Lost time: damage control in Iraq

Natural History, June, 2003 by John Malcolm Russell

EDITOR'S NOTE: The looting and destruction that have befallen ancient artifacts from the museums and archaeological sites of Iraq are a calamity for civilization. The photographs on these four pages depict only a handful of the glories that had been unearthed in recent centuries; it is too soon to say with any certainty whether the items pictured here are safe or missing--or whether, if missing, they will somehow yet turn up.

In February 2001, Natural History published the article "Robbing the Archaeological Cradle," by John Malcolm Russell, a professor of art history and archaeology at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and a leading authority on the antiquities of the Near East. Passages adapted from Russell's article, which provide cultural and historical context for the artifacts, are presented here (italic text). David Keys, a freelance journalist based in Middlesex, England, who specializes in archaeology, has contributed a report about the looting and the early responses to it.

Called Mesopotamia by the Greeks, and variously Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia, and Assyria by its own ancient inhabitants, Iraq has an excellent claim to be the cradle of Western civilization. The emergence of complex communities was accompanied by developments such as writing, the wheel, irrigation agriculture, cities, monumental architecture, state-sponsored warfare, organized religion, written laws, kingship, a wealthy class, imperialism, centrally organized production of hand-crafted goods, and large-scale trade. The first eleven chapters of Genesis are set, by and large, in southern Iraq, in the land of Shinar (Babylonia). Eden, the Sumerian word meaning "steppe," was the name of a district in Sumer, or southern Babylonia. Mesopotamian royal gardens, notably the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, may have inspired the story of the Garden of Eden.

Prior to the First World War, when the area that is now Iraq was part of the Ottoman Empire, excavations by foreign archaeologists were carried out under permits issued in Istanbul. Mid-nineteenth-century excavators' were allowed to export whatever they wished. That is how the British Museum and the Louvre acquired the bulk of their renowned Mesopotamian collections. Stung by the empires loss of irreplaceable treasures, and anxious to establish Istanbul as a center for the study of ancient art, the Ottoman statesman Hamdi Bey founded the Archaeological Museum of Istanbul in 1881. Thereafter, foreign archaeologists were obliged to share their discoveries with the museum.

After the First World War, Iraq became a separate state, initially administered by Britain. With the energetic guidance of a British official, Gertrude Bell, who advocated that antiquities be retained by the country of origin, the Iraq Museum was founded in 1923 in Baghdad. A decade later, Iraq began to take charge of its own patrimony. A law, enacted in 1936 decreed that all the country's antiquities more than 200 years old were the property of the state; amendments in the 1970s eliminated the Ottoman tradition of dividing finds with their excavators. The Iraq Museum, in the heart of downtown Baghdad, now began to accumulate the most important collection of Mesopotamian antiquities in the world....

At the time of the 1991 Gulf War, archaeology was undergoing an extraordinary revival in Iraq. Dozens of foreign and Iraqi teams were working at an unprecedented rate.... When Iraq invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990, virtually all archaeological activity ceased, and the war and subsequent imposition of UN sanctions have left Iraq's patrimony in peril. Not only is almost no money available for the preservation of antiquities, but some Iraqi citizens, squeezed between ruinous inflation and shortages of basic necessities, have turned to looting and selling artifacts from excavated and unexcavated sites and even from museums.

RELATED ARTICLE: Aftershocks.

David Keys

A round the world, the initial response to the looting of Iraq's internationally important museums and archaeological sites was, in the catchphrase of the moment, shock and awe. Early reports claimed near-total destruction of the collections in Iraq's National Museum in Baghdad, numbering some 170,000 ancient artifacts. Three weeks after the looting began, paralysis continued to dog the military reaction. Meanwhile, however, an international roster of organizations and scholars had begun to move toward coordinated action.

Subsequent estimates put the losses at roughly 15 percent of the collections, either smashed, damaged, or looted. Despite the disaster in the museum, virtually all 80,000 of the institution's cuneiform tablets appear to be safe, as do most of the precious Mesopotamian cylinder seals. The losses remain devastating, but they fall far short of complete ruination. What is more, in response to appeals by Muslim religious leaders, some of the stolen objects are gradually being returned.

By the end of April, an alliance of leading Western museums and universities had announced a multimillion-dollar initiative to provide expertise and funding for the repair and conservation efforts. But the basic police work--sealing borders, hunting for thieves, tracking down illicit Iraqi antiquities that reach Western art markets--had been left to governments. Cultural institutions could do little more than beg political leaders to devote resources to an effective, aggressive recovery effort.