The Iraq War & Archaeology Archive 2

The Iraq War & Archaeology
Reviewed Articles Archive Two: Second 1/2 of April 2003

This is the second archive of the reviewed articles of The Iraq War & Archaeology web site.

Francis Deblauwe, Ph.D.

The articles and other information are listed chronologically, most recent first.

Archive Seventy-Five: May 2006
Archive Seventy-Four: 2nd 1/2 of April 2006
Archive Seventy-Three: 1st 1/2 of April 2006
Archive Seventy-Two: 2nd 1/2 of March 2006
Archive Seventy-One: 1st 1/2 of March 2006
Archive Seventy: 2nd 1/2 of February 2006
Archive Sixty-Nine: 1st 1/2 of February 2006
Archive Sixty-Eight: 2nd 1/2 of January 2006
Archive Sixty-Seven: 1st 1/2 of January 2006
Archive Sixty-Six: 2nd 1/2 of December 2005
Archive Sixty-Five: 1st 1/2 of December 2005
Archive Sixty-Four: 2nd 1/2 of November 2005
Archive Sixty-Three: 1st 1/2 of November 2005
Archive Sixty-Two: 2nd 1/2 of October 2005
Archive Sixty-One: 1st 1/2 of October 2005
Archive Sixty: 2nd 1/2 of September 2005
Archive Fifty-Nine: 1st 1/2 of September 2005
Archive Fifty-Eight: 2nd 1/2 of August 2005
Archive Fifty-Seven: 1st 1/2 of August 2005
Archive Fifty-Six: 2nd 1/2 of July 2005
Archive Fifty-Five: 1st 1/2 of July 2005
Archive Fifty-Four: 2nd 1/2 of June 2005
Archive Fifty-Three: 1st 1/2 of June 2005
Archive Fifty-Two: 2nd 1/2 of May 2005
Archive Fifty-One: 1st 1/2 of May 2005
Archive Fifty: 2nd 1/2 of April 2005
Archive Forty-Nine: 1st 1/2 of April 2005
Archive Forty-Eight: 2nd 1/2 of March 2005
Archive Forty-Seven: 1st 1/2 of March 2005
Archive Forty-Six: 2nd 1/2 of February 2005
Archive Forty-Five: 1st 1/2 of February 2005
Archive Forty-Four: 2nd 1/2 of January 2005
Archive Forty-Three: 1st 1/2 of January 2005
Archive Forty-Two: 2nd 1/2 of December 2004
Archive Forty-One: 1st 1/2 of December 2004
Archive Forty: 2nd 1/2 of November 2004
Archive Thirty-Nine: 1st 1/2 of November 2004
Archive Thirty-Eight: 2nd 1/2 of October 2004
Archive Thirty-Seven: 1st 1/2 of October 2004
Archive Thirty-Six: 2nd 1/2 of September 2004
Archive Thirty-Five: 1st 1/2 of September 2004
Archive Thirty-Four: 2nd 1/2 of August 2004
Archive Thirty-Three: 1st 1/2 of August 2004
Archive Thirty-Two: 2nd 1/2 of July 2004
Archive Thirty-One: 1st 1/2 of July 2004
Archive Thirty: 2nd 1/2 of June 2004
Archive Twenty-Nine: 1st 1/2 of June 2004
Archive Twenty-Eight: 2nd 1/2 of May 2004
Archive Twenty-Seven: 1st 1/2 of May 2004
Archive Twenty-Six: 2nd 1/2 of April 2004
Archive Twenty-Five: 1st 1/2 of April 2004
Archive Twenty-Four: 2nd 1/2 of March 2004
Archive Twenty-Three: 1st 1/2 of March 2004
Archive Twenty-Two: 2nd 1/2 of February 2004
Archive Twenty-One: 1st 1/2 of February 2004
Archive Twenty: 2nd 1/2 of January 2004
Archive Nineteen: 1st 1/2 of January 2004
Archive Eighteen: 2nd 1/2 of December 2003
Archive Seventeen: 1st 1/2 of December 2003
Archive Sixteen: 2nd 1/2 of November 2003
Archive Fifteen: 1st 1/2 of November 2003
Archive Fourteen: 2nd 1/2 of October 2003
Archive Thirteen: 1st 1/2 of October 2003
Archive Twelve: 2nd 1/2 of September 2003
Archive Eleven: 1st 1/2 of September 2003
Archive Ten: 2nd 1/2 of August 2003
Archive Nine: 1st 1/2 of August 2003
Archive Eight: 2nd 1/2 of July 2003
Archive Seven: 1st 1/2 of July 2003
Archive Six: 2nd 1/2 of June 2003
Archive Five: 1st 1/2 of June 2003
Archive Four: 2nd 1/2 of May 2003
Archive Three: 1st 1/2 of May 2003
Archive Two: 2nd 1/2 of April 2003
Archive One: 1st 1/2 of April 2003
Archive Zero: through the 2nd 1/2 of March 2003

Almost all are accessible for free (or after a free registration) on the internet. Each time, I try to draw attention to the most relevant tidbits of information, esp. things that were not mentioned before; occasionally, I provide some comment. The usual warning applies: many links become defective with time. Inclusion in the list does not in any way mean that I necessarily agree with the opinions expressed in an article. But for a few exceptions, the occasional photos and figures accompanying reviewed articles are just hotlinked images on other web sites, in other words: do not download them or request permission to publish them from me, for I do not own the copyright to them in any way! Please do contact the rightful owners if you would like to use them for publication purposes. Finally, for the sake of convenience, all articles and so on are assumed to have been published on US web sites unless indicated otherwise.

T. Cook, "War Takes Toll on Iraqi Artifacts. Destruction Called Tragedy," in The Cincinnati Post, April 30, 2003: "'We've had 20 years of not working together,' [Brian] Rose [professor of classical archeology at Univ. of Cincinnati and vice president of the AIA] said of the lack of cooperation between Western and Iraqi archeologists and historians. 'We have our work cut out for us.' Rose said he is working on setting up a program to create closer interaction between U.S. and Iraqi experts." "[Rose] said the [AIA] is even willing to buy back the artifacts if necessary." [didn't know there was a budget for this?]
"Interpol to Host International Conference on Stolen Iraqi Art on May 5-6 in Lyon," in Interpol.int, online, April 30, 2003: at their headquarters in France; "... to put in place a structure, resources and expertise for interested parties to work effectively together to solve this major crime and recover missing items." "... to significantly expand Interpol's existing database of stolen art to include the thousands of other items now missing in Iraq." "The conference is closed to the media except for two events on Tuesday, May 6." [now, is this the same database the UNESCO is talking about? still no clarity about a lot of this]
L. Crickett (?), "Leading Museums Pledge to Help Iraq," in Reuters, with online video, [April 30, 2003]: nice video from the meeting in London with Donny George speaking and showing slides of the plunder; unfortunately, while talking about the National Museum, they show pictures of the National Library instead; also video of returned and/or confiscated artifacts (cuneiform tablets, figurines): voiceover says that about a thousand pieces are already recovered from two men who were caught close to the Kuwaiti border
B. Glauber, "Marine Scholar Probes Sacking of National Museum," in The Macon Telegraph (Georgia, US), April 30, 2003: "Warrior and prosecutor, classicist and amateur boxer, Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos faces one of the great legal and investigative challenges of his career ..." "On Friday, Bogdanos said a list had been compiled of 14 significant missing items;" "'We focused on the most important pieces from a historical perspective," he said. "We were able to sort through the rubble to identify these pieces. Think of it as a wanted poster.'" "He also said some items were taken from the museum before the war and stored in 'at least two off-site locations. One is a shelter. The other is the Central Bank.'" "He received a master's degree in classics and a law degree from Columbia University, and is an assistant district attorney in Manhattan." "... on April 20, he was shifted to the museum investigation and told to assemble a team with knowledge of smuggling. Ten U.S. Customs officials are involved in the investigation, plus a representative each from the Air Force, Army and Marines." "'First, you treat this location as a crime scene with the limitations inherent with the crime scene contaminated by a mob,' Bogdanos said. 'You don't take fingerprints. You establish a timeline. Who came in. Who came out. Who had access. Second, you do a physical inspection to determine points of entry. Third, you determine what is gone, determine what was here, what's here now and then you do the math. That is a formidable task, and that's not completed.' Bogdanos said investigators and curators still cannot enter some of the museum storerooms because of the damage."
An e-mail from a reliable source who attended the meeting in London: "The Iraq Museum records are safe but have been scattered all over the 120 ransacked offices. Getting them into order, together with the photographs, then matching them up with the mass of material that has been packed away, in order to find out what IS missing, will take months, if not years. The state of the storerooms has not yet been investigated, partly due to lack of electricity. The thieves broke in through a walled up doorway and the room visible through the hole is strewn with fragments. This from Dr Donny George of the Iraq Museum, who was in the BM yesterday, and from Dr John Curtis, Keeper of the Department of the Ancient Near East, who brought back digital images of the devastation. Stomping around in hob-nail boots is not recommended, and collecting all the fragments according to object, is obviously a priority. If all objects from Iraq can be impounded, then this will take care of stuff looted from sites, for which no record exist. A priority is for the US to man effective checkpoints at the borders - not the case at present." [April 30, 2003]
M. Gottlieb and B. Meier, "The Plunder. Of 2,000 Treasures Stolen in Gulf War of 1991, Only 12 Have Been Recovered," in The New York Times, April 30, 2003: "Eleven years later, experts say, no more than half a dozen of the pieces have been tracked down." [the article title is too rosy still, should be "Only 6"!]; "'Sometimes we feel we are fighting a war we have already lost,' said Manus Brinkman, secretary general of the International Council of Museums in Paris, ..." "Other factors add to the difficulties: the ease with which material can slip through customs, the meager numbers of police assigned to art theft, and the circuitous trails of ownership in the world of trading." "[After the 1991 Gulf war, c]ollectors, dealers and law enforcement officials said that they frequently heard that Saddam Hussein's son Uday had a role in the trafficking. In some areas of the countryside, Saddam Hussein, weakened after his rout by allied troops in the war, ceded some control to local leaders. McGuire Gibson, ... at the University of Chicago, said there were reports that these leaders would accept payments from intermediaries to allow ancient sites to be pillaged, often with small armies of local people digging for little compensation." "One [unscrupulous] dealer named by several people in the trade was Ghassan Rihani, the former head of the Jordanian Antiquities Association." "From Jordan and other regional trade centers in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran and Syria, the goods often passed through Switzerland. Laws there are more favorable than in many other countries to buyers, who [can] say [simply] they bought objects without knowing that they were stolen." "Before placing an antiquity on the market, dealers often tried to have them authenticated by experts, not to learn where they came from but to guard against fakes. Some archaeologists decline to participate in this verification, saying they are reluctant to assist a market that they believe only encourages smuggling. One expert who validates authenticity is Wilfred Lambert, emeritus professor ... at the University of Birmingham in England. ... estimated he had evaluated several hundred items from the region, working for several London dealers. He said that in a marketplace filled with copies and fakes, his role is limited to identifying the age and culture of objects and ascertaining that they are genuine." [I hope that he at least made copies of the texts too before they almost certainly disappeared into obscurity...]; looks like that promise from eBay about not handling looted Iraqi stuff was full of holes, they just pretend they don't have a clue about the provenance and keep on auctioning
M. Fan, "Iraqi National Museum Anticipates Opening of Some Exhibits," in The Miami Herald, April 30, 2003: "Repairing the damage at the museum, at least enough for a "soft" opening of some of the museum's exhibits, would be a much-needed symbol of the country's future as well as its past, and a point of pride, officials said. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III of the 3rd Infantry Division said the museum might be ready for public visitors in as little as two or three months, although it will take as long as a year to clean up the damage wrought to the museum's records and many of its exhibits." "Blount said only 10 to 15 percent of the museum's artifacts were stolen, with most of the treasures packed away in vaults and in storage by museum officials anticipating bombing."

