Update
    Posted on Sun, Apr. 13, 2003

Looters pillage ancient history
Archaeologists fear the worst after mobs raid Museum of Iraq
By MIKE TONER
COX NEWS SERVICE

ATLANTA - Iraqi mobs looted priceless antiquities from Baghdad's premier cultural history museum on Friday, turning archaeologists' worst nightmares into stark reality.

A dozen looters roamed undisturbed among broken and overturned statues that littered the ground floor of the sprawling National Museum of Iraq, according to Agence France-Presse. Two men were seen hauling away an ancient door frame. Empty wooden crates were scattered across the floor.

The museum housed more than 100,000 artifacts spanning 8,000 years, including irreplaceable sculptures, inscribed tablets and carved reliefs from a half-dozen cultures, including the Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian empires. Upstairs, portions of the museum seemed to have been spared, and there was hope that the museum's 30 senior archaeologists had moved the most important collections to safety before the war.

Word of what is likely to be reckoned as one of the greatest cultural disasters in recent Middle Eastern history only came to light on Saturday, as museum officials reached foreign journalists.

A full accounting of what has been lost may take weeks or months.

Looters also plundered Mosul University's library, with its rare ancient manuscripts. The library was ransacked despite appeals broadcast from the minarets of the city's mosque to halt the destruction.

Archaeologists worry there is more to come.

"If these mobs start going into other museums and looting them, the loss will be horrendous," said Zainab Bahraini, an Iraqi-born professor of Mesopotamian art and archaeology at Columbia University. "Many of these pieces will disappear into international markets and never be seen again."

Bombing is reported to have damaged museums in Mosul and Tikrit and a museum at Baghdad's al-Zohur Palace, the former residence of Iraq's Hashemite kings.

Before the war, archaeologists gave U.S. military planners a list of 4,000 sites in Iraq that deserved protection. A full appraisal of how they fared may take months to compile.

Major ruins in harm's way include the ancient city of Nineveh, just across the Tigris from Mosul, which fell to Kurdish and American troops on Friday; the site of ancient Babylon, near Hillah, the scene of another intense battle last week; and the ancient city of Ur, which coalition troops occupied early in the war.

Officials at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Qatar say efforts to avoid damage to cultural sites have been frustrated by Iraq's positioning of military forces and equipment at many sensitive sites, including the Ali Mosque in Najaf and the Mother of All Battles Mosque in Baghdad.

Iraq's antiquities have, of course, survived invading armies for thousands of years. Archaeologists are less worried about wartime effects than what the postwar collapse of order will mean.

"The vacuum of power and the difficult economic environment that now exists in Iraq is a classic recipe for looting," says DePauw University law professor Patty Gerstenblith, a spokeswoman for the Archaeological Institute of America.

The institute has repeatedly urged all parties in conflict to protect Iraqi archaeological sites and monuments.

"This is not merely a matter of protecting Iraqi culture," said United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Director General Koichiro Matsuura. "As the cradle of civilizations that go back thousands of years, Iraq has many treasures and sites that are part of the heritage of all mankind."

"Until 1990, Iraq has an enviable record of protecting its antiquities and cultural heritage," said McGuire Gibson, professor of Mesopotamian archaeology at the University of Chicago.

However, in the unrest and economic slide that followed the wake of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, more than 4,000 items vanished from Iraqi museums.

Unknown numbers of others were looted from the country's archaeological sites. Many of the items turned up for sale on street corners in other Middle Eastern countries, on Internet auction sites and in the high-end art markets of London, Berlin and New York.

"If the war itself did little damage, the economic embargo against Iraq imposed by the United Nations has been devastating," said Gibson.

Gibson said severe cutbacks in Iraq's museum staffing and guards at archaeological sites led to increased looting. He said recent years have witnessed, "large-scale smuggling to feed the voracious international antiquities market."

Saddam Hussein recognized the value of the country's cultural history and took steps to protect it. In 1998, the government executed 10 people for chopping off the head of a winged bull from the Assyrian empire, a piece that dates to 2500 B.C.

As war approached in March, the Iraqi Antiquities Department was seeking help from Interpol in retrieving 900 stolen artifacts that had been smuggled to Germany.

