had been locked away before the war, either in underground store rooms or in bank vaults, and had survived more or less intact. US military investigators discovered that keys from one director's safe went missing and had never been found.

Several employees said they found secure doors leading into the building unlocked, but not broken, after the first days of looting. A wall which concealed a secret entrance to underground store rooms, which only a handful of senior officials knew about, had been knocked down. Recently, Mr. George has taken to calling for American forces to shoot looters to death on sight, a little piece of drama that cynics will think is little more than a feeble attempt to re-establish his credentials as a serious member of the curatorial fraternity.

The investigation is still a work in progress - the final report will undoubtedly make thoroughly interesting reading. The true state of Iraq's historical holdings is still some distance from being established - it is hard to find an estimate that inspires any kind of confidence at all. It is certain that there has been some looting, and that some items have been destroyed, not only in Baghdad but in the Museum at Mosul as well.

Gangs of thieves have also been busy looting archaeological sites all over Iraq. But, as you might remember having read in a column I wrote some weeks before the war began, that has been going on in Iraq for years, at a pace said to have been accelerated at the end of the first Gulf War by United Nations-imposed sanctions.

At the least, the world can take comfort that Mr. George's accusation that the United States was complicit in the Crime of the Century - the looting of the entire holding of the Baghdad Museum - has turned out to be nonsense, a tale told by a man who is surely in the running for the title of Biggest Nitwit of the Century.

But the importance of Mesopotamia and its historical artefacts to human history cannot be exaggerated. Any loss at all is a blow to our ability to understand our own beginnings. As investigators worked in Iraq to quantify the damage done, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened an exhibition entitled Art of the First Cities - an extraordinary conglomeration of Mesopotamian art from museums and private collections all over the world, in some held in Russia, Japan, the Middle East, Pakistan, France, Germany, England and Greece. It is to continue through August 17.

Anyone who visits New York between now and then should try very hard to go and have a look - it seems unlikely that all these pieces will be assembled again in one place for many years. It was an extraordinary feat for Curator Joan Aruz and the staff of the Museum to assemble the collection, even as war began in Iraq.

Syria seems to have been the only casualty. Although the catalogue contains illustrations of 26 Syrian pieces, only three of them made it to the Met. While I was in New York last week, I tried to find out why that might have been. I tried first to contact Ms Aruz. She didn't return the call, perhaps out of reluctance to say anything that might make the situation worse. (It might also have been that she was somehow unaware of the importance of The Royal Gazette in world affairs, so perhaps I shouldn't jump to conclusions.)

I also spoke to a gentleman at the Syrian Embassy in Washington, but when he heard who I was and what I wanted, he told me the staff of the press office had gone back to Syria and was unlikely to return in the near future. I really didn't know what to make of that. Nonetheless, the exhibition does contain fabulous works of art, of which I'll mention two.

The Standard of Ur, from the British Museum's collection, is one of them. This is a rectangular wooden box, 18 inches long and eight inches in height, covered with panels of shell, lapis lazuli and red limestone on which are depicted aspects of a battle and its aftermath, and scenes from a banquet. It was found by the renowned British archaeologist, Sir Leonard Woolley, in the Royal Cemetery at Ur. The decayed remains of the box were lying in the death pit of a grave, quite close to the shoulder of one of the men whose grave it was.

Mr. Woolley concluded that he might have been holding the object on a pole, and so he called it a standard. That might have been a bit of a stab in the dark, but there is no doubt that it is a most beautiful object, whatever its use. The second object, known as the Great Lyre, or the Harp of Ur, was also taken by Sir Leonard from a tomb at Ur, where it was found resting on the heads of three women, probably musicians who were part of a death ritual.

The wooden part of the instrument had long ago disintegrated when it was found, but the archaeological team managed to make a cast of the cavities in the ground that the decaying wood left behind, allowing its reconstruction. The Lyre is decorated by a 14-inch high bull's head, made of gold, shell and lapis lazuli. The bull has a luxurious beard (don't ask) of 12 locks formed from pieces of lapis, set onto a silver backing. Plaques of lapis and shell cover the front of the sound box with what the catalogue calls "one of the most intriguing and skillfully executed Sumerian compositions known".

These two pieces are interesting enough on their own, but put them together with hundreds of others from collections around the world, and this is an exhibition really worth a visit. gshortoibl.bm.