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| The tragedy of history lost The ransacking of the Iraq Museum is an incalculable loss to mankind, writes Sebastian Smee October 01, 2005 AFTER the invasion of Iraq by coalition troops in 2003, as days became weeks and then months, conflicting reports about the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad kept appearing in the press. At first we were told that something like 170,000 artefacts had been stolen by looters in the 48 hours after coalition troops entered Baghdad. Later came reports that this number was a huge exaggeration. Claim and counter-claim have followed ever since: most of the time, it has to be said, in opinion columns more concerned with the rights and wrongs of the war than with the true extent and significance of the museum's losses. Many people reading the commentaries had not heard of the Iraq Museum before the war, nor did they have any idea of what it contained. Not surprisingly, perhaps, since Baghdad has not been a holiday destination of choice for decades. Now they found themselves reading about civilisations of which they may have had only the dimmest idea: fabled cities such as Ur, Babylon, Nineveh and Nimrud, and rulers such as Hammurabi, Nebuchadnezzar, Ashurnasirpal II and Sargon II. Well, it all sounded rather exotic, and no doubt looting is a regrettable thing, but weren't people making a bit too much of the fate of the museum when, in the rest of Iraq, history was being made, statues were being toppled and a tyrant had gone into hiding? What real importance could a few thousand cuneiform tablets and vases have when the lives of soldiers and civilians were hanging in the balance? Now is a good time to revisit such questions, since we suddenly have a great many more facts at our disposal. Matthew Bogdanos, the American attorney who led the attempt to recover antiquities looted from the museum, has published an account of his operation in the July issue of the American Journal of Archeology, and it clears up many inaccuracies and misunderstandings reported in the media and reiterated elsewhere. At the same time, a new book, The Looting of the Iraq Museum, Baghdad, has come out, published by Harry N. Abrams. It is an attempt to reconstruct, in book form, the ravaged museum, tracing the history of what the Ancient Greeks called Mesopotamia from prehistoric times through to the advent of Islam. Its chapters are written by many of the archeologists whose finds were collected, catalogued and displayed in the museum. What is so special about these objects? In Donald Rumsfeld's view, evidently, nothing much. It is still staggering to be reminded of Rumsfeld's initial response to the looting. In the days that looters were ransacking the Iraq Museum, he made it clear he had no interest in trying to prevent it. He joked about the repeated appearance on the television news of "the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase". "Is it possible," he wondered, "that there were that many vases in the whole country?" This was said within hours of the disappearance from the museum of the Warka vase, a work as important as the Bayeux tapestry or Ghiberti's doors for the baptistry in Florence. Understandably, the scenes of desecration in the museum, along with Rumsfeld's disgraceful comments, provoked outrage around the world. However, in the polemical battle over the war, half-truths and guesses were repeated as facts, with unhelpful results. Bogdanos and his taskforce were given the mission of determining what had happened at the museum and recovering whatever antiquities they could. His investigation established that there had been not one but three thefts from the museum by three distinct groups: "Professionals who stole several dozen of the most prized treasures, random looters who stole more than 3000 excavation-site pieces, and insiders who stole almost 11,000 cylinder seals and pieces of jewellery." One of Bogdanos's first discoveries was that the destruction in the museum's administrative offices was "wanton and absolute". But, he says, the mob showed "astonishing restraint and respect" in the public galleries: "It was as if the majesty of the galleries had worked a cathartic spell on many of the looters." Initial reports that more than 170,000 antiquities had been stolen were certainly wrong. The best current estimate is that 14,000-15,000 pieces were stolen. About 5000 have been returned, which means that as many as 10,000 objects have been lost. Of course, 10,000 sounds a lot better than 170,000. But what do these numbers really mean? Here, it is worth paying close attention to Bogdanos: "Once it became clear that the original number of 170,000 was wrong by a factor of at least 10, the world breathed a collective sigh of relief that 'only' 15,000 objects were stolen. The word 'only' should never be used in such a context and never would have been but for the original reporting. "The further tragedy was that once the lower numbers became known, many governmental and private organisations quickly moved on to other crises, thereby depriving the international investigation of essential resources and funding." Bogdanos laments that no matter how many times he pointed out that numbers were not the point, or how vigorously he stressed that "the loss of a single piece of mankind's shared history is a tragedy", it tended to fall on deaf ears. War-time propaganda -- whether it is pro or anti-war -- is usually about reducing, hollowing and flattening out the truth, the better to control it. But, of course, the reality of any given situation is invariably