"There is no doubt that this occurred in part because the Iraqi people were having such a difficult time that they would sell anything," said John Malcolm Russell, a specialist in Iraqi archaeology at the Massachusetts College of Arts. "But if there were not a market for these pieces, it would not have happened.

"This is not merely Iraqi cultural heritage, it's our heritage too," he says. "It belongs to the whole world. It's part of a story that we all want preserved."



    ~ Leah Enkidu

The really disturbing thing is...
    that the Bush Administration should have known this would happen.

It happened in the last Gulf War. Mere months after the end of the war, this stuff started showing up in dealers' show rooms and auction houses. There is a well oiled underground network of smugglers specializing in looted artifacts. The people there know this. They are offered, what is to them, huge amounts of money for these artifacts and manuscripts. after years of oppression and deprivation, they are all too easy prey for this incentive and they will cave to those desires to feed and clothe their families.

It would have been of negligible cost to have parked a tank of two and 20 to 30 troops around the museums to at least discourage if not prevent the looting. Nope. They are not going to do it. Rummy is going to tut-tut about the "untidiness" and do diddly squat.

Of more than passing interest is the fact that at the same time the administration was revving up for the war, they were lobbied by a group know as the American Council for Cultural Policy. This is a group run by collectors and dealers. They want restrictions lifted on the import of artifacts from Iraq, claiming that the current Iraqi law is "overly retentive" of their national heritage. How terribly inconvenient for them and how nicely convenient is the current situation.

Let's just hope that eBay has the balls to refuse listings of the most obvious thefts.


    ~ Aulus Sergius

Very sad....
   

The following is excerpted from the morning's Explorator. Some of these artifacts survived war, famine, flood for thousands of years, not to mention surviving Saddamm Hussein and the Ba'ath Party for decades. They are priceless, irreplaceable testaments to the past of Western heritage and Mid Eastern history.

From Explorator (with a few--ahem--editorial comments from your truly, duly noted):

The major news of the week, of course, is that the Baghdad Museum was looted this week ... here's various coverage:

Looters ransack Baghdad museum

A civilisation torn to pieces

Iraq National Museum Treasures Plundered

Looters Ransack Baghdad's Antiquities Museum

Looters steal Iraq's heritage

Looters destroyed what war did not (Rather says it all--My note)

.. and the museum in Mosul:

Mosul descends into chaos as even museum is looted

.. and Basra (mentioned only in passing):

In Pursuit of Answers, and Loot, in Basra

.. somewhat disturbing is the last paragraphs of this one:

Tearing Loose as a New Power Arrives at the Ruins of Babylon

.. and similarly disturbing are the implications of the information in this one:

They came, they saw, they went sight-seeing

Perhaps even more disturbing is the following tidbit, which appeared *before* the museums were a target (And if the implications of this doesn't make one sick, not much will--my note):

US accused of plans to loot Iraqi antiques

.. and this one (guess who isn't a signatory to the Hague Convention?):

Britain and US have not ratified site protection treaty (UGH--my note)

.. as mentioned before, a good place to monitor this sort of thing is Francis Deblauwe's site:

The 2003 Iraq War & Archaeology

Al-Ahram has a couple of good items -- somewhat late -- on the threat (the last one is by Zahi Hawass):

The cradle of civilisation

A heritage under siege

History up in flames

(As I said when the Taliban et. al. blew up the Bamiyan statues, perhaps one can be relieved that the violence is directed against objects rather than living beings, but it is still a tragedy.--my note)
    ~ Marie Siduri

EBAY!!!!
    I hope it doesn't come to that, that some system can be set up where it is more rewarding to return objects than to keep or sell the objects.

Can't think of what that might be at the moment, though.
    ~ Marie Siduri

Who is behind the looting?
    From the Herld Tribune written before the looting:

US accused of plans to loot Iraqi antiques
By Liam McDougall, Arts Correspondent


FEARS that Iraq's heritage will face widespread looting at the end of the Gulf war have been heightened after a group of wealthy art dealers secured a high-level meeting with the US administration.
It has emerged that a coalition of antiquities collectors and arts lawyers, calling itself the American Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP), met with US defence and state department officials prior to the start of military action to offer its assistance in preserving the country's invaluable archaeological collections.

