start of 1991 and again during the American invasion in 2003. Miraculously, the vault survived both bombings, but the flooding caused by the second bombing irreparably damaged many of the objects. In addition, the more mundane objects from the excavations, which were kept at the Iraq Museum and the Mosul Museum, were looted during the war and the whereabouts of many of these items remain unknown. From April 10–12, 2003, the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH), which is located in the same complex as and administers the Iraq National Museum, was looted. This incident was a grievous destruction of institutional and cultural memory, in addition, to the unimaginable loss of many archeological finds. Looters destroyed equipment and objects before burning records, during an attempt to set the building on fire. In the aftermath of the looting, programs such as the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) funded the reconstruction of destroyed information and manuscripts. One of the projects they funded led to the republication of the original manuscript on the Queen's Tombs written by Hussein. The original report had been printed in a discolored and inadequate format due to the lack of access to printing resources caused by the sanctions in 2000. The reprint allowed for the addition of new information, past corrections along with further detail, and drawings. Modern looting and trafficking continue to pose a serious threat to the preservation and safekeeping of the site and its objects. In 2010, Christie's New York, a prominent private auction house, withdrew a pair of earrings that were for sale when it was discovered that they were a trafficked part of the archeological finds from Nimrud's royal tombs. Reception The discovery of the tombs originally received substantial coverage, including a full-color spread in Time Magazine, but the attention drifted with the Gulf Wars on the horizon. Additionally, the original reports were largely in Arabic and local to Iraq, which limited Western access to them due to an international embargo. Thus, the queens’ tombs have received limited academic attention. The Nimrud Tombs are “one of the most important archaeological finds of the second half of the twentieth century,” but the chaos of war and the language barrier has resulted in the tombs often being overlooked and underappreciated in the West. The tombs Overview The Tombs were built under the residential wing of the Northwest palace by Assurnasirpal II and his