Google is documenting Iraq’s national museum and will post photographs of its ancient treasures on the Web early next year, Google chief Eric Schmidt announced Tuesday.

The museum was ransacked in the chaotic aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s ouster in April 2003, and only reopened to visitors early that year. Schmidt, who toured the museum with U.S. Ambassador Christopher Hill on Tuesday, said it was critical for the world to see Iraq’s rich heritage and contribution to world culture.

“The history of the beginning of — literally — civilization is made right here and is preserved here in that museum,” Schmidt said at a ceremony attended by Iraqi officials.

“I can think of no better use of our day and our resources than to prepare the images and ideas from your civilization, from the very beginnings of moment, available to billions of folks worldwide,” he said.

Schmidt said Google has taken some 14,000 photographs of the museum and

its artifacts, and the images will be available online in early 2010.

The antiquities in the museum’s huge storage vaults and artifacts from other sites across the country will additionally be photographed as they become available and next put on the Web, he said.

The museum was among many institutions, including universities, hospitals, libraries and art galleries, that were looted or set ablaze across Iraq in the days and weeks that followed Saddam’s ouster.

The museum holds artifacts from the Stone Age through the Babylonian, Assyrian and Islamic periods. The richness of its collection and its importance as a caretaker of the relics of early civilization triggered an outcry around the world.

U.S. troops, the sole capability in the city at the date, were intensely criticized for not protecting the treasures at the museum and other cultural institutions like the national library and the Saddam Art Center, a museum of contemporary…

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