The group is known to consist of a number of influential dealers who favour a relaxation of Iraq's tight restrictions on the ownership and export of antiquities. Its treasurer, William Pearlstein, has described Iraq's laws as 'retentionist' and has said he would support a post-war government that would make it easier to have antiquities dispersed to the US.

Before the Gulf war, a main strand of the ACCP's campaigning has been to persuade its government to revise the Cultural Property Implementation Act in order to minimise efforts by foreign nations to block the import into the US of objects, particularly antiques. News of the group's meeting with the government has alarmed scientists and archaeologists who fear the ACCP is working to a hidden agenda that will see the US authorities ease restrictions on the movement of Iraqi artefacts after a coalition victory in Iraq.

Professor Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn, leading Cambridge archaeologist and director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, said: 'Iraqi antiquities legislation protects Iraq. The last thing one needs is some group of dealer-connected Americans interfering. Any change to those laws would be absolutely monstrous. '
A wave of protest has also come from the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), which says any weakening of Iraq's strict antiquities laws would be 'disastrous'. President Patty Gerstenblith said: 'The ACCP's agenda is to encourage the collecting of antiquities through weakening the laws of archaeologically-rich nations and eliminate national ownership of antiquities to allow for easier export. '

The ACCP has caused deep unease among archaeologists since its creation in 2001. Among its main members are collectors and lawyers with chequered histories in collecting valuable artefacts, including alleged exhibitions of Nazi loot. They denied accusations of attempting to change Iraq's treatment of archaeological objects. Instead, they said at the January meeting they offered 'post-war technical and financial assistance', and 'conservation support'.



    ~ gaius Ulpius

Some good news?
    Today's news on the Iraq antiquities sound a bit more promising. Two articles say that both the US and UN are making noises about repatriating/saving "priceless" artefacts which have been looted from Iraq.



Criticized for not preventing the pillage of Iraqi antiquities, the United States vowed Monday to take a "leading role" in protecting artifacts and repair damage to the National Museum of Iraq which was looted last week.

In addition, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Washington was working with the United Nations, the European Union and Interpol to prevent stolen objects from leaving Iraq and warned thieves that they would face prosecution.

"This kind of looting causes irretrievable loss to the understanding of history and to the efforts of Iraqi and international scholars to study and gain new insight into our past," Powell said in a statement.
US: Will Restore Looted Iraq Artifacts



UNESCO will send a team of experts to Iraq to assess the damage that looting has caused to the country's vast holdings of priceless antiquities.

The U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization said the team would study the conditions of museums and historical sites, identify ways of restoring them and find potential donors.

"The recent experience of UNESCO ... shows that culture can play a key role in the consolidation of the peace process," Director-General Koichiro Matsuura said in a statement Tuesday.

UNESCO said the team would travel "when conditions permit." About 30 experts were to meet Thursday for an initial assessment at UNESCO headquarters in Paris.

After the fall of Saddam Hussein's government last week, looters stole and smashed priceless archaeological treasures from Iraq's National Museum. The museum in the northern city of Mosul also was pillaged, and Baghdad's Islamic Library, which holds one of the oldest surviving copies of the Quran, was set afire on Monday.
UN experts to assess damage to Iraqi relics


Worringly the above article quotes US Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks as saying "I don't think anyone anticipated that the riches of Iraq would be looted by the people of Iraq". Which I do find very unbelievable.
    ~ Sulpicia Lepidina Flavius

Lost Treasures Website
    The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago now hosts a website on the lost treasures of Iraq .
    ~ Anticus Cornelius

Excellent Post Anticus Cornelius!
    Thank you for posting that site, it is wonderful!!
    ~ Leah Enkidu

Foresight is a wonderful thing....
    In the latest issue of "Archaeolgy," there is a brief article titled, "The Need to Protect Iraq's Ancient Heritage," which links to older articles that deal with the looting (and aftermath) of some museums and sites after the 1991 Gulf War. It also mention action by the AIA (Archaeological Institue of American) and a "task force" formed to post updates on recovery of artifacts on Archaeology's site.

"The Need to Protect Iraq's Ancient Heritage"
    ~ Marie Siduri

One telling little tidbit
    Among the rumors that some of the plundering was done by people who knew what they were about--possibly insiders--is this statement "...and the staff of the Baghdad Museum has been trained to empty its thirty-two rooms in less than twenty-four hours and move the collections to secret locations" from the May/June 2002 issue (which was written just before the outbreak of war, according to the note).
    ~ Marie Siduri

Looting
    1. The museum in Baghdad was prelooted by Saddam, so there was less to take than first met the eye.