more complicated. One of the grisly truths that got lost in the debate about whether or not the Iraq Museum should have been protected by coalition forces was that, in clear violation of international law, the Iraqis had turned the entire museum compound into a military fighting position. The US commander who found his troops under fire from positions within the compound on April 9 and 10 chose to withdraw rather than engage in a battle to secure the museum, for obvious reasons: a battle would have put the museum's contents at much greater risk. In the fog of war, it would have been difficult to know when the last Iraqi fighter left the compound, making it safe to enter and protect the site without a battle. And yet, as Bogdanos admits, questions remain: Why, despite calls for assistance on April 12 and 13, was there a delay of several days before coalition forces secured the compound? And why, despite ample warning about the danger the museum might face during an invasion, was no unit given the specific mission before the battle of protecting it from looting after Baghdad was secure? The answers (which might include an acknowledgment of the surprising speed of the coalition's victory, and its failure to anticipate the hatred directed at the museum by ordinary Iraqis who associated it with the Baathist regime) are, as Bogdanos admits, "neither complicated nor entirely satisfactory". Not only does Bogdanos's account go to great lengths to set the record straight, it gives a compelling insight into what things were really like on the ground in the weeks and months after the invasion, and the massive obstacles faced by his team and the museum itself. But it is only when you read The Looting of the Iraq Museum, Baghdad, that you start to approach the heart of the matter, the reason for all the fuss: the objects themselves. What makes this book especially moving is that we read about them in the words of the archeologists who, in many cases, dug them from the ground, and made it their life's work to piece together, preserve and make sense of them. (It is worth noting that the organised theft of antiquities from archeological sites in southern Iraq, an appalling tragedy, is ongoing.) The cities that sprang up between the two great rivers -- the Euphrates and the Tigris -- were the first civilisations on Earth. Indeed, Iraq is a country of firsts: it was the home of the first villages, the first cities, the first writing, poetry and epic literature, the first temples and codified religion, the first armies, the first world economy and the first empires. Looking at the art of ancient Mesopotamia, which is made strange by its sheer distance from us, one nevertheless succumbs to sensations of uncanny familiarity. A stark example of this came during the first days of the war when, living in London, I saw the Ancient Near Eastern galleries of the British Museum swarming with expatriate Iraqis. In the same week that British forces encircled Basra, I watched some of these visitors shaking their head in amazement at a series of stone reliefs, intended for the Assyrian court, depicting soldiers campaigning in southern Iraq. Who needed the evening news? It was all here: soldiers hiding in river reeds, prisoners of war being led through a landscape of date palms near modern-day Basra, and so on. But the sense of recognition is usually more subtle. Looking at the small statues that were left as offerings in Sumerian temples, for instance, one can't help but be struck by the eager humanity of these figures. Squatting or kneeling and with one hand clasped at their chest and one down in front of their groin, they seem to suggest familiar emotions, from bursting consciousness to bewilderment. Their ears and eyes are over-sized, their bodies often plump, giving them a striving, almost comic, appearance. Amazingly, they strike us as individuals: a smiling young boy, a muscle-bound hero, an authoritarian goddess, an enchanted lady. Certainly, their expressions seem more heartfelt and spontaneous, their lives more recognisably precarious, than the hieratic, suave and meticulously finished sculptural figures of Old Kingdom Egypt, which was taking shape about the same time. The Warka vase, which was stolen and later recovered, wrapped in toilet paper, is made from alabaster and stands a metre tall. Made during the 4th millennium BC, it is decorated with relief sculptures that narrate, for perhaps the first time in human history, rituals surrounding a ruler and a divine cult. It is also the first example we have of an artist exploiting a defined "image-field", in which figures stand on firm ground in an area that can be read to imply space. That this development occurred about the same time as the appearance of the first writing is surely no coincidence: parallel bands, regular direction, spacing and movement are all qualities that the figures on the Warka vase share with writing. The Warka vase was one of several "big-ticket" items stolen by organised criminals, who have been thriving in Iraq since the first Gulf War. But a lot of the items that were looted or destroyed were small fragments or cylinder seals, many of which had not even been catalogued. The debate about the precise number of items destroyed or looted becomes academic when you learn, for instance, that one of the museum's cuneiform tablets, no more than a few centimetres, has proof of Pythagoras's theorem on it, more than 2000 years before the birth of Pythagoras. It is one example of why we must take Bogdanos seriously when he says "the loss of a single piece of mankind's shared history is a tragedy". |