B. Simon, "Robbing The Cradle," in 60 Minutes II (CBS), April 30, 2003: "Just yesterday, George asked the United Nations to declare a temporary moratorium on the trade of all Iraqi antiquities. But archaeologists say this is a classic case of locking the barn door after the horses have been stolen. The sale of plundered antiquities has always been illegal, but it has also been a bustling trade." "[Prof. John Russell:] ... after the first Gulf [W]ar. The only Iraqi commodities that Westerners wanted were oil and antiques. The Iraqi government had the oil. Iraqi people had the shovels." "'I think archaeologists basically have been perpetuating this huge lie, literally,' says Torkom Demirjian, who owns an antiquities gallery on New York’s Madison Avenue – a place where old money looks for old objects. Like many traders, he insists there’s no network of looters and smugglers, no flood of stolen antiquities." "The sales history of an item is called its provenance." "Russell showed us ... [on] eBay. Of the hundreds of items listed, he zeroed in on one – a clay tablet. The description? 'Believed to be the world’s oldest surviving written receipt for delivery of beer by a brewer.' ... 'It’s upside down. It’s been over-cleaned. Which to me is a hint of looting, although certainly not conclusive. There’s no ownership history given.'"

Photo 1: "The National Museum in Baghdad housed key artifacts from ancient Mesopotamia, which was among the earliest civilizations. (Photo: CBS)"

Photo 2: "Richard Zettler, a curator in the Near East collection at The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, sits near replicas of ancient items thought to have been stolen from the National Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad, April 18, 2003 (Photo: AP)"

F. Gibbons, "Assessing the Disaster. Experts Mourn the Lion of Nimrud, Looted as Troops Stood by. 'Indiana Jones' Archaeologist Tells How Gangs Broke in and Calls for Borders to Be Sealed," in The Guardian (UK), April 30, 2003: "... the 5,000-year-old Warka Vase ... was too fragile to be moved into the museum's underground vaults in the weeks leading up to the war, and like 18 other major artefacts so far confirmed missing by Iraqi experts, may already have been smuggled over the country's unguarded borders. The Lion of Nimrud, an ivory relief of a lion attacking a Nubian, one of the museum's most prized objects and 'an icon of Phoenician art', ..." "Throughout the bombing of the city, staff had remained on guard inside but when a few militiamen began using the grounds to fire on American patrols, they left. When the shooting stopped three hours later, the team of young archaeologists and curators were unable to return. 'One of our staff who lived in the museum compound went to an American tank and pleaded with them, begged in fact, for them to come in front of the museum to keep it safe,' Mr George said. 'But he was told they had no orders to do so.' He contrasted this with the way US forces immediately secured the oil ministry. "They were warned [about the danger to the museum]. Was it done intentionally? I don't know. But moving a tank 50 of 60 metres would have saved mankind's heritage." The archaeologist, whose bravery in tackling looters after the first Gulf war has earned him something of a reputation as an Indiana Jones figure [why didn't I notice his uncanny likeness to Harrison Ford before? ;-)} ], also raised the suspicion that organised gangs of thieves had been first into the galleries. 'They got in by making holes in the walls and through the windows we had blocked,' Mr George said." "The British Museum ... is acting as a 'clearing house' for offers of help to the Iraqis." "Jordanian authorities have seized 12 boxes of antiquities and assorted government documents, which foreign journalists had attempted to smuggle out. Fears were also raised that greater treasures will disappear down British and American military supply lines."

Photo: "U.S. Army civil affairs soldiers and the Office of Resource and Humanitarian Assistance meet with the Chairman of the State Board of Antiquities and directors of the Iraqi National Museum to discuss plans to recover stolen artifacts and eventually rebuild and reopen the museum in Baghdad. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. D. Myles Cullen" [April 29, 2003][US Department of State, International Information Programs]

D. Rubin and Sh. McCaffrey, "Unguarded Borders Allowing Antiquities to Be Taken Out of Iraq," in The Macon Telegraph (Georgia, US), April 29, 2003: "Many museum vaults remain unexamined, although they are not expected to yield the best-known treasures. ... filled with 'study collections,' ..." "The torrent of publicity surrounding the case could actually work against investigators by driving the thieves deep underground where they could wait years, perhaps even decades, before they try to sell their loot." "Some experts in art theft question whether tighter border controls are the best way to track down the stolen antiquities. 'Searching everyone is time-consuming and expensive and not-well targeted,' Julian Radcliffe, chairman of the Art Loss Register in London, said in an interview. 'You need intelligence.'" "The Art Loss Register, funded by art traders and insurance companies, maintains a database of more than 125,000 stolen artworks and antiquities. The group had a gloomy prediction: Only 10 percent of the stolen items would be recovered." "Many of the priceless clay [cuneiform] tablets have never been translated, so all an enterprising thief would have to do is sand off the museum number and polish them, Stein [from the Oriental Institute] said."
M. McLeod and K. Santich, "Stolen past. The Looting of the Baghdad Museum and a Historical Library Robs the World of Precious Links to Ancient Civilization," in Orlando Sentinel, April 29, 2003: "In the late 1980s, University of Texas archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat spent hour after hour studying the tokens in back rooms of the Baghdad Museum, ..." "She came to believe that the tokens were records, used nearly 10,000 years ago to keep track of the produce and livestock that farmers in tiny villages put into common storage, ..." "They became the basis, she believes, for an orchestrated system of symbols -- in other words, written language." "Two weeks ago, while watching the news about the destruction of the Baghdad Museum by looters and art thieves, she thought she recognized, among the ruins of twisted shelving and fragmented clay, the room where the tokens had given up their secrets. Then she cupped her face in her hands and, as many archaeologists did when they first heard the news of the looting, she cried." "'Many of the high-value items will go to rich people in the West -- people with too much money and no scruples, people who would be more than willing to buy something like this and hide it in their vaults forever,' says archaeologist Francis Deblauwe. He is among several archaeologists [should be: experts] developing a Web site, baghdadmuseum.org, that will feature a virtual re-creation of the ravaged museum." "'The material is priceless. The bad has happened,' Vikan [who recently resigned from the President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property] says. 'So how do we get the best result out of a bad thing? You know, the behavior problem is first and foremost with the United States. If the United States can't 'fess up to its failure on this, then I would say that we didn't learn a damn thing.'"
S. Suri, "Iraq: U.S. Forces Fail Iraqi Treasures Again," in IPSnews, April 29, 2003: "George ... 'We saw tanks coming at us from both sides on Tuesday April 8,' he said. 'Members of the militia jumped into our compound and heavy fighting began. In the circumstances we all had to leave the compound.'" [this is the first time I see anyone of the museum staff presenting their side of the story regarding the presence of Iraqi resistance near the Museum: by "compound" he most likely means that they were taking refuge on the grounds, probably not inside the buildings although that's not clear; does this also set the time when the museum staff left the Museum? did they then return later after the Iraqi resistance had been taken care of only to eventually be overwhelmed by looters?]; "The looters got into the store rooms that housed about 170,000 precious objects. Only when these are examined will they know what is missing. That process can take six months at the very least, [George] said." "George dismissed a suggestion by a journalist from the U.S. that the looting could have been an 'inside job' by museum staff and by Saddam Hussein's thugs. 'I know how Saddam Hussein cared for antiquities,' he said. 'In one case some thieves entered a museum and cut off the head of an object. Saddam had their heads cut off as punishment.' George said he was not praising Saddam Hussein for that action, but he said it indicated that Saddam Hussein's men were not likely to be behind the looting and destruction of the museums." [not a convincing argument, I'm afraid]

"British Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport Tessa Jowell MP (L) and Director of Research at Iraq's National Museum Donny George view Assyrian artifacts after speaking at a news conference on international support for Iraqi museums, at the British Museum in London April 29, 2003. George angrily accused the Americans of failing in their duty to protect Iraq's National Museum from looters on Tuesday and called for the United States to tighten Iraqi border controls to stop priceless treasures from being smuggled out of the country. REUTERS/Stephen Hird" [Reuters.com]

"Irakisches Museum erhebt schwere Vorwürfe gegen die USA," in Frankfurter Rundschau, April 29, 2003: the DPA journalist heard Dr. George say that he couldn't exclude that the US intentionally chose to leave the National Museum unprotected (hence the article title: Iraqi Museum levies serious accusations against the US), the AP report published in other newspapers quotes him more in the sense of that he doesn't know why they didn't protect the museum: interesting dichotomy, reflecting the general sentiment about the war in general, I suppose; at the end, John Curtis (BM) is quoted as saying that the "Archiv," meaning the records of the museum were completely destroyed: does this once and for all put to the rest what Ambassador Limbert (ORHA) was told about the catalog having survived after all? something tells me we haven't heard the last of this

"Coopération des grands musées pour sauver le patrimoine irakien," in L'Express (France), April 29, 2003: about 50 experts attending the meeting in London; UK minister Jowell stressed that it is illegal to import Mesopotamian artifacts into Britain

Photo: "Une statue laissée par les pillards dans le musée archéologique de Bagdad © AFP Ramzi Haidar" [a statue left behind by the looters in the Baghdad archaeological museum]

K. Oakes, "Restoring Iraq's Cultural Heritage," in BBC News, April 29, 2003: "Dr George ... believes the only way to stop anymore crossing the border out of Iraq, possibly to be lost for ever, is for the coalition forces to make rigorous checks on anyone leaving the country." "Unesco is to send a team of eight experts to Iraq to make an assessment of the situation and devise a plan for the next stage in the salvage operation. It is also calling on the UN Security Council to pass a resolution which would place an immediate embargo on all Iraqi cultural goods. This would also include the return of goods to Iraq that may have already entered the market. [UNESCO] will then compile a database with all the archives, lists and inventories relating to Iraqi heritage. Switzerland has already promised a substantial amount of money to fund the survey. This will then be passed to customs, art dealers, trade organisations and Interpol to ensure the illicit trade of Iraqi artefacts is made as difficult as possible. The director of the British Museum, Neil McGregor, said the next step would be to verify what antiquities have been damaged and what can be done to repair pieces. This would involve the sourcing of suitable materials and the training of conservation teams, which could take a considerable amount of time." "Tessa Jowell, [UK] Secretary of State for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, ... pledged to hurry ... to close a loophole [in UK law] that contends that if the original owner of a piece of art cannot be traced then nobody can be prosecuted over it."

Photo: "Donny George told Tessa Jowell what help Iraq needs"

"Rund 650 geraubte Kunstwerke aus Museum in Bagdad wieder aufgetaucht," in Frankfurter Rundschau, April 29, 2003: 650 artifacts already recovered; today, one man returned 30 (several cuneiform tablets, a 15 cm-high statuette of a king); yesterday, one of the oldest bronze reliefs of a bull was returned; valuable manuscripts given back; at the end of last week, [Chalabi's IFF] recovered a trunk with 465 artifacts from smugglers, including a lot of cylinder seals; it seems the artifacts that were transferred to the Central Bank for safekeeping before the war were put in a tunnel underneath
C. Hawley, "Iraq's Cultural Restoration Begins," in BBC One O'Clock News, with online video, April 29, 2003: interview w. US Col. M. Bogdanos who says they can't do much till some kind of inventory can be made of what was originally there; museum staff tells the journalist that the records disappeared; quite some video from inside the National Museum, showing some of the returned artifacts (pot, figurine)
G. Satchell, "'They Are Trying to Fill the Galleries with Anything They Can,'" in BBC News, with online video, [April 29, 2003]: pictures, pottery and other things are being moved from elsewhere into the National Museum [very unclear what exactly is going on here, only shots from the outside]; visit to Babylon: Saddam's restoration projects were destructive; US soldiers on a tour of the ruins

