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Lost treasure of Iraq


..."The story is larger than the museum. The wholesale looting going on across the country is devastating," said the book's other co-editor, Milbry Polk, by phone from her home in New York. "It's an absolute travesty that none of these sites are being protected. We bear a huge responsibility." Schuster, editor of the preservation quarterly Icon, published by the World Monument Fund, wrote an essay illuminating the high-stakes market for stolen art and antiquities. The sale of pillaged antiquities is a multibillion-dollar business, she reports, behind drug smuggling and weapons sales in the scope of illegal international trade. With so little being done to protect the archeological sites from which objects are stolen, the U.N. resolution in May 2003 banning the sale or export of those artifacts has been ineffectual, she said...

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Lost treasure of Iraq

Sheila Farr, Seattle Times art critic

2002443277.jpeg

August 21, 2005

In spring 2003 during the early days of the Iraq war, the news media buzzed with stories about the terrible looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, with 170,000 ancient artifacts representing the birth of civilization reported smashed or stolen.

But soon conflicting stories emerged about the number of missing items and how they disappeared. Was the looting an inside job? How much of the museum's collection had been secretly relocated for safe keeping? What, in fact, went missing and how did such flagrant looting take place with the U.S. military standing by?

Since that time, few clear answers have emerged about what happened at the museum, now in the process of repairing and upgrading its ransacked facilities. Yet few in the United States realize that as the Iraq war pushes into its third year, the stealing of cultural artifacts continues unabated, with little attention from the media. The looting of some of the world's most important archeological sites continues "on an industrial scale," according to Angela M.H. Schuster, co-editor of the recently released book "The Looting of the Iraq Museum, Baghdad: The Lost Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia."

"We were outraged at what happened and more so at what's continuing to happen at the sites," said Schuster, noting that numbers of impoverished Iraqis are willing to pillage for antiquities in order to feed their families. "It's 200 people a night with equipment. Look at Umma: It's like a lunar landscape [from the digging.]"

Much of the U.S. public seems unaware of the historical importance of the area, site of such biblical cities as Ur and Babylon. "There's a lot more to Iraq than a political fistfight," Schuster said in a telephone interview. "Do people know that Iraq is ancient Mesopotamia? It's almost as though there's a disconnect, that there is 10-15,000 years of history here. It wasn't just Saddam's Iraq: It is all of our heritage."

The book, a series of essays by experts with personal experience at the museum and archeological sites in the region, is not an exposé of what happened at the Iraq Museum in April 2003, but rather an introduction to the museum's collections (both missing and intact) and the vast historical significance of the region.

"The story is larger than the museum. The wholesale looting going on across the country is devastating," said the book's other co-editor, Milbry Polk, by phone from her home in New York. "It's an absolute travesty that none of these sites are being protected. We bear a huge responsibility."

Schuster, editor of the preservation quarterly Icon, published by the World Monument Fund, wrote an essay illuminating the high-stakes market for stolen art and antiquities. The sale of pillaged antiquities is a multibillion-dollar business, she reports, behind drug smuggling and weapons sales in the scope of illegal international trade. With so little being done to protect the archeological sites from which objects are stolen, the U.N. resolution in May 2003 banning the sale or export of those artifacts has been ineffectual, she said.

"The thing that's so disturbing about the site looting is it's hard to report a theft when you don't know what is missing. How do you describe something you haven't seen?" Schuster said.

Losing puzzle pieces

The Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow through Iraq, irrigating a region most U.S. school children know as the cradle of civilization. It's a country of firsts, home to "the earliest villages, cities, writing, poetry, epic literature, temples, codified religion, armies, warfare, world economy, and empire," write architects Usam Ghaidan and Anna Paolini in their essay on the history of the Iraq Museum. The country is an archeological treasure trove, much of it still unresearched. Artifacts looted from the Iraq Museum and sites around the region hold clues to thousands of years of primal human history, including the invention of cuneiform writing on tablets that date back to 3300 B.C. Once artifacts are wrenched from their sites and disappear onto the black market, their meaning — part of an intricate puzzle archeologists reveal through dating and studying the objects in their context — is lost.

One of the amazing finds recently excavated in Iraq — and of the most obvious monetary value — is the Nimrud gold, a cache of precious objects discovered in tombs of ancient Assyrian queens beneath the palace at Nimrud. Among the artifacts are a crown, an ornamental headband, 79 earrings, 20 rings, 14 armlets, 90 necklaces and various bowls and vessels, all made of gold, rock crystal and silver — a treasure trove one author compares to Egyptian pharaoh Tuthankhamen's in its extravagance. The horde was unearthed in the late 1980s and briefly exhibited at the Iraq Museum before being stored in underground bank vaults before the Gulf War. In the chaos after the 2003 invasion, the fate of the Nimrud gold was unknown for a time, but it has since been found undisturbed.

That's the good news. But some 8,000 objects from the museum are still missing, of an estimated 15,000 that disappeared during the looting of April 10-12, 2003. Among the lost are many extraordinary tablets and cuneiform documents and cylinder seals — precursors to cuneiform script, the world's earliest written language. "It may not sound like much, but what they say and tell us is exceptional," Schuster said. For example, the epic poem of Gilgamesh, an ancient Babylonian king, survived on cuneiform tablets.

Missing from market

Some of the items go directly into the hands of private collectors. "Little has surfaced on the market so far," Schuster said. "Items such as the missing 2,800-year-old ivory lioness found at Nimrud will be difficult to unload because they are so well-known."

The looting of archeological sites in Iraq stretches back to the early 19th century, when clay tablets with cuneiform texts began to appear on the international market. But when the 1991 Gulf War hit, along with the tight economic restrictions of its aftermath, "farming antiquities" became a way of life for some. After the 2003 war began and the government collapsed, the situation exploded. Professional black-marketeers began systematically pillaging sites to supply a super-heated international market for antiquities. The U.S.-led coalition has done little to stop them.

"It is just so not a priority," Schuster said. "Working from my own position [with the World Monument Fund, which monitors cultural sites around the world], we have a State Department that compiled a complete and authoritative dossier of what was at risk prior to the invasion. It is just somehow not factoring in on the Defense Department list of things to worry about. That's hard for us to resolve. The fact is that at least part of our government does care a lot."

One of the foremost frustrations for Schuster is what she calls the U.S. military's disregard for major historical architectural monuments. "We had an option to do things appropriately," she said. "Then there are crazy things like having an airbase on Babylon. ... They damaged the remains of two temples to do it." The base has since been closed, she said, but damage to the site has yet to be addressed.

For many concerned people around the world, the pillage of the Iraq Museum remains clouded in contradictions, a story without an ending. All that can be done now is to try and restore what was damaged and hope that stolen objects can be recovered. For the authors of "The Looting of the Iraq Museum, Baghdad," the story is simply the most obvious part of an ongoing cultural crisis, one that they hope will not be repeated.

"We just hope that people will remember that these things were really formative in shaping who we are," Schuster said. "This is where we learned to be civilized humans and it is going away in uncivilized ways."

Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company



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