Iraq's cornerstone of civilisation

It's not every day you look in your wardrobe and find a unique 4,000-year-old piece of history that belongs to Saddam Hussein. Paul Morrison was helping to move some furniture at his aunt's home last month when he happened across the inscribed mud brick from ancient Babylon. It was, to say the least, a rare find – certainly for a town-house in 21st century Cambridge.

But almost as remarkable was its discovery by someone who knew instantly what it was – and whose careful handling ensured it stayed in one piece until it reached a museum.

"My aunt was having some central heating put in and the plumber needed the wardrobe moving," said Paul. "In the wardrobe was a cardboard box, the size of a biscuit tin. I was amazed to find a mud brick inside, covered in cuneiform."

The Akkadian inscription reads: duiger Dun-gi nita kalga lugal Ur ki-ma lugal Ki-En I-gi-Ki-uri-a – "the divine Dungi, mighty man, King of Ur, King of Sumer". A piece of paper found with the brick revealed it to be from a partition wall of the Royal Tombs discovered in 1930 at Ur – the so-called "cradle of civilisation" – about 400 miles south of modern Baghdad.

The note was written by Leonard Woolley, who led several expeditions to Ur and brought the brick back when explorers were still allowed to do that sort of thing, in the early Thirties. And the fact that the brick arrived from Iraq before the Second World War means that, even if Saddam didn't currently have more pressing priorities, he cannot now claim it back.

"Woolley gave the brick to Rev Oswald Lukyn-Williams, who between the wars had been an evangelical missionary to the Holy Land," said Paul. "He gave it to my cousin just before he died.

"But Oswald's subject was Hebrew so I don't think either of the brick's custodians realised the significance of it."

But Paul did – thanks entirely to his Open University studies. "Because I was taking AT 308, the Cities and Technology course, I knew I was looking at something either very old or a clever fake," he adds. "I immediately appreciated it was very fragile and vulnerable and walked it to the local Fitzwilliam Museum. There are a lot of speed bumps on the Cambridge roads so I didn't even risk a cab – it would simply have crumbled."

Disintegration seems to have been the fate of so many other, similar pieces taken at the time from Ur that the Leicester student believes his discovery could be the last remaining such brick in existence. Museum experts believe it may have survived only because it was wrapped in another historical artefact, a 1930s Boots paper bag, and stowed away in a dark cupboard for 70 years.

The excavation of Ur, which according to Jewish, Moslem and Christian teachings was the birthplace of Abraham, has yielded many historical secrets.

The archaeological treasures found along the banks of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in ancient Mesopotamia offer many clues as to how modern civilisation began. But 20 years of war in Iraq has meant many of the treasures are lost forever.

During the 1991 Gulf War the 2,400-year-old city ziggurat (palace) was damaged by shrapnel from US bombs. An American raid on a Baghdad telephone exchange during the same conflict damaged the next-door Iraq museum and 4,000 priceless artefacts from the country's Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian and Islamic eras were stolen by looters – who were able to get in because the museum's usual guards had been redeployed for the war effort.

US military commanders have pledged during the present conflict to honour the 1954 Hague Convention, which prohibits the bombing of religious or culturally significant sites. Even so, the as yet untold collateral damage by the allied bombing raids on Baghdad and other cities mean Paul's find could become even rarer.

"As a text it is one of the oldest extant memorials, " he says. "As a display item it is almost unique because it does not need to be repatriated.

"And of course," he adds, "it looks very unlikely that there will be many archaeological artefacts on loan from Iraq in the near future."