Story highlights Sturt Manning: Video shows ISIS destroying apparent antiquities; they reflect rich history that is alternative to group's barbaric nihilism

He says it's key to teach importance of archaeology everywhere in world. Antiquities are the text of the past that helps define our future.

Sturt W. Manning is director of the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies and chair of the Department of Classics at Cornell University. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) Confucius said: "Study the past if you would define the future." In Iraq, the past is glorious and long.

This is where the world's first cities were built and where writing and organized government were first developed more than 5,000 years ago. This is the land that gave the world its first great literary work -- the Epic of Gilgamesh, king of the city of Uruk -- over 1,000 years before Homer, and over 2,000 years before Christ.

Sturt Manning

ISIS, like so many iconoclastic extremist groups through history, seeks to destroy the record of the past. In the past week, video has circulated showing neatly dressed figures wielding rather new-looking sledgehammers and destroying archaeological objects in the Mosul Museum.

The spectacle would be ridiculous and pathetic if it were not so tragic.

Although there are suggestions that some objects destroyed are only copies, many are said to be unique and irreplaceable objects that had survived thousands of years -- until now.