2. It was the locals that looted, plus maybe some organized agents for the antiquities market (check the mansions of the rich and pacifist in France and Germany).

3. If the stuff had been housed in the British Museum, where it belonged in the first place, it would still be safe. There is a reason why the west rules!
    ~ sari Curius

Update on Losses at Iraq Museum - Damage Estimates are Cut
    From the New York Times

I post the article in its entirety so that also those who are not registered readers of the online NYT can read it)

MISSING ANTIQUITIES
Loss Estimates Are Cut on Iraqi Artifacts, but Questions Remain
By ALAN RIDING


BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 30 — Even though many irreplaceable antiquities were looted from the National Museum of Iraq during the chaotic fall of Baghdad last month, museum officials and American investigators now say the losses seem to be less severe than originally thought.

Col. Matthew F. Bogdanos, a Marine reservist who is investigating the looting and is stationed at the museum, said museum officials had given him a list of 29 artifacts that were definitely missing. But since then, 4 items — ivory objects from the eighth century B.C. — had been traced.

"Twenty-five pieces is not the same as 170,000," said Colonel Bogdanos, who in civilian life is an assistant Manhattan district attorney.

There is no doubt that major treasures have been stolen. These include a lyre from the Sumerian city of Ur, bearing the gold-encased head of a bull, dated 2400 B.C.; a Sumerian marble head of a woman from Warka dated 3000 B.C.; a white limestone votive bowl with detailed engravings, also from Warka and dated 3000 B.C.; a life-size statue representing King Entemena from Ur, dated 2430 B.C.; a large ivory relief representing the Assyrian god Ashur; and the head of a marble statue of Apollo, a Roman copy of a fourth century B.C. Greek original.

Even if the damage may not be as widespread as originally reported, there is still no clear answer to the most important question: just how much has been taken?

"I don't know exactly," said Jabbir Khalil, chairman of the State Board of Antiquities.

John Limbert, an American diplomat who is a senior adviser in the new Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq, concurred. "How bad was it?" he asked. "We just don't know yet."

While many museum officials watched in horror as mobs and perhaps organized gangs rampaged through the museum's 18 galleries, seized objects on display, tore open steel cases, smashed statues and broke into storage vaults, officials now discount the first reports that the museum's entire collection of 170,000 objects had been lost.

Some valuable objects were placed for safekeeping in the vaults of the Central Bank before the war; the bank was bombed and is in ruins, but officials say its vaults may have survived.

Other objects were placed in the museum's own underground vaults; only when power was restored this week could curators begin assessing what was lost. Even in some of the looted galleries, a few stone statues are intact.

Still more encouragingly, several hundred small objects — including a priceless statue of an Assyrian king from the ninth century B.C. — have been returned to the museum, in some cases by people who said they had taken the treasures to keep them out of the wrong hands. In addition, a steel case containing 465 small objects was confiscated by soldiers of the Iraqi National Congress and returned to the museum.

But some items that have been handed back to the museum are copies. "One of the storerooms that was looted contained almost entirely documented authenticated copies," Colonel Bogdanos said. "I got six items today. They were all from the gift shop."

The difficulty in determining what is missing is compounded by the lack of a master list of the museum's collection. Although inventories survive, they were compiled department by department and not computerized. And in some cases, they are not complete.

Nor is there a clear consensus about how much of the looting was organized. As evidence of a planned assault, museum officials say they found keys and glass-cutters. One official said he saw two "European looking" men enter the museum with the mob, point to various treasures and leave.

"Behind the looting there were wicked hands," Mr. Khalil said. "They took precious pieces and left less valuable ones."

For Mr. Limbert, the case is undecided. "One theory is that this was done by people who knew which were the best pieces and came equipped to get them," he said. "I'm told 27 pieces were taken from the actual galleries. But the other theory is that this was a smash-and-grab operation, mostly by people from the neighborhood. What supports this is that a lot of very good pieces have been returned. If you like conspiracy theories, you can go on forever here."