"Takeaway Antiquities: Art Dealers May Have 'Ordered' Looting," in The Sydney Morning Herald, April 29, 2003: "Dr Peter Stone, Director of the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies at Newcastle University, said he had told the Ministry of Defence that both opportunist looting and the stealing of treasures to order by foreign collectors were likely after liberation." "... ahead of a conference today at the British Museum, attended by Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell ..." "[Stone] advised the military for more than two months in his role as Chief Executive Officer of the World Archaeological Congress."
"Iraqi Antiquities Summit Meets. Representatives from Some of the World's Leading Museums Are Meeting at the British Museum in London on Tuesday to Discuss How to Help Museums and Archaeologists in Iraq," in BBC News, April 29, 2003: "Dr John Curtis, from the British Museum, will brief colleagues from the Louvre in Paris, the Getty Museum in California, New York's Metropolitan Museum and the Hermitage in St Petersburg. Dr Curtis ... has just got back from a visit to Iraq's national museum ..."
R. Boucher, "U.S. Contributes $2 Million to Protect and Restore Iraqi Antiquities," in US Department of State, online press release, April 29, 2003: "The funds will support specific cultural preservation needs to be identified in consultation with Iraqi cultural officials." "Included in this contribution are funds to re-establish a U.S. overseas research center in Baghdad, support for development of the 'Red List of Iraqi Antiquities at Risk' by the International Council of Museums, and a searchable on-line database of images from the Baghdad Museum."
M. Baker, "Looters Pocket $700 Million," in The Sydney Morning Herald, April 29, 2003: "US officials also said civilians had returned hundreds of items stolen from the National Museum. But a Baghdad 'neighbourhood watch' team is refusing to return 500 trunks of artefacts because it fears the museum staff are too closely linked with Saddam's regime to be trusted. The leaders of the community protecting the stolen items have said they will hand them back only when a new government is in place."
N. Gamm, "Plundering Our Own Past," in Turkish Daily News, April 28, 2003: "Could what happened in Iraq happen in Turkey? Well, it's impossible to imagine the circumstances ever being the same. But that doesn't stop the looting of archaeological sites that go on continually, albeit quietly, in Turkey." "TAY (The Archaeological Settlements of Turkey) concludes its destruction report with a series of proposals leading with education and especially media campaigns to raise awareness. An active effort is being made to provide information about not officially registered sites to the appropriate museums and related organizations."
T. Zeranski, "More Than 100 Looted Iraqi Artifacts Returned, Military Says," in Bloomberg.com, April 28, 2003: "Unesco said the National Museum of Baghdad housed about 100,000 artifacts." "... customs agents are on the ground in Iraq and are working with museum officials to catalogue the loss as well as with the U.S. military." "Interpol, the largest international police organization, also formed a special response team to locate art and antiquities and arrest those responsible for the looting. A special meeting on the issue will be held in Lyon, France, Interpol's headquarters city, on May 5 and 6 to develop a strategy for dealing with the theft."
"Franks: Iraqis Turning Over Museum Pieces," in The Guardian (UK), April 28, 2003: "More than 100 items have been returned, including priceless manuscripts, a 7,000-year-old vase and one of the oldest recorded bronze bas relief bulls ... a chest filled with priceless manuscripts and parchments ..." "After some negotiation, one man arrived with 46 stolen antiquities, then with eight more pieces, and finally with the vase." "... ordinary Iraqis had told coalition forces that they wanted the items in coalition hands, not with Baath party members who were responsible for managing the museums and are accused of spiriting the antiquities away." "The U.S.-led coalition on Sunday began broadcasting messages on radio offering rewards to Iraqis to hand over antiquities ..." "[General Franks] said he doesn't expect to find an organized network of thieves as some art experts have suggested. 'We're apt to find where an individual person decided he or she could take some of the antiquities and save them for a rainy day,' ..."
R.W. Duffy, "Antiquities Experts Post Online Treasures of Baghdad Museum," in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 28, 2003: portrait of Dr. MacG. Gibson; "First came a compilation of a list for the U.S. armed forces and anyone else who might come in contact with stolen museum property. Gibson said the first list was too long; the next effort was to provide a quick reference, a set of pictures for wide distribution."; probably half a million artifacts in the National Museum [but the greater part of these are "pedestrian," i.e., pottery sherds, bones, etc., very useful only if still connected with their archaeological context], excluding the ca. 100,000 cuneiform tablets; "Reichel [U. of Chicago, in charge of the database project] admits freely he approaches the problem from an academic point of view. 'But for this purpose, we have to get away from that. The layperson is who should use this information.' [in Wired, however, the target audience is described as "law enforcement, customs officials and art dealers"?] And he is concerned about speed: 'It's not going to be perfect,' he said. 'But we need to get as much information as possible out now.'" "He has heard that the records of the National Museum in Baghdad were not lost, as reported earlier, and worries that because of this news, some might feel that the OI's effort to put images and descriptions online is unnecessary. But it is necessary, he said: The world must be able to see what is missing - and eventually, to learn the good news about what is not gone or destroyed."

"Mit Sensen und Messern gegen Plünderer gewappnet. In Babylon fü[r]chten Archäologen und Wächter die Zerstörung der letzten Überreste der einst bedeutendsten Stadt Mesopotamiens," in Der Standard (Austria), April 28, 2003: "Sensen" = scythes; site not damaged by bombing; hopefully, some of the tacky reconstructions can now be removed; all looters were able to steal from the site museum were basically copies; if only they could get the GIs to not march with their heavy boots over the fragile antique bricks...

Photo: "US-Marine posiert für ein Foto neben der Löwen-Statue beim Palast König Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon" [US marine poses for a picture next to the [granite] lion statue at King Nebuchadnezzar's Palace in Babylon]

"Looted Iraqi Art Displayed Online," in Wired, April 28, 2003: "The Lost Iraqi Heritage project is a joint effort of over 80 universities, museums and individuals working to create a tool that law enforcement, customs officials and art dealers can use to prevent the sale and export of stolen objects. The group, which is coordinated by professors at the University of Chicago, includes the Archaeological Institute of America , University of California at Berkeley and the University of Michigan." "Nicholas Kouchoukos, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago who heads up the technical effort, says the project will be built in phases. ... an extensive effort to catalog the losses, as well as to facilitate the objects' return and the rebuilding of the Iraq Museum. The first version will show only images of the museum's known masterpieces, but the organizers plan to turn it into a searchable database as soon as possible. The effort faces severe challenges. Little is known outside Iraq about the extent of the holdings, ... The museum's own records have apparently been destroyed in the two days of looting. ... Some hope that smashed computer hard drives can be salvaged. But even if the information can be retrieved, Kouchoukos says the computerized records included only a small fraction of the collection ... The database is being populated with images from published books and museum exhibition catalogs, as well as unpublished images from scholar's notes and from institutions that excavated artifacts in Iraq and documented them before turning them over to the museum. Copyright laws also complicate the task, requiring the permission of those who have photographed these items. [Dr. Clemens] Reichel, the project's coordinator [research associate at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute], said publishing houses have granted permission to publish their copyrighted images, and museums and researchers will permit the display of previously unpublished images. Kouchoukos says the group will watermark each image, both visibly and digitally, to make sure that copyright holders don't lose control of their images." "'We still don't know whether the Iraqi curators want us to do this,' said Oriental Institute Professor McGuire Gibson, ... 'If they don't want the entire catalog on the Web, then we won't publish it.'" "On May 8th, a group of archaeologists will travel to Baghdad to meet with officials in order to address what Kouchoukos calls "key ethical questions." For instance, how much should the public be allowed to see? Nobody wants the site to aid the illegal sale of artifacts by verifying their authenticity. Kouchoukos stresses that these conversations will be essential to determining the format and content of the system, given that the long-term goal is to turn the database and the website over to the museum. In the meantime, Kouchoukos is using PostgreSQL, an open-source Unix database application developed in Berkeley in the 1980s, to create the database's backend." "'This is something we want to hand over as the information technology backbone for the museum as it rebuilds,' said Kouchoukos. The database could run on Linux or Mac OS X [yes!]. Because of the need for quick action, the project is currently relying on donations from individuals and some money from the University of Chicago. However, the group is searching for grants from foundations and hopes to get funding from government agencies, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.'" "So far, the much criticized State Department has not been involved in the project ..."
F. Alam, "Scholars Unite to Save Treasures," in The Guardian (UK), April 27, 2003: "Tuesday's meeting, organised by the British Museum, will discuss how thousands of missing artefacts can be saved from the international black market." "The National Library in Baghdad smouldered for two days, its half a million books, newspapers and documents being turned to ash. The Awqaf Library in Baghdad is ruined. It contained more than 5,000 manuscripts. The Saddam Manuscripts Library, held more than 40,000 manuscripts. It, too, was looted." "Some looters have taken back the stolen artefacts, after imams threatened to ban thieves from worship at mosques."
C. Watson, "Beyond the Rubble: Many Iraqi Treasures Exist Outside Iraq," in The Star Tribune (Minneapolis - St. Paul), April 27, 2003: half of the treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur were in Baghdad, one quarter is in Philadelphia and one quarter in London; "When the University of Pennsylvania Museum's Ur show was traveling between California and Tennessee, 'the trucks were hit by a tornado,' Zettler [curator at the Univ. of Pennsylvania Museum] said. 'The truck with the objects got through. The truck with the showcases was lifted up and thrown.'" "The world got a bonus from archaeologist [and Ur excavator] Woolley's unique personality. He made painstakingly exact replicas of 10 to 20 of the best gold objects in Iraq's share -- apparently just so each of the other museums could have a full set." "What will happen when Iraq is back on its feet? Will it resume demands that its many treasures be returned from abroad? It's likely." "The tragedy, [Zettler] said, 'wasn't just what was taken -- it was that people just ran through there, ransacking things. I saw pieces I know very well with the heads smashed.'"
Ph. Reeves and J. Morrison, "Chalabi's Men Hand 'Rescued' Artefacts Back to Museum," in The Independent (UK), April 27, 2003: "Dozens of tablets and statuettes ... recovered ... in an armed stand-off with a gang of men who were driving through the southern city of Kut en route to the Iranian border." "... the US reconstruction team in Baghdad was briefing that much of the damage was caused by journalists 'trampling' on objects dropped by looters." "There was no independent corroboration of the incident, ... Sources suggested [the looters] were allowed to proceed with up to two crates of artefacts still on them, in return for handing over the bulk of the treasures." "Mr MacGregor confirmed that a 'first aid team' from the British Museum would be dispatched to Iraq as soon as possible, buoyed by hundreds of thousands of pounds in private donations raised in 'the past 72 hours'. The [UK] Department of Culture, Media and Sport is also preparing to send a team of Arabic-speaking officials with in-depth knowledge of the country's history."
L. McDougall, "UK Database to Track Stolen Art Treasures. World's Second Largest Criminal Industry Targeted," in Sunday Herald (UK), April 27, 2003: "... officials at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport are discussing the creation of two databases, one for stolen art in general and another specifically to store information about missing Iraqi cultural property. The databases would be able to provide up-to-date information on artefacts stolen from anywhere in the world to police and dealers." "... keen to have a working database up and running in 'a matter of weeks'." "James Ede, chairman of the Antiquities Dealers' Association, ... said : 'The catastrophe in Iraq has given added urgency to this issue. I think a publicly available database is essential. What has happened in Iraq is such a catastrophe of enormous proportions that it is right to have a separate database for that and another for art generally. If the government is serious about fighting art crime it's not enough to harangue the trade or pass laws saying it's illegal. You simply have got to give the trade the tools ..." "Anthony Browne, chairman of the British Art Market Federation, said: '... At the moment legitimate dealers and the art trade just don't have the tools to check if something has been stolen."
J. Waldbaum and P. Gerstenblith, "Tracing Iraq's Lost Treasures," in Washington Post, April 27, 2003: this relates to an official AIA appeal; "The theft of artifacts directly from archaeological sites, both known and unknown, is particularly devastating because they have never been documented, their find spots are unknown and the context provided by their association with nearby materials, such as architectural, floral and faunal remains, is destroyed. The resulting losses to our ability to reconstruct human history are devastating. We therefore propose that the museum officials, dealers and private collectors who truly wish to contribute to the effort to locate and restore these looted items make available to law enforcement agencies images of the ancient Mesopotamian objects in their collections and inventories, as well as the documentation of the sources of these objects. This would be of enormous help to law enforcement efforts, because it would provide information on how objects move through the international market and thus would help authorities in tracing any taken out of Iraq." "... so that new objects that appear on the market now could be easily distinguished from those that left Iraq before the beginning of the current war."
D.B. Roddy, "Looting of Baghdad Treasures Shines Light on a 'Dirty Business,'" in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 27, 2003: "Gerstenblith [AIA], a critic of the [ACCP], said she saw no ulterior motives in the council's meetings with Pentagon and State. 'Their agenda is totally clean at these meetings,' Gerstenblith said. 'A lot of people sort of overstated what happened.' It was one of the few moments in which one side had kind words for the other." "The unsettling truth, say experts on both sides of the dispute over collecting, is that much of the world's cultural storehouse has been expropriated by either force of arms or business deals in which some questions were never asked. 'What do you think the Louvre is?' said Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Museum in Baltimore. 'The ethical, moral imperative we feel now would have been absolutely foreign to Lord Elgin, absolutely foreign to Henry Clay Frick.'" "Anger between the two sides can run deep. 'How about hatred? We respect them, they hate us,' said William Pearlstein, a lawyer who represents collectors and museums. 'What would happen if we stopped talking to them? What would happen if we stopped giving them information about the objects in their cases? That would be my personal gut reaction,' Paley [prof. of classics at SUNY Buffalo] said. 'That springs from this wonderful arrogance that academics have,' Vikan [one of 3 members who resigned from President Bush's Advisory Council on Cultural Property to protest US failure to stop the looting of Baghdad's museums and libraries] said. 'There's a lot of anger. The piety is really just quite amazing to me sometimes.'" "Frederick Schultz ... was a New York specialist in Egyptian and Middle Eastern antiquities who, as president of the National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental and Primitive Art, testified frequently before the President's Cultural Property Advisory Committee, arguing against further restrictions on the trade in antiquities and art during the Clinton administration. What committee members did not know at the time was that Schultz, according to later testimony at his trial, was receiving artifacts looted from archaeological sites outside Cairo, then sent to London by a British smuggler ... [who] ... , testifying for the federal government, said he and Schultz created a false 'provenance' -- a history of ownership -- for the items. On some occasions, he said, they dipped forged labels for the items into tea and then baked them to make them look old. The [AIA] filed a friend of the court brief [click here for the complete text] urging U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff to rule that the National Stolen Property Act applied in Schultz's case. Under that act, the items Schultz received could be classified as stolen because they were taken out of Egypt in violation of a 1983 U.S. law that declared all newly discovered artifacts national property. Schultz's own trade group, through lawyers who included Pearlstein, urged the court to grant Schultz a new trial, saying Rakoff should not have applied a 1979 ruling that allowed the stolen property act to be used in such cases where all that had been shown was that Schultz had handled objects that had been illegally exported from Egypt. The appeal is pending ..." "A potential new conflict between scientist and collector is now shaping up in the [AIA]'s proposal to create a database of all items now owned by museums and collectors -- a 'baseline' by which governments can be tipped off when looted Iraqi antiquities appear on the market [see AIA officials Jane Waldbaum and Patty Gerstenblith's article of the same date]. Many collectors are disinclined to publicly declare what they own, sometimes from fear of being robbed."
W. Orthmann, "Ein Rundgang durch die Menschheitsgeschichte. Die Sammlungen des Irakischen Nationalmuseums in Bagdad. Noch weiss man nicht genau, wie viel von den Beständen des geplünderten irakischen Nationalmuseums endgültig zerstört oder verloren ist und was eventuell noch gerettet werden kann. In einer Art Rundgang durch die nun zerstörten Säle führt der folgende Beitrag die Kostbarkeit und den wissenschaftlichen Wert der Sammlungen vor Augen," in Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland), April 26, 2003: detailed history of the National Museum in Baghdad, description of the former content of the galleries
S. Farrell, "Officials Convinced Museum Was Looted to Order," in The Times (UK), April 26, 2003: "A small Mesopotamian vase, circa 5000BC, was handed back to the Iraq Museum in Baghdad yesterday, ..." "John Curtis, of the British Museum [who is on location] ... Up to 20 priceless statues and other objects have been either smashed or stolen from the main galleries, ..." "Among the missing objects: an Akkadian bronze statue, dating to 2400BC, of King Naram-Sin; an Islamic wooden door; the head of a Roman emperor, perhaps Trajan; and an Assyrian stone statue of King Shalmaneser III, circa 800BC. But perhaps the most significant theft is of a 4ft-high decorated Sumerian stone temple vase found at Warka, near Uruk, dating from 3500BC. 'It is one of the very few examples of Sumerian figural art,' Dr Curtis said. 'It is the only one of its kind on that scale. The problem is we don’t know anything about what has happened in other places around Iraq. The preliminary news from Mosul is very bad, that the museum has been completely emptied out.' The Shalmaneser statue was, in fact, handed back earlier this week ..." "Forty-six items were returned yesterday alone ..." "'We were fighting the whole time,' [US] Captain Jason Conroy said, wiping his brow as he guarded the museum gate. 'For four days we were taking machinegun-fire and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) from these buildings around here. They had a bunker around the back of the museum with a cache of RPGs. Guys were running out of that alley, firing Kalashnikovs at us. When we shot them, they threw out hooks, dragged the bodies and guns back and came at us again.'" [seems US troops were attacked from close to but not inside the Museum building]

