At the temple of Ninmakh, the Sumerian mother goddess, Iraqi archaeologists are using 7,000-year-old techniques to protect the monument, and the rest of the ancient city of Babylon, from salt seeping into its heart and destroying it from within.
With carefully made desalinated mudbricks, they are repairing the ruins of the UNESCO World Heritage site, which are being corroded by the intrusion of increasingly salty groundwater - a problem linked to prolonged droughts and soil erosion in climate-vulnerable Iraq.
"Salty groundwater is our greatest enemy," said Ammar al-Taee, an archeologist with the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities who oversees the project and calls himself wryly "the guardian of Babylon".