Antiquities experts, foreign museums and governments have mobilized to block traffic in smuggled treasures. At a meeting in London on Tuesday, representatives of some of the world's leading museums vowed to work to rebuild Iraq's plundered cultural institutions. Donny George, the research director of the Baghdad museum, said he was convinced that a significant part of the looting was organized.

Officials at the National Museum, whose scholars and scientists are widely respected, dismissed the idea that the museum was targeted as another symbol of Mr. Hussein's rule. They conceded, however, that particularly in recent years, the government had supported the work of the museum, which reopened in 2000 for the first time since the 1991 gulf war.

Colonel Bogdanos said that some Iraqis returned looted objects to him, rather than to the museum itself, which was identified with Mr. Hussein. "It has been a challenge to us that the Iraq museum is closely identified with both the prior regime and its Baathist Party," he said. "Everyone says this looting was anger at the regime."

Supporting that thesis is the destruction of numerous other cultural institutions where nothing but furniture and computers were stolen. The National Center of Books and Archives, also known as the National Library, was destroyed by fire, although Mr. Limbert said he had heard that 90 percent of its books and documents had been removed for safekeeping. The Awgaf or Religious Endowment Library, however, was burned, and it lost 6,500 Islamic manuscripts. The Central Library of Baghdad University and the Science Academy were also looted and destroyed by fire.

One piece of good news is that 50,000 Islamic and Arab manuscripts, dating back 14 centuries, were saved from the Saddam House of Manuscripts. Osama Nassir al-Naqsa Bandy, the director-general of manuscripts in the Ministry of Culture, had his entire collection removed to a safe place one week before the war began in March. He also took 150 boxes of books and catalogs from the library of the National Museum for safekeeping.

"The House of Manuscripts was attacked by saboteurs who took all the installations and furniture but everything important was gone," he said. "The library of the museum was bricked up and it also escaped vandalism."

Colonel Bogdanos said he had visited the hiding place of the manuscripts and books and was satisfied they were well protected by the local community.

"We had planned to bring them to the museum, but community members were insistent it would be a mistake," he said. "I was assured they were safe where they were. We took an inventory of the locked cases and left."

Word of what happened to regional museums is only just reaching Baghdad. Mr. Khalil, who is responsible for all national antiquities museums, said he had been told that the museums in Nimrud, Ashur, Hadra, Samarra and Nineveh had not been looted, but that serious damage, including looting of storerooms, was done to the museum in Mosul in northern Iraq.

"We were about to open a new museum in Tikrit, but it was bombed," he added.

Information is also just trickling into Baghdad about the situation at the 32 excavation sites operated by the National Museum.

Hanna A. Khaliq, general director of excavations, said the sites had been well protected from looters until the beginning of the wars. She said that she had so far heard from nine sites. In five — Mosul, Kirkuk, Nadjaf, Baa-Kuba and Ashnuna — buildings linked to the sites were looted, but she had no detailed information of the extent of the theft of recently found objects.

Ms. Khaliq said that it was hard to work because her department's entire fleet of 40 new cars as well as trucks had been stolen. At the museum itself, where administration offices were vandalized, Mr. Khalil said the staff needed material assistance, from cars to laboratory equipment for restoration.

"We have the people, but they have nothing to work with," he added.

The Iraqi cultural officials cannot help looking back to April 8 and 9, when their appeals for American military protection of the museum went unheeded. In conversation after conversation, the subject resurfaces, invariably with a bitter reminder that American forces were already protecting the nearby Ministry of Oil.

"I asked some soldiers why they did not stop the looting," Mr. Naqsa Bandy recalled. "They said, `This is not our duty.' "

Mr. Khalil said his experience was similar. "The U.S. forces and tanks were near the museum," he said. "They could have done as they did at the Ministry of Oil. Why didn't they? I don't know. We asked them. They said they were in the middle of a war."

The American response since then has been to try to fix what has been broken.


    ~ Yngvildr Scylding

40.000 Objects Found in Iraq
    Recently, it was reported that American authorities in Iraq have found over 40.000 objects, which were stolen from the National Museum in Iraq.
    ~ Byblos Hammurabi

Happy Message
    Books in thousands, which were stolen from the Iraqi National Library, were found in the Imam Alhaq Ali mosque in the district of Thawra in Baghdad in May.
    ~ Byblos Hammurabi