Photos: "Photos by ERIC SEALS, Detroit Free Press," in KnightRidder Washington Bureau, April 26, 2003 [The infamous foreign glass cutters allegedly used by professional antiquities thieves in the National Museum in Baghdad]
[Sumerian sculpture (cast?)]

P. Escobar, "The Lions of Babylon," in Asia Times Online (Hong Kong), April 26, 2003: "Babylon's museum was pillaged and torched. Although most of what has been discovered on site since the end of the 19th century is in European museums, it held some priceless objects recently excavated by Iraqi archeologists. [Caretaker] Hussein Sahab says that most were saved by the site's staff of 60." "... an armed guard at the [Baghdad] museum told Asia Times Online that American soldiers had not taken anything, but that they had opened the doors for 'people from other nationalities' to loot [I think this is erroneous reporting]."
J. Kimball, "A Bit of Ancient Mesopotamia at Science Museum," in Star Tribune (Minneapolis - St. Paul), April 25, 2003: museum staff rooted through their reserves and "... came up with 13 examples of art, pottery and tablets ..." "All of the items were found in what is considered ancient Mesopotamia -- modern-day Iraq, Iran and Syria. All are at least hundreds of years old; two pottery pieces are more than 4,000 years old." ""We thought it would be nice to show people a three-dimensional example of the kinds of things they were seeing on the news," said Jackie Hoff, head of collections." "All of the pieces were acquired by the museum between 1930 and 1973, ... Most were donated by individuals, although some were donated years ago by the Minneapolis Public Library."
P. Watson, "Treasure-Trove of Suspects in Plunder. Iraqis in the Know Say Top Cultural Officials, and Hussein's Reputed Mistress, Were Behind Thefts of Archeological Artifacts in the North," in Los Angeles Times, April 25, 2003: "Junayd Fakhri, an archeologist who claims the 1990 discovery of a royal Assyrian treasure buried in a palace well, perhaps in the 8th century BC. Priceless relics of gold and ivory were uncovered with about 400 skeletons, one shackled in irons at the wrists and ankles, Fakhri said. He thinks it was an Assyrian king executed and buried with his retinue at Nimrud, 20 miles southeast of the northern city of Mosul." "But Fakhri and several other Iraqi experts say Hussein's culture and information minister during the 1980s and early '90s, Latif Nusayyif Jasim, ordered about 160 pounds of Nimrud's golden treasures, including a queen's crown and jewelry, shipped to Baghdad. The treasure was stored in a vault at the national bank ... 'The truth is they sold all the pieces.' [said Fakhri]" "Mansiyah Khazer. Hussein met her during a tour of Hatra ... said Mamoun Ghanim, a veteran archeologist at Mosul's museum ... Khazer, a singer and belly dancer, stole the visiting president's heart. Hussein took Khazer as a lover and, to make her life more comfortable, appointed her general director of the Hatra ruins and museum in 1994, Fakhri said. The year after she took charge of Hatra, ... UNESCO put out a global alert warning art dealers and governments that artifacts were being looted from the ancient walled city." "... Hikmat Bashir Alaswad, a scientific researcher in the archeology department of Mosul's museum ... In 1994, he noticed that part of a stone statue, a woman's head more than 2 feet tall, was missing from the wall. Thieves had hacked it off sometime in the night. Alaswad quickly wrote a report and submitted it to his superiors. Then the police came and arrested him. 'They kept me in jail for 22 days and they tortured me,' he said." "Three months ago, the statue that he discovered missing from Hatra was spotted in a London antiques shop and returned to Iraq with the help of Interpol ..." "[Khazer] admitted that her brother stole a statue of the Roman god Bacchus from Hatra in late 1994. 'Saddam threatened her personally and ordered her to make her brother return the piece,' Ghanim said. 'But it is now in Britain.'"
F. Isman, "«Temo una nuova razzia su commissione». L’archeologo Gullini ricorda l’incontro con Saddam: «Faceva porre il suo sigillo come Nabuccodonosor»," in Il Messaggero (Italy), April 24, 2003: Centro scavi di Torino has been excavating in Iraq since 1963; in January [2003], Paolo Battino closed their office in Baghdad, hid away their vehicles and equipment in secret storage (doors soldered shut); he's got a walrus mustache that got him mistaken for an Iraqi fedayyin once during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War; Dr. Giorgio Gullini has worked for 40 years in Iraq and will become 80 in August [2003]; he recalled a visit of Saddam Hussein to the excavations at Hatra; he said that while Iraq had missed out on the century of the Enlightenment, democracy was going to be hard to introduce and that it couldn't be done at the point of a gun; he recalled saving art from the museum at Montecassino in 1943 during World War II: "Bombs then, bombs now"; hoped the Treasure of Nimrud, stored in the Bank was safe; regarding the looting of the National Museum in Baghdad, he was told that US Customs in New York had already confiscated 40 boxes with artifacts
M. Reel, "Slowly, Loot Is Being Returned to Museum. Some Artifacts Were Taken for Safekeeping; Thieves Urged to Bring Others Back," in Washington Post, April 24, 2003: "The blue Kia minivan rolled through the guarded gates of the National Museum ... a bronze relief from the 4th century B.C. swathed in yellow foam padding, antique farm implements, an elaborately engraved marble slab wrapped in plastic, a decapitated statue of an Assyrian king." "Officials are also using tips from citizens to hunt down stolen items, and trying to prevail on thieves to turn them in voluntarily." "... a number of objects were collected in mosques in the neighborhood after appeals from the imams ..." "[Stumbling upon the looting, Mr. Jamil] recognized the statue of Assyrian King Shalmaneser III, which lay in several pieces on the floor. He collected all the fragments, including slivers that had been chipped away from a blow to the statue's midsection. [With his brother and brother-in-law he] filled the van and drove it home, then returned for another load. At his home, he gathered foam and plastic and wrapped the art objects. The next day, he contacted Donny George, director general of research and study for the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities, to tell him what he had. ... told Jamil to keep the things until the museum was secure." "Some of the museum's collection was carried off in the 1990s by members of Hussein's government, according to Iraqi antiquities officials. Archaeologists who work for the Culture Ministry said today that Baath Party officials periodically confiscated gold and other valuables from the museum, possibly to be sold on international underground markets."

Photo: "Jay Garner, center, director of the office of reconstruction and humanitarian assistance to Iraq, shakes hands with the President of the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, Jaber Khalil Ibrahim, after visiting Baghdad's archaeological Museum Thursday, 24 April, 2003. © AP/Wide World Photo/Odd Andersen, Pool" [US Department of State, International Information Programs]

R. Russell, "Iraqis Say US Ignored Pleas to Halt Museum Looting," in Reuters AlertNet, April 24, 2003: "Lieutenant Colonel Eric Schwartz, commander of the tank battalion which fought Iraqi forces around the museum ... was aware the museum was a protected site and had orders to 'identify it and ensure its integrity'. George said one of his staff had run to a U.S. tank to tell them about the looting, only to be told: 'It is not our responsibility'. Schwartz recalled a similar incident but said the man had been suspected of belonging to the Fedayeen. Schwartz said his men from the 3rd Infantry Division around the museum came under fire from small arms and rocket-propelled grenades. He said one U.S. soldier was killed and 35 wounded. 'There were 30 to 50 Fedayeen defending the compound. Once it was defended, it lost its protected status,' he said.": this is the first official claim I have seen that the Museum was used to attack US soldiers, it was not mentioned in any of the interviews with museum staff nor was it used as an excuse by the Pentagon before; this needs clearing up, sooner rather than later; no matter, even if this is true, the looting started only after the area was more or less secured, i.e., after this shooting episode as described by Schwartz, so why didn't they intervene then?

