Robbing the Archaeological Cradle

Natural History, Feb, 2001 by John Malcolm Russell

At Kalhu, Layard excavated the site of the palace belonging to King Tiglath-pileser III (reigned 744-727 B.C.). The building had been dismantled by one of the king's successors, and its sculptured wall slabs stacked neatly in preparation for recarving. Recently, many of the slabs were stolen and cut up into smaller pieces, which are now appearing on the international art market. The fate of more than a hundred pounds of gold jewelry and other fabulous artifacts that Iraqi archaeologists excavated just before the Gulf War from the burial sites of four Assyrian queens remains unknown.

The site of Telloh ("the mound of tablets"), excavated by French archaeologists beginning in 1877, was the cult city Girsu in the ancient city-state of Lagash. Among the cuneiform records found there is an inscribed stele (upright stone slab) from about 2500 B.C. that constitutes the earliest known documentation of state-sponsored warfare. Lagash was competing with neighboring Umma for irrigation rights, and the dispute was settled by armies that rode into battle in war wagons, among the earliest documented wheeled vehicles. After the Gulf War, Telloh was apparently plundered, because previously unknown temple records from the site appear regularly for sale on the Internet.

Lagash's rival, Umma, unexcavated before the war, recently fell prey to wholesale looting, resulting in large numbers of tablets from the site being offered on the antiquities market. In response, the Iraqi Department of Antiquities and Heritage initiated its own excavations at Umma and last year discovered a monumental palace or temple and a huge cemetery, described by the excavators as "a city of graves"--all dating from about 2500 B.C. Perhaps a stele with Umma's version of the war with Lagash will eventually come to light.

During the bombing of Baghdad, the Iraq Museum was closed and its holdings dispersed for safety to the regional museums and the vaults of the Central Bank in Baghdad. The unanticipated sequel was that the bank was bombed, and during the uprisings that followed the cease-fire, at least seven of the regional museums were looted. The full extent of the losses is not yet known; however, some 4,000 objects have been reported missing from the regional museums. Last year the Iraq Museum reopened, but it may take years to evaluate and conserve the collections. Rebuilding the professional staff, diminished by hardships and cutbacks, is a major challenge, because the education of the upcoming generation has been disrupted.

Arguing that Iraq has not fulfilled the terms imposed by the cease-fire, the United States has consistently used its UN Security Council veto to maintain the sanctions. As a result, over the years, most kinds of nonhumanitarian assistance to Iraq have been blocked, including a planned UNESCO mission to assess damage and even a request to import photographic supplies to reproduce images of stolen artifacts for Interpol. The Department of Antiquities and Heritage has managed to protect and document a few major sites and to reopen the Iraq Museum, but for the most part, we are witnessing the destruction of a very promising past. Once gone, it can never be recovered.