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The
Golden Bull's Head from the Lyre, circa 2500 B.C.
(Electrotype copy). 31-18-10 [click photo to enlarge]
This is an exact electrotype replica of an artifact that was
excavated by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology and the British Museum at the
Royal Tombs of Ur in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) in the
late 1920s and early 1930s. Location: National Museum of
Iraq, in Baghdad.
Photo: The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology
and Anthropology |
 One
of the casualties of the Iraqi war is the National Museum of Iraq, in
Baghdad. Its 170,000 artifacts, worth billions on the open market and
spanning 7,000 years of human history, may be lost forever. In a tearful
interview with Reuters after 48 hours of looting, deputy museum director
Nabhal Amin said, “If they had just one tank and two soldiers, nothing
like this would have happened.” Tears are appropriate when treasures
that tell us who we were and perhaps who we are get plundered wantonly,
willfully, ruthlessly.
Oddly,
it was looting and not bombing that took the toll on the museum, and
while American troops secured the oilfields but not the museum, it was
Iraqis and not the victors who emptied it of its spoils.
If
America is very young in the history of the world, Iraq is the very
“cradle of civilization.” Ur, in Iraq, was the ancestral home of
Abraham. Ancient Babylon, with its hanging gardens, stood in central
Iraq. Ninevah, in the north, was the seat of Assyrian kings for 2,500
years. Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, gave rise
to Sumeria, the world’s first great civilization, 3,500 years before
Christ. The first irrigation of fields, the creation of the wheel, the
development of the written word and the first code of law all took place
in what is today called Iraq, and the Baghdad museum was its repository,
one of the world’s great collections of antiquities, the raw data in
reconstructing the human story.
From
the thousands of inscribed clay tablets, including Hammurabi’s Code
and the Epic of Gilgamesh, to artifacts from the excavations at Ur,
including the Ram in the Thicket and golden cups, weapons, jewelry, and
the first narrative image of battle, scholars must now work to identify
the missing, though the collection has never been fully catalogued or
published.
Definitely
“disappeared” is the Sumerian alabaster vase, the Lady of Warka,
from Uruk, 5,000 years old and one of the earliest representations of
the human face. Gone is the huge bronze statue of Basitki from the
Akkadian period, hauled out despite its weight. Gone is a wooden portal
of King Sargon from 720 BC. Found shattered on the museum floors were
ceramic pieces and the bodies of Roman statues, no more than shards,
their hacked-off heads stolen away. Lost is the collection of 80,000
cuneiform tablets with the world’s earliest writing documenting
literary, mathematical, and legal matters. Also among the missing is the
solid gold harp of Ur.
While
the frenzied destruction was first assumed to be the result of an
impassioned populace, suddenly free, it looks as if most of the looting
was done by professional thieves, well-prepared in anticipation of the
unguarded moment. Storage rooms and steel-door vaults were breached with
proper keys. Museum records were thoroughly burned. Glass-cutting
instruments sliced deliberately through the thick glass of display cases
without damaging the art. Worthless replicas such as the Black Obelisk
from Nimrud were left behind while only priceless originals were
whooshed out of the museum. Even an original weighing hundreds of pounds
was carted carefully from the second floor to the exit.
 And now where?
If
the drones don’t spot them, smaller items can be smuggled across
porous borders and then shipped worldwide, or they can be dismantled for
their precious gold and stones. The larger items, their museum ID
numbers stripped, will be too hot to sell now (artifacts stolen during
the 1991 Gulf War have still not resurfaced) and will either be
abandoned or go on a black market for stolen treasures and then to
hidden private collections. There is a well-developed global network
that specializes in stolen antiquities, and the sheer rarity – when
was the last time fine Sumerian art came onto the market? – of these
pieces will fuel demand by private collectors. According to a FBI agent
with 27 years of undercover work in art, there are people who derive
great pleasure from showing off their looted pieces to a few favored
friends or to no one at all. A professor of archaeology at the
University of Chicago, which has been conducting digs in Iraq for 80
years, believes that unscrupulous antiquities dealers actually
“ordered” the most important pieces well in advance.
This
kind of indifference – if not greed, malignant narcissism, and
destructiveness – to the quiet but essential life of museums has led
to a flurry of activity to recover what has been lost. The FBI has sent
in a dozen agents. Interpol called on all involved in conservation and
trade of antiquities to “decline any offers of cultural property
originating in Iraq.” The U.S. government wants to offer ransoms for
stolen artifacts. UNESCO is meeting to discuss avenues of action. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City will hold its biggest
exhibition on Mesopotamian art in years, with 400 unique objects from 12
of the world’s largest museums. Scholars from the University of
Pennsylvania, University of Chicago, and New York University are busy
compiling an Internet database to thwart sales on the gray and black markets
and to help border guards and art dealers identify stolen pieces.
One
can almost hear echoes of the plaint that the world is more concerned
about the loss of antiquities in Iraq than about the lives lost there.
It is a valid point. And so is the view of archaeologists who find the
most profound loss in the charred archives from Iraq’s National
Library and National Centre for Archives. Rare legal and literary
documents, priceless Korans, calligraphy, and illumination are now
mounds of ash. The 417,000 books, 2,618 periodicals, and 4,412 rare
books and manuscripts are irreplaceable and irretrievable – an
intellectual legacy gone mute. Says one archaeologist, “As for the
museum’s missing artifacts, future archaeologists will have
opportunities to dig again and excavate the country’s sites, and
sooner or later, many of the items stolen from the National Museum of
Iraq will turn up.”
They
often do. At the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology, for example, an ornamental crystal ball from the imperial
palace in Beijing, priceless and beloved, disappeared from under the
noses of the guards. Everyone despaired. And then, several years later,
the crystal ball surfaced in a garage across the river. Today, it is
back in the museum in the Chinese Rotunda, proudly reflecting one the
largest unsupported masonry domes in the U.S. This is a story that
begins in arrogant disregard and greed but ends in restoration, not only
of the crystal sphere, but of our humanity. Can one hope that the museum
in Baghdad will have similar good fortune?
If
we come to museums and libraries to better know and understand our human
essence, both spiritual and temporal, then the destruction of the record
of our collective past is an estrangement from our essence. For all that
we are at ease with collecting 7,000 years of artifacts telling us the
history of mankind, why is it that we cannot learn
from all that we have so assiduously collected?
More
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by Dea Adria Mallin
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