Ch.M. Fröhder, C. Herstatt, J. Lau and M. Mönninger, "Weltkultur im Bollerwagen. Die Beute aus den Raubzügen im Nationalmuseum von Bagdad ist auf dem internationalen Kunstmarkt heiß begehrt. Wissenschaftler arbeiten an Rettungsplänen für gestohlene Exponate," in Die Zeit (Germany), April 24, 2003: "Bollerwagen" = coaster wagon; Donny George shows a key chain found after the looting which opens all display cases but doesn't belong to anyone in the museum; he says that a complete Akkad-period sculpture of a king has already surfaced on the antiquities market; that the gold jewelry from the Royal Tombs of Ur are safe, were not in the museum; that 50 artifacts were intercepted at the Jordanian border "yesterday"; "Was die Bomben verschonen, räumt eBay ab. [What bombs spare, eBay carries off]"; nomads esp. have been active in the illegal antiquities trade since the 1991 Gulf War

Photo: "Ein zerstörtes Gedächtnis der Menschheit: Die Reservekammer des irakischen Nationalmuseums in Bagdad nach der Plünderung
Foto [M]: Gilles Bassignac/Gamma/Studio X" [Shattered memory of humankind: the storage rooms of the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad after the looting]

J. Moris, "Assyrian Statue, Going Cheap. The Government Must Close the Legal Loopholes that Make London a Prime Marketplace for Looted Antiquities," in The Guardian (UK), April 24, 2003: "Ordinary people sell in local markets. Stallholders sell to dealers in capital cities. Dealers in capital cities have international contacts, legal and illegal. A few, very valuable and recognisable artefacts may be bought by that shadowy figure, the rapacious international art collector who wants what he wants and does not care about price or legality." "London has long had a reputation, second only to Switzerland, for handling objects that are dubious, and which many experts believe are looted. So much so that London and Geneva are now the two main marketplaces for stolen antiquities." "Since the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, the Kabul Museum has been stripped almost bare. Archaeologists believe that many of its items are in the hands of wealthy Pakistanis. Tokyo is also becoming as important a market as London, Geneva and New York. Meanwhile, the desecration of historic sites continues unabated. Since 1975, the temples and monuments of Angkor Wat, Cambodia, have been wrecked. Hundreds of stone Buddhas have been hacked off, with the heads particularly prized. In China, archaeological sites are routinely plundered. Yet the local looter risks paying a terrible price. In 2000, three local men were executed ..." "Instead of leaving it to the eagle eyes of museums and the most ethical dealers to spot suspicious objects, [the UK government] could draw up a database of types of objects and actively police it. It could break the confidentiality that surrounds the art and antiques trade and so often acts as a shield. Most crucially, it could change the burden of proof, so dealers have to show that an artefact isn't stolen, rather than forcing the authorities to prove that it was - an often difficult undertaking."
A. Emmerich, "Let the Market Preserve Art. What Were All Those Antiquities Doing in Iraq Anyway?," in The Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2003: provocative essay against retentionist antiquities policies; "However, mentioning one aspect of [this tragedy] seems to be taboo: the grave danger of having too large a part of a culture's art gathered in just one place on earth."; as a Belgian, I appreciate his mentioning of the destruction of the university library in Leuven (Louvain) by the Germans during World War I as an example, however, surely, he can't mean that that collection with manuscripts going back to the Middle Ages should have been split up? after all, what else is a university library for if not to serve a large thriving intellectual community gathered in one place with books new and old, reflecting the development of knowledge?; "The great contribution the art market makes to [preservation] is to endow works of art with value. When objects have no value they are inevitably at grave risk of destruction because preserving them is a costly enterprise." "... no responsible art dealer or antiquarian will touch any Mesopotamian object unless there is positive proof of provenance, or ownership history, dating prior to the second Iraqi war." "One curious point in this debate is that the present-day population of so many archaeologically well-endowed regions consists of the descendants of the invaders who destroyed the very cultures whose remnants their modern governments now so jealously claim as exclusively theirs." "A case must also be made for American exceptionalism. We are a country of immigrants, coming from countries all over the world, and surely have a moral claim to reasonable access to the buried treasures of our common ancestors." "As a practical matter, the objects yielded by excavating tombs are generally quite repetitive within each culture." "An obvious solution would be to deaccession the masses of such repetitive minor objects now stored in deplorable conditions. At present it is politically dangerous for local officials to grant export permits even for the most redundant of objects. What would be invaluable and instructive additions to the collections of many of the world's museums are left unseen and endangered in premises supposedly dedicated to their preservation. There is a constructive way a country could deal with this matter similar to the one Great Britain uses to retain pre-eminent examples of its cultural heritage. Its national museum would issue export permits for all but the most valuable objects subject to a 20% or 25% export tax to be levied on their value, and with the museum retaining the right of pre-emption. The revenue thus raised could be used to purchase one in five or one in four of the objects presented for export or go toward the care of the country's museums and safeguarding its archaeological sites."
M. Wiltenburg, "Iraq and Ruin. Archaeologists Have Been Piecing Iraq's Past together for Centuries. Now They're at It Again," in The Christian Science Monitor, April 24, 2003: "Worldwide, archaeologists who study Mesopotamia ... are a tight-knit bunch. Never in their lifetime has the field of study received such attention." "Archaeologists say the protection, repair, and recovery of Iraqi artifacts will need to unfold in several stages. The first, clearly, is political triage. 'You need some kind of public order, basic policing, before you can even talk about protecting this stuff,' says James Armstrong [Harvard University]..." "... local curators can begin to assess what they lost to looting. Lists from around the country can then be compiled into an online database ..." "'Everything depends on the catalogs,' says Richard Zettler of the University of Pennsylvania. If Iraqi antiquities authorities want help from Western scholars, he says, and 'if their inventories are more or less intact, we can go right to searching for what's missing, preparing what was damaged to be exhibited once more. If not, rebuilding them will be very time consuming.' That, he explains, would mean countries pooling field records and catalogs of objects from hundreds of digs in Iraq from the 1920s through the early '90s to determine what artifacts other museums have in their collections - and what the Baghdad museum should have had." "... hope that some of the museum's best-known stolen artifacts will prove too famous to smuggle or sell, and may yet be recovered." "At the Paris meeting last Thursday, UNESCO Director-General Koichiro Matsuura urged the UN to impose a temporary international embargo on Iraqi cultural objects. Others - including US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld - say they are in the process of offering rewards for the return of museum pieces." "... some in the museum community have begun to consider repatriating small artifacts, and replicas of larger ones, as gestures of goodwill." ""If you want to find a symbol for a post-Saddam secular Iraq, that symbol would have to be Mesopotamia," Dr. Stone says. "It's the only other time in history you have a single political system, a single pantheon, a single written and spoken language in both northern and southern Iraq. This is no little thing here."
C. Oon, "Looted Iraqi Artefacts Turn up. International Art Dealers Report That Some of the Stolen Artefacts Are Now Being Put on Sale, With at Least One Suspect Piece Being Seized in a US Airport," in The Straits Times (Singapore), April 23, 2003: "Other museum officials noted that since the end of the Gulf War of 1991, financiers from neighbouring countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Jordan have paid people to smuggle out specific items from the sites of archaeological digs around Iraq." "Mr Matsuura [Unesco's director general] has also set up a special fund to be spent only inside Iraq for the purpose of buying back stolen art from looters. Last week, Italy donated US$400,000 ... towards protecting Iraq's heritage and it has since raised its contribution to US$1 million. Mr Matsuura said he had also received offers of financial aid from Qatar, France, Britain and Egypt. However, Unesco officials said that it had so far received nothing from the United States, which last year announced it would rejoin Unesco after an 18-year absence."

Photo 1: "John Limbert, U.S. Ambassador to Mauritania and assistant to the Office of Resource and Humanitarian Assistance receives a tour through the Iraqi National Museum from Dr. Donny George, director of research (left) and Dr. Jeber Khalil, chairman of the state Board of Antiquities. Members of the U.S. Army 308th Civil Affairs Brigade and the Office of Resource and Humanitarian Assistance met with the Chairman of the State Board of Antiquities and directors of the Iraqi National Museum to discuss a plan to recover stolen artifacts and eventually rebuild and reopen the museum in Baghdad. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. D. Myles Cullen" [Defend America; April 23, 2003]

Photo 2: "Dr. Donny George, director of research and another museum director carefully step through the disarray caused by looters during a tour through the Iraqi National Museum. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. D. Myles Cullen" [Defend America; April 23, 2003]

Photo 3: "John Limbert, U.S. Ambassador to Mauritania and Assistant to the Office of Resource and Humanitarian Assistance, observes one of the few remaining artifacts that was not destroyed or stolen by the looters at the Iraqi National Museum. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. D. Myles Cullen" [Defend America; April 23, 2003]

Photo 4: "A director of the Iraqi National Museum rummages through papers in hopes of recovering important museum documents. U.S. Air Force Photo by Staff Sgt. D. Myles Cullen" [Defend America; April 23, 2003]

Photo 5: "John Limbert, U.S. Ambassador to Mauritania and assistant to the Office of Resource and Humanitarian Assistance, reacts to the damage caused by the looters during a tour through the Iraqi National Museum. Members of the U.S. Army 308th Civil Affairs Brigade and the Office of Resource and Humanitarian Assistance met with the Chairman of the State Board of Antiquities and directors of the Iraqi National Museum to discuss a plan to recover stolen artifacts and eventually rebuild and reopen the museum in Baghdad.U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. D. Myles Cullen" [Defend America; April 23, 2003]

Photo 6: "Members of the U.S. Army 308th Civil Affairs Brigade and the Office of Resource and Humanitarian Assistance meet with the chairman of the State Board of Antiquities and directors of the Iraqi National Museum to discuss a plan to recover stolen artifacts and eventually rebuild and reopen the museum in Baghdad. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. D. Myles Cullen" [Defend America; April 23, 2003]

We have it from a good source that, April 23, 2003, "[National] Museum officials told Ambassador Limbert [ORHA (Office for Reconstructions and Humanitarian Assistance) responsible for cultural affairs; he is on the scene in Baghdad] that they have good records of holdings -- rumor that these records were destroyed is not true."; if confirmed, this would be very good news!
B. Weinraub, "Recovery of Looted Treasures Is a Slow, Agonizing Process," in The New York Times, April 23, 2003: "Mr. Jamil's pieces — which included a bronze temple relief from the fourth century B.C. and other artifacts, in addition to the statue of the Assyrian king, Shalmaneser III — are part of a slow trickle of objects being returned voluntarily."; Mr. Jamil passed by the Museum when it was being looted and grabbed some nice pieces to keep them safe until he felt it was secure enough to return them; "'There was trashing and general vandalism but also selective activity by people who seemed to know exactly what they wanted,' said John Limbert, the American ambassador to Mauritania who is now a senior adviser in the new Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq and is coordinating efforts to recover artifacts. Col. Matthew F. Bogdanos, a Marine reservist who is investigating the looting, said the authorities were pursuing numerous leads and focusing on airports, checkpoints and border crossings to find the stolen material and seize criminals. Colonel Bogdanos, who in civilian life is an assistant Manhattan district attorney and has a master's degree in classical studies from Columbia in addition to his law degree, is deputy of the United States Central Command's Joint Inter-Agency Coordinating Group, which comprises military and civilian law enforcement and intelligence officials. The group was created by the military to examine major crimes as well as terrorism." "John Curtis, the keeper of the Near Eastern Department at the British Museum, who has developed close ties with the Baghdad museum, will arrive this week to assist museum officials in efforts to assess the damage and set up a coherent agenda for the art historians at the museum. While the focus in Baghdad has primarily been on the museum, art authorities have also tried to save other works in the city."

M.D. Lemonick, "The Taking of Iraq's Heritage. Could the U.S. Have Stopped the Looting of the Country's Priceless Antiquities? The Answer Is Not That Simple," in Time, April 22, 2003: good overview; "... the libraries are belatedly under guard — in this case by Syed Munem El-Musawi, imam of the Imam Ul Huq Ali Mosque, and a group of Kalashnikov-toting volunteers from the impoverished Sadr City area of Baghdad, known until the city's liberation as Saddam City. It is from here that many of the looters came as well, and, says Ahmad Khalaf, 26, a software-engineering student, 'we want to show the world that not everybody from our neighborhood is a thief and a looter.'"

Photo: "PATRICK ROBERT/CORBIS FOR TIME. TRASHED: A storeroom at the Iraq Museum looked more like a garbage dump after looters went through it"

B. Blomquist, "Iraq Museum Loot Shows up Here," in New York Post, April 22, 2003: "... the head of the FBI's art-theft unit ... Lynne Chaffinch said Customs agents have come across suspicious Iraqi artifacts at airports, and she's gotten calls from prominent collectors and auction-house dealers who say they've spotted pieces stolen during the mass looting that took place at Iraq's National Museum of Antiquities." "Chaffinch said she still doesn't have a list of all the pieces stolen, which makes it harder to check out the suspicious items that get called in. She said she's largely relying on experts who have been to the Baghdad museum."
M. Kramer, "America's Archaeologists: Armchair Savants?," in Sandstorm, online, April 22, 2003: "Now listening to the scholars, you might be persuaded that the looting of the Iraq Museum is the greatest loss to human knowledge since the Library of Alexandria burned down." "All of these comparisons are pure hyperbole, much of it self-serving, all of it lapped up by anti-war activists, and some of it believed by editorial writers." [it can't be denied that emotionalism is a factor. as well as the media's love of superlatives and absolutes]; comparison with Napoleon's military campaign in Egypt during which 'savants' or scholars in many different fields studied and recorded the exotic Egyptian cultural and natural landscape, producing the famous 20-volume Description de l'Égypte; "It's a pity that some of America's savants weren't along for the [US military's] ride to Baghdad. Their presence, like that of embedded journalists, would have reminded field commanders of the need to respect and pursue goals deemed important by influential constituencies at home. But our savants didn't propose it. Indeed, they would have found the idea preposterous. Why? Imagine you operate in an academic environment of alienation from American power and its masters. Imagine that your discipline is increasingly subject to post-colonial commissars [I think he's transfering his grudge with Middle Eastern Studies in the US to Ancient Near Eastern archaeology, quite a different discipline, focusing on pre-Islamic periods and not generally bankrolled by Saudi princes and the like---we'd wish!], who warn that even the idea of Mesopotamia is an imperialist construct [that's a first, never heard of this one], and that scholars will be banished on the mere suspicion of association with the imperium's legions [more prevailing in Mesopotamian studies is political apathy, for better and for worse]. Add the fact that your personal access to archaeology, art, and architecture requires that you kowtow to third-world despots [he's got something of a point here]. You are more likely to know Tariq Aziz than Paul Wolfowitz [sorry, I don't know either nor do 99.9% of my colleagues, I estimate]. Are you going to don a flak jacket and jump into a Humvee, even to prevent a predictable cultural disaster? [just like the embedded journalists, embedded archaeologists would be relegated to observation and not have any power to change tactical split-second decisions on the ground, let's get real here; maybe much-better-qualified Middle Eastern studies scholars like Dr. Kramer should have volunteered, he could have speeded up the surrender of enemy troops tremendously, I'm sure] We know the answer." [sure, the Western archaeologists are responsible for the looting of the Museum! putting a US tank or two next to the Museum would have been an operation of such complexity, it was impossible to execute for the shock-and-awe-inspiring US military; a cordon of Western archaeologists and Assyriologists standing guard around the Museum, facing down the looting mob and trigger-happy US Marines while chanting Sumerian hymns, that 's what Dr. Kramer would have liked to see, I guess; surely, pacifist archaeologists are a threat to world peace and order, while bombs and bullets are what you never can have enough of in the Middle East]
S. Stalinsky and E. Carmeli, "Syrian Government and Media on the War in Iraq," in MEMRI Inquiry and Analysis Series, 134 (April 21, 2003): "Teshreen columnist Nabil Salih charged: 'The <Israeli> Mossad sent its agents to destroy the antiquities in the National Museum <in Baghdad> in retaliation for the Babylonian captivity ... [27]" [footnote 27 says "Teshreen (Syria), April 4, 2003." which can't be right as this predates the looting of the Museum; as for the allegation, the less said the better]
Ph. Leckman, "Permitting Museum Looting Reveals Intentions of U.S.," in Arizona Daily Wildcat, April 21, 2003: "As art historian Zainab Bahrani wrote ... the Western archaeologists who excavated it took Iraq’s heritage and in effect tried to make it their own. 'Protecting' the archaeology of Iraq became part of the argument used by the British to justify their colonial rule of the country. As a result, reclaiming title to the Mesopotamian past formed a major preoccupation for Iraq’s rulers after independence. Iraqi national identity became inextricably linked with its ancient civilizations. Images from ancient artifacts featured prominently in official propaganda and government art. Archaeological sites like Babylon were restored and became major tourist attractions. Ancient leaders like Nebuchadnezzar and Hammurabi were raised to the status of national heroes." "Perhaps, then, the plundering of Iraq’s cultural riches is an appropriate symbol for 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' — as anthropology graduate student Bruce Bachand remarked to me, 'there is nothing new about pillaging, desecration, or the appropriation of old things.' Such events have always marked the expansion of empires."
"Chinese Archeologist Urges Rescue, Preservation of Iraqi Relics. A Chinese Archeologist on Sunday Urged the International Community to Assist Iraq in the Preservation, Restoration and Return of Its Cultural Relics," in People's Daily (China), April 21, 2003: "Qi Dongfang, a "Silk Road" specialist from the archaeology department of the prestigious Beijing University ... said many antiquities from China's Tang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.), for example, featured paintings of a type of "winged beast", an image reflecting direct Persian influence, but actually dating back to Mesopotamian civilization." "... while pictures show only the most beautiful side of the [artifacts], researchers care more about the decayed or hidden parts which can only be seen through examining the real objects."

F. Deblauwe, "Iraq: Looting of Cultural Treasures," in WashingtonPost.com. Live Discussion, online moderated chat, April 21, 2003: yours truly answered questions asked by the general public before and during the event

C. Anderson, "FBI: Looted Iraqi Antiquities Surfacing," in Yahoo! News, online, April 22, 2003: "... Customs agents at an unspecified U.S. airport seized at least one item believed stolen from a Baghdad museum." "The FBI soon will send a team of agents ... to Baghdad to collect documentation about the stolen pieces. The information will then will be posted for police on the FBI's National Stolen Art File, which along with private and international databases lists descriptions of some 100,000 pieces of stolen art. The University of Chicago's Oriental Institute has also begun posting on its Internet site [see bottom of this page for the link] descriptions of some important artifacts believed stolen. Experts at the university say between 50,000 and 200,000 items were stolen from Baghdad museums after the city fell to U.S. forces. A U.S. government task force that includes the FBI and Justice Department, State Department, Customs, CIA and Interpol is figuring out how to tackle the Iraqi looting case. Some thought is being given to using an amnesty or reward program to get thieves to return items, though officials stressed no final decisions have been made. Interpol plans a conference May 5-6 in Lyons, France, to organize and coordinate international efforts to both recover the stolen pieces and arrest the perpetrators. Some Interpol investigators are already in Kuwait, awaiting U.S. military permission to travel to Baghdad."
"Wrong Job for FBI," in Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 21, 2003: "It's foolish to put FBI agents on the trail of the art and antiquities thieves. Interpol, the international law enforcement agency, has experience in this type of investigation. It should do the heavy lifting. U.S. taxpayers are footing plenty of bills in Iraq already."
S. Hudson, "Iraq to Rid Ancient Babylon of Saddam Brick by Brick," in Reuters AlertNet, April 20, 2003: "At the reconstructed palace of King Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon, ... Saddam's name is inscribed in flowing script on row after row of sand-colored bricks that are built into the walls of the palace's imposing courtyards, arched gates, and angular towers. 'Saddam Hussein, the protector of Iraq, rebuilt civilisation and rebuilt Babylon,' ..."
P. Martin, "Troops Were Told to Guard Treasures," in The Washington Times, April 20, 2003: "In a memo sent two weeks before the fall of Baghdad, the Pentagon office charged with rebuilding Iraq urged top commanders of U.S. ground forces [CFLCC] to protect the Iraqi National Museum and other cultural sites from looters." "'We asked for just a few soldiers at each building, or if they feared snipers, then just one or two tanks,' said an angry ORHA official, one of several who spoke to The Times on the condition of anonymity." "Much of the ORHA memo, titled 'Guidance for CFLCC's Priorities for Securing Key Baghdad Institutions' is devoted to the Iraqi Ministry of Culture. ... 'It contains literally thousands of priceless historical objects, many of them gold, silver, and precious stones, as well as priceless works of art. Its collections cover over 5,000 years of recorded history and represent the fruits of 200 years of scientific investigation by both Western and Iraqi archaeologists. It will be a prime target for looters,' ..." "The memo said: 'Looters should be arrested/detained,' yet in the days after the fall of Baghdad, looters carted off their booty as U.S. forces looked on." "At a meeting on April 10, the ORHA staff were aghast when told that the document had not even been read, the official said. The official also criticized military commanders for blocking the ORHA staff from moving from Kuwait to Baghdad, where they are supposed to oversee reconstruction. Gen. Garner was said by one of his aides to be 'just livid' at the delay."
D. Schorr, "Looting in Iraq," in Weekend Edition (NPR), with online audio, April 20, 2003: he questions the Bush administration's handling of the chaos in Iraq that led to the looting of the National Museum
E. Westervelt, "Baghdad Museum," in Weekend Edition (NPR), with online audio, April 20, 2003: interview of Donny George: the Early Sumerian harp with gold leaf was damaged but not stolen; interview with Lt. Col. Schwartz (US Marines): they were busy chasing dozens of Republican Guards who sook refuge in the yard of the National Museum, did avoid damaging the building; only half a dozen of the about 4,000 artifacts stolen in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf war have been recovered
L. Hansen, "Looted Antiquities," in Weekend Edition (NPR), with online audio, April 20, 2003: Dr. John M. Russell is OK with small rewards to encourage returning Museum objects with museum IDs; Dr. Neil Brodie (Illicit Antiquities Research Centre, U. of Cambridge) expressed need to be careful about not de facto paying ransom for nice pieces, esp. to people outside Iraq
S. Ellicott, "The Perils of Empire. The Sun Never Sets On the British Museum," in Washington Post, April 20, 2003: "And this war, with its graphic television images, has taught us that we British are, above all else, a nation of armchair archaeologists. All it took was for the BBC to start showing Iraqi machine-gun posts atop ancient tombs -- perfect lookouts in a flat terrain -- and viewers began bombarding the British Museum's Department of the Ancient Near East with e-mails and telephone calls, desperate to know which 'ziggurats,' or royal burial sites [sic], might come under fire. Stricken, we recalled our old history lessons from sixth-grade: Iraq. The Cradle of Civilization. One giant open-air archaeological site. Help! The museum's response was history. Literally. John Curtis, keeper of the department of the Ancient Near East, mobilized his version of a rapid response team, including Collon, a 'world expert on cylinder seals,' or cork-shaped tablets [sic] of ancient writing [they're really cylindrical stones (natural, ceramic) in which scenes and/or cuneiform text have been cut] from 3,500 B.C., to host a series of free public lectures and guided tours of its Mesopotamian and Assyrian galleries." "Maybe we haven't entirely lost our inclinations toward empire-building, but at least we have grown up. Our first experiment with imperialism was a tragedy. We prefer to conduct our second as archaeology, ideally without having to return any of our past spoils, whatever the circumstances of their removal."

M. Schulz and B. Zand, "Mongolensturm im Stahltresor. Kulturschock in Bagdad. Womöglich 170.000 Kostbarkeiten aus dem Nationalmuseum sind in Räuberhände gefallen. Droht dem Land der Verlust seines Erbes? US-Sammler greifen bereits nach den Schätzen aus dem Zweistromland. Neue Gesetze sollen deren Ausfuhr erlauben," in Der Spiegel (Germany), April 20, 2003: "Stahltresor" = steel[-door] vaults

Photo: "Verwüstetes Magazin im Nationamuseum von Bagdad: Die Diebe wateten durch Scherben bemalter Keramik - DPA" [Ransacked storage room in the National Museum in Baghdad: thieves waded through sherds of painted ceramic]

"Expertin: Großteil der Beute aus irakischen Museen taucht wieder auf. Nach Erfahrungen aus dem ersten Golfkrieg," in Der Standard (Austria), April 19, 2003: the Art Loss Registers (ALR) have a private database of 130,000 stole works of art and archaeological artifacts, of which about 25% are recuperated eventually, sometimes after several years; offices in order of importance: London, New York, Cologne, St. Petersburg (Russia)
F.S. Farmanfarmaian, "Did Anyone Care? Looting of Baghdad Museum: America's Clash WITH Civilizations," in The Iranian, online, April 19, 2003: "Even more distant from the minds of these young [rich Arab] men [shopping in London] was the threat that war posed to several millennia of civilizations to which Iraq was heir. They just pay lip service to Islam, relegate the rest of history to the time of the jaheliya, the 'age of of ignorance' that is supposed to have preceded the coming of the Prophet of Islam -- an excuse to avoid learning more about complexities to which the Arab tribes of Saudi (Oman and Yemen are important exceptions) and the little sheikhdoms carved out by the British as their oil suppliers cannot lay any claim." "... one of the Qatari princes has been scouring art markets for some years with guidance from a British dealer, his regular side-kick. The collection is due to go on show soon in a purpose-built museum, designed by I.M. Pei ... Was there any concern for the sites that supplied at least some of that art? A passing reference to Iraq's heritage on the Al-Jazira network did not go far ..." "... to show much concern for stones and artefacts, is often deemed to be unfeeling, when humans suffer so. It's a flawed argument. Are humans animals that they have no need for history or culture? History is memory, it is identity, and national dignity, all of the ingredients that have made great nations resilient in the face of adversity and therefore enduring. To deny them their right to cultural memory is indeed to deny them their future as well." "With warnings given by art scholars, with the precedent of some 4,000 pieces stolen during the last war against Iraq (some of which had turned up in an exhibition held later in Israel) and the fresh precedent of looting of rare and precious mansucripts in the Museum of Mosul (no doubt mostly Persian), and the devastation of the Natural History Museum of Basra, [the US] should have known better than to let it happen." "This is not a a clash of civilizations, it is more like a clash with civilization. (Actually museum curators in Baghdad and Mosul are Christians). The barbarity of SUV gas-guzzlers has gotten the better of knowledge and culture. Is overconsumption by wasteful consumers more important than what they can store in their minds? Is oil more important than treasures of the mind, of the creative minds which opened up the way for civilization? This is a cultural disaster of epic proportion that can only compare with northern Crusaders pillaging Byzantium's 'oriental' luxury, the Arab Moslem sacking of the Taq-e Kasra at Sasanian Ctesiphon, the aforementioned sack of Baghdad and other cities by the Mongols, the bombing of Dresden." "When Saddam was bombing Isfahan [during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s] ... I and many others, contacted by students in Isfahan, had tried to alert the media and obtain a petition against the bombing of a World Heritage site of special beauty. Nobody was willing to sign a petition. As one Frenchman said to me years later, 'all of us in the West wanted to destroy you', regardless of the fact that world heritage sites belong to everyone, not to just one nation."; inaction of the West and Saudi Arabia in face of the destruction wrought on monuments and heritage in Afghanistan before the Taliban came to power; "... auctions in Paris (manuscripts from Mosul have already reached it) ..."
A. Talbot, "The Looting of Baghdad’s Museum and Library. US Government Implicated in Planned Theft of Iraqi Artistic Treasures," in World Socialist Web Site, online, April 19, 2003: "The museum was the victim of a carefully planned assault." "With the collapse of global stock markets, works of art and antiquities have come to be regarded even more highly as a secure investment, fuelling an already huge underground market. The illegal trade in antiquities is thought to be as lucrative as drugs trafficking, to which it is often linked."; much detail about the history and philosophy of the ACCP: "The ACCP’s ideas represent the interests of particularly rapacious sections of the US ruling class, who operate on the principle that everything—even an object of priceless artistic or scientific value—is defined by its 'market value'. What they mean is price, since the real value of the objects stolen from the Museum of Baghdad and the Iraqi National Library is incalculable. These are quite literally people who understand the price of everything and the value of nothing. The prescription for the market to determine possession of and access to works of art and archaeological material would place these artifacts in the hands of a rich minority and make public access to them depend on the good will of their wealthy owners." "Publicly funded museums represented a break with the tradition of private treasure hunting. Their exhibits aimed to display the material artifacts of the past in a rational and scientific manner. The accumulation of archaeological artifacts in private hands tends to disrupt scientific work, since material becomes scattered, is difficult to catalogue and much of it remains unknown to scholars working in the field." "... a museum’s records goes far beyond these spectacular works of art. It includes all the minor finds of archaeological excavations that, in themselves, are not eye-catching, but when studied together produce a picture of a society that cannot be gained from its art alone."; importance of archaeological context of objects
"Looters Return Museum Artifacts," in Herald Sun (Australia), April 19, 2003: " Prodded by Muslim clerics and guilty consciences, Baghdad residents returned 20 looted pieces from Baghdad's [National Museum]" " Iraq's antiquities chief, Jabar Hilil, ... left open the possibility the loss wasn't as absolute as first thought. With no electricity in Baghdad, he said, museum operators had yet to make a full assessment of the now-unlit underground vaults ..." "Three members of a White House cultural advisory committee resigned ..." "The returned works included pottery and metal pieces ..." "News reports since the looting have quoted top staffers as saying small gold works in particular were taken to Baghdad bank vaults just before the war. The key deposit spot was said to be the Central Bank - itself gutted and burned by looters. The bank building was too unstable today for US forces to determine if the bank vaults were intact anywhere under the rubble. Hilil said today little actually had been taken off museum grounds for safekeeping - manuscripts only. Those were now being held in what he called an exceptionally safe - undisclosed - place."

Photo: "A U.S Army tank is parked in front the main gate of the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad, Iraq ( news -web sites ), on Saturday April 19, 2003. The museum was looted last week after the collapse of Iraqi Prtesident Saddam Hussein ( news -web sites )'s government. The museum is recognized as the Middle East's leading archaeological collection. It held thousands of years of fragile artworks and clay tablet inscriptions from the Tigris-Euphrates valley that saw much of the innovations of mankind spring up. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)" [Yahoo! News Photos]

J. Shilling, "Iraq's Looting of Its Own Past. The Theft and Destruction of Iraq's Museum Treasures by the Iraqi People May Be Their Half-Conscious Attempt to Hurt Us, Their Assailants, in the Only Way Remaining to Them," in The Times (UK), April 18, 2003: "Then again, most of us feel the same mysterious sense of doom — as though this isn’t merely something we are watching, but in some way our shared loss — when we read about the ruined treasures of Iraq’s museums: the 26 statues of Assyrian kings who had kept their intricately carved heads on their shoulders for 2,000 years but now are all decapitated; the gold bison-headed harp of Ur, the marble head of a woman from Warka, carved 3,000 years ago with the blank gaze of a tragic mask and the soft, ambiguous mouth of a French film star — Juliette Binoche, say, or Emmanuelle Seigner." "It is perfectly obvious that no one in the coalition, with its high moral tone and its explicit claim to be the forces of civilisation, thought the things at all important. The Times reported Eleanor Robson, of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, as saying that the British School of Archaeology in Iraq wrote repeatedly to the British Government, prewar, expressing concern, and received no answer. Now the Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, insists that the Government could not have predicted the destruction. Perhaps some of this ambiguity exists because of the uneasy relationship that prevails in all cultures about the power of things." "That joy of possession is a universal human desire." The article title "[w]hich might be rough justice, of a kind, if only it didn’t hurt [the Iraqis] more."
E. Gibson, "Why a Museum? Saddam Stole Iraq's History. Looters May Have Wanted It Back," in The Wall Street Journal, April 18, 2003: "... Journal reporter Yaroslav Trofimov's story yesterday that the Americans couldn't protect the museum because they were taking fire from the building." [not confirmed by any other source]; "... a professional job ... 'I would personally suggest it was done by Saddam's circle, and my prime suspect would by Uday,' says Con Coughlin, author of 'Saddam: King of Terror,' ..." "A decade ago, Iraq Opposition Radio alleged that 'several antiquity collections have found their way outside Iraq and been sold for the benefit of Saddam's family and his cronies.' And in October the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag reported that Saddam had started moving--to a remote town in northwestern Iraq--several truckloads of 'gold bars and artworks from museums in Baghdad and the northern city of Mosul.'" "... Iraqis laid waste to the museum in Baghdad because it had become the symbol of a hated regime." [not the main reason at all for what happened]
Ph. Kennicott, "The Vanishing Past. Iraq's Proud Library Turns to Bitter Ashes," in Washington Post, April 18, 2003: "That coincided with growing malaise within the archaeological community in Iraq [after the 1991 Gulf War]. Not only was there damage to sites, there was an erosion of the country's ability to defend its heritage. 'All their vehicles had been commandeered, their telephones hadn't been turned back on, salaries were frozen at levels too low to sustain anyone,' says Zimansky, remembering a visit to Iraq shortly after the Persian Gulf War. 'People were floating away from antiquities.'"
D. Birch, "In North Iraq, an Ancient Past Falls Victim to a Modern War. Hundreds of Key Artifacts Looted from Mosul Museum," in The Baltimore Sun, April 18, 2003: "... hauled away hundreds of one-of-a-kind artifacts, including reliefs and clay cuneiform tablets from the ancient Assyrian cities of Nineveh and Nimrud, the great centers of Mesopotamia, which were at their most powerful about 850 B.C. Some of the cuneiform tablets had not been deciphered." "Manhal Jabr, director of antiquities and heritage for the Nineveh Governate, ... The scale of the loss, he said, simply can't be calculated. 'I cannot tell,' Jabr said, with a dazed smile. 'Every piece, every shard was important to us.'" "Within 12 hours, [marauders] had taken almost everything of value, leaving behind piles of catalog cards, broken glass and ripped-up portraits of Hussein, Iraq's president. The only things they didn't steal were objects too big and heavy to lift. A 6,000-year-old pottery oven the size of a small car squats in the foyer. Eight lion-clawed stone altars dating to 680 B.C. are lined up in the courtyard. And a 30-ton winged Assyrian bull with a human head broods in a gallery." "But other[ looters], Jabr said, understood what was valuable. 'They knew what they wanted.' In the galleries, thieves ignored imitation statuary made of gypsum and carted away those carved from marble. In the basement library, they helped themselves to only the rarest books, maps and manuscripts, tossing aside the less-valuable scholarly volumes that make up the bulk of the collection." " Fearing American bombs, curators packed up their most delicate pieces two months ago and shipped them to the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad for safety. About half the collection, they say, wound up in Iraq's capital." "Jabr said yesterday that he had not been able to reach his colleagues in Baghdad." " Their biggest concern is that the looters will return." "Poachers began picking over archaeological sites about four years ago, Jabr said ... He had hoped to discourage pilfering by setting up small museums throughout the region, including in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. Perhaps then, he said, potential poachers would learn to respect their history. But he never got the chance."
G. Gugliotta, "Looters May Have Destroyed Priceless Cuneiform Archive," in Washington Post, April 18, 2003: "... the "Sippar Library," the oldest library ever found intact on its original shelves." "Dating from the sixth century B.C., it comprised only about 800 tablets, but it included hymns, prayers, lamentations, bits of epics, glossaries, astronomical and scientific texts, missing pieces of a flood legend that closely parallels the biblical story of Noah, and the prologue to the Code of Hammurabi, the ancient Babylonian lawgiver." "... only about two dozen of the Sippar Library tablets have been fully analyzed and published." "the small corps of linguists, Assyriologists and epigraphers who study early writings -- perhaps 200 experts worldwide -- was distraught over the lost texts." "Scholars agree that Iraqi authorities readily granted access to the collections and kept them well-catalogued and cared-for -- but the material remained largely unstudied. One reason, noted Yale's Foster, was that wars beginning in the 1980s closed the museum for years at a time. Also unexamined were thousands of modest lots of material excavated from sites slated for inundation by hydroelectric projects. These tablets were hurriedly gathered and stowed in Baghdad to be analyzed during quieter times that never came." "[Prof.] Stone noted that cuneiform tablets, for all their longevity, do not travel well. 'You put these things in the back of a truck and drive over a bumpy road, and pretty soon you have a sackful of dust.'"
J. Brown, "Pieces of History. An International Effort Is Under Way to Recover What Remains of the Looted National Museum of Iraq. Jeffrey Brown Reports on the Lost Collection," in The News Hour with Jim Lehrer (PBS), with online audio, video and transcript, April 18, 2003: interviews with Dr. J. Russell, Donny George and Jerome Eisenberg (Royal Athena Gallery); video of UNESCO meeting in Paris
A. Lawler, "Ten Millennia of Culture Pilfered Amid Baghdad Chaos," in Science, April 18, 2003: "After viewing scenes of the chaos in Baghdad on 9 April, frantic U.S. archaeologists urged a senior Air Force official to intervene to ensure the museum was safe. That official told Science he contacted the coalition’s Air Operations Command on 10 April, when the looting began, and the request to secure the museum was forwarded to U.S. Central Command and to the Army liaison at Air Operations Command. The Air Force official was told the request was 'taken seriously.' But nothing was done. The looting continued until 12 April."
S. Dillon, "Islamic World Less Welcoming to American Scholars," in The New York Times, April 18, 2003: "Elizabeth C. Stone [SUNY Stony Brook] ... had planned to spend the summer excavating a 2,600-year-old city surrounding an ancient citadel in eastern Turkey. But like scores of other American professors, she was forced to cancel her trip as American tanks rumbled toward Baghdad." "'We can't be too concerned about our own problems — think of the people in Iraq who are facing catastrophes,' said Tony J. Wilkinson, an associate professor at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute who has worked across the region studying the canals and roads of ancient civilizations." "... academics now hope to enlist graduate students whose expeditions were canceled to work on a cataloging of items stolen from the museum to help with their recovery."; February 7, the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman, Jordan---normally one of the safest countries---, shut down and moved its staff to Cyprus due to security concerns; Tell Sweyhat excavations in Syria canceled
L. Bryant, "Archeologists Request Immediate Protection for Iraqi Museums," in Voice of America, with online audio and transcript, April 17, 2003: "Coalition forces also appeared to have inadvertently bombed at least two museums."
J. Derbyshire, "Churning. Rethinking the Iraqi National Museum," in National Review, April 17, 2003: "In what sense do these ancient artifacts belong to Iraq’s heritage? The nation of Iraq has only existed since 1932. Prior to that, the 'land of the two rivers' was a British colony. Before that, it belonged to the Ottoman Empire. Heading backwards through time beyond that, it belonged to the White Sheep Turks, the Black Sheep Turks, the Timurids (another variety of Turk), the Mongols, the Abassids (Arabs), the Seljuks (more Turks), the Buwayhids (Persians), the Abbasids again, the Umayyads (more Arabs), the Sassanids (Persian), the Arsacids (Parthian), the Seleucids (Macedonian-Greek), the Persians again, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Aramaeans, the Elamites, the Kassites, the Amorites, the Akkadians, and the Sumerians. That’s a considerable amount of churning. The ethnic and linguistic connections between, on the one hand, modern Iraqis, and on the other, the people of Babylon, Nimrod, Nineveh, and Ur, are tenuous, to say the least of it. In the case of the Sumerians, they are probably nonexistent. We know the ancient Sumerian language well — can even sing songs in it. It has no relationship whatever with any other known tongue. The origin and ethnicity of the Sumerians are deeply mysterious. You might have as much Sumerian blood as the average Iraqi, for all anybody knows to the contrary. To describe the contents of the Iraqi National Museum as being 'Iraq’s ancient heritage' is, therefore, to stretch a point." [territorial principle, I guess, though he does have a point]; "Whether you think these treasures belong to Iraqis or to all mankind, they are treasures nonetheless. They should therefore be stored and displayed in the safest place we can think of." "At any point in history, some parts of the world are civilized, and some are sunk in barbarism. The civilized part of the world at present is what we call the West — a term not to be taken with strict geographical seriousness, as it includes places like Japan and Australia. The Arab countries, including Iraq, belong to the sphere of barbarism, subject to unpredictable spasms of war, revolution, and chaos. In the present age, priceless artifacts from mankind’s history should be kept in the West as far as possible." [needless to say, here he goes overboard, taking a grain of truth and taking it to its racist extreme]; "Look at it from the point of view of the average Sumerian golden harp. Some artisan created you around 2,900 B.C. for Queen Shub-Ad of Ur. You adorned the palace for a few years. Then, with the queen’s demise, you were shut up in her tomb, along of course with her harpist." [and the story goes on through the later 21st century AD: a good read actually]

"President of the American Association for Research in Baghdad McGuire Gibson, right, gestures as Director of the British Museum Neil MacGregor looks on during a news conference held at the Paris-based U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Thursday April 17, 2003. Some 30 experts met at the UNESCO ( news -web sites ) headquarters Thursday to attempt to draw an inventory of recent cultural destruction in Iraq ( news -web sites ) and to catalogue the missing artifacts. UNESCO Director-General Koichiro Matsuura, unseen, urged the United Nations ( news -web sites ) to impose a temporary embargo on Iraqi cultural objects. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)" [Yahoo! News Photos]

"Thu Apr 17, 7:21 AM ET - Koichiro Matsuura, director general of the UN's cultural organisation UNESCO ( news -web sites ), has called for the establishment of a 'heritage police' to secure Iraq ( news -web sites )'s archaeological treasures.(AFP/File/Adam Jan)" [Yahoo News Photos]

"Did U.S. Antiquities Dealers Plan to Loot Iraq Themselves: A Debate between the American Council for Cultural Policy and the Cambrian Archaeological Association," in Democracy Now! (Pacifica Network), with online audio with summary info, April 17, 2003: William Pearlstein, ACCP treasurer, spoke in his own name; he said there was a misunderstanding, in the Science interview he did not advocate abolishing the "retentionist" Iraqi antiquities law
E. Kemmick, "Glendive Priest Decries Looting of Iraqi Artifacts," in Billings Gazette (Montana), April 17, 2003: "Rev. Joseph Ponessa ... in the face of such tragedy, outrage over the destruction of cultural artifacts perhaps channels an anger that otherwise would have no outlet." "The greatest damage might have been done by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who referred to the looting and rioting in Iraq as 'untidiness.' By pooh-poohing the problem, Ponessa said, 'Rumsfeld incited the country to riot.'"

Photo: "US soldiers guard the archeological museum in central Baghdad. The US military said it is working to recover Iraq ( news -web sites )'s looted archaeological treasures after accusations that American troops stood by and watched the national museum being ransacked(AFP/Odd Andersen)" [April 17, 2003] [Yahoo! News Photos]

E. Robson, "Method to Madness in Museum Looting," in Los Angeles Times, April 17, 2003: "Cylinder seals, cuneiform tablets and ancient coins will leave the country in suitcases and backpacks." "These items will appear for sale for $50 or $100 in antiques stores all over the Middle East, Europe and North America or on EBay. The unsuspecting or the unscrupulous will buy them as novelty Christmas presents or coffee-table pieces." "Other artifacts may be deliberately damaged so that they no longer resemble their published photographs. Looters may chip off the nose of a statue, for instance, so that it is different but still valuable. Or they may use a hammer and chisel to erase the inscription from a piece, much as a more mundane criminal might remove the serial number from a gun. When these altered pieces are offered for sale on the open market, it will be almost impossible to identify them and therefore to confiscate and repatriate them. The risks are worth it to criminal gangs. Ten years ago, a legally owned Assyrian relief from 850 BC was auctioned at Christie's in London for $11 million, at that time the highest price ever paid for an antiquity at auction."
B. Oakes, "Bay State Prof. Says Some Antiquities Recoverable," in WBUR News, with online audio, April 17, 2003: interview with Dr. John Russell: rumors about some looted artifacts already having surfaced should be treated with caution because lots of artifacts have been smuggled out since the Gulf War already so it's hard to know which ones they would be
J. Ewing, J. Weber and M. Shari, "Were Baghdad's Antiquity Thieves Ready? They May Have Known Just What They Were Looking for Because Dealers Ordered the Most Important Pieces Well in Advance," in Business Week, April 17, 2003: "Although most art dealers publicly denounce the trade in stolen objects, many continue to buy and sell works of dubious origin." "'When was the last time any of us saw great Sumerian art come on the market?' asks New York art dealer Andrew Kahane, who deplores the looting. 'It's extraordinarily rare.'" "a few well-informed and unscrupulous Iraqis probably arranged for poorly paid "mules" to truck the pieces through the trackless desert and across the porous borders into Jordan, Syria, or Turkey. From there, the objects can be easily shipped by air to shady international dealers. Typically, the works are intentionally mislabeled, with their museum ID numbers stripped off, to evade detection. Over time, such pieces acquire what's known in the art world as 'good provenance,' or seeming legitimacy. Initially, people who buy the objects will make up histories for them. As the antiquities pass through several more hands, the trail becomes increasingly murky."

"US Sends FBI to Find Baghdad Museum Looters," in Yahoo! News, online, April 17, 2003: "Martin Sullivan ... quit as chairman of the President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property, after eight years in the post, saying the devastation of the Baghdad museum was a 'tragedy'." "... it was not prevented 'due to our nation's inaction.' A source close to the committee told AFP that another committee member, Gary Vikan, was also stepping down."

Photo: "US Marines guard the Iraq (news - web sites) national museum in Baghdad. According to UNESCO (news - web sites), much of the looting of treasures at Iraq's national museum was carried out by organised gangs who traffic in works of ancient art.(AFP/File/Karim)" [Assyrian sculpture]

W. Bossier, "Het Irak Museum heeft nog slechts gedichten. Van het oorlogsgeweld heeft het Iraakse Nationaal Museum niet te lijden gehad, van de plunderingen des te meer. Eeuwenoude kunstschatten zijn gestolen of, wanneer ze te zwaar waren, kapotgeslagen," in NRC Handelsblad (Netherlands), April 17, 2003: Mu'ayed Said Damerji (Director-Gen'l of Dept. of Antiquities) says that the guards were not armed at the time because they were afraid to be mistaken for Iraqi soldiers and shot by the US soldiers; only the Islamic section (Abassid period) has remained almost unscathed; Damerji estimates at least 50,000 items are missing; article title refers to the Museum of Modern Arts which is only left with poetry, no more paintings

Photo: "Een Amerikaanse tank beschermt het Irak Museum sinds gisteren tegen plunderingen. Foto Reuters [Since yesterday, an American tank protects the Iraq Museum against looting. Photo Reuters]"

L. Witt, "The End of Civilization. The Sacking of Iraq's Museums Is Like a 'Lobotomy' of an Entire Culture, Say Art Experts. And They Warned the Pentagon Repeatedly of This Potential Catastrophe Months Before the War," in Salon.com, online, April 17, 2003: first, a correction: the AIA is not headquartered in Milwaukee but in Boston; detailed walk-through of the meetings and contacts between the Pentagon/administration and the archaeological/art community in preparation of the war; "In mid-March, just days before Anglo-American forces entered Baghdad, an expanded group met with Ryan Crocker, deputy assistant secretary of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs." "... [Crocker] pledged that the State Department would set up a working group to focus on protecting Iraq's cultural and archaeological sites. He asked the people at the meeting to provide names of Iraqis who could participate in the working group once the coalition forces had secured Iraq. But it was too late. The war's progress overtook the State Department's efforts ..." "... a conspiracy of antiquity dealers and smugglers. ... the destruction of the [sic] one of the catalogs shows that there was an effort to cover up what was going on. In fact, there have been reports that artifacts that were in the museum have already shown up in antiquity markets in Teheran and Paris." "On Monday, Powell made a statement that anyone caught dealing or possessing stolen antiquities may be prosecuted under Iraqi law and the United States National Stolen Property Act. He also said that Central Command issued orders to all troops in Iraq to protect museums and antiquities throughout the country. Powell said U.S. radio broadcasts are encouraging Iraqis to return any items taken. The Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Affairs will help Iraqis and international experts in their efforts to restore artifacts and the catalogs of antiquities that were damaged by looters. A senior advisor in the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Affairs, Ambassador John Limbert, will take the lead in this effort. Powell also said the U.S. is working through Interpol to help locate stolen items and return them to Iraq before they make it into international crime channels. And he said the U.S. has been in touch with the UNESCO to form a plan to safeguard Iraq's antiquities." "Archeological groups and art curators want to prevent the stolen artifacts from leaving the country. Once they're in other countries, it will be that much harder to retrieve them. To encourage Iraqis to return stolen art and artifacts, they are pushing for the U.S. government to set up an amnesty program and a reward system." "Waldbaum, with the [AIA], says she's talking to different groups and individuals about setting up a Web site that could be a repository for images and descriptions of all the artifacts that were in the museum. That way if they make it to the market, dealers and museum curators will be better able to determine if they were stolen from the Iraqi National Museum. But this will take much time [no kidding!]." [One final note: the American Council for Cultural Policy comes out a lot more positive here than in a lot of other articles]
W. Wenzel, "'Als würde der Louvre zerstört'. Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum bietet Hilfe bei Rettung des Kulturerbes im Irak an," in Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany), April 17, 2003: interview with Dr. Michael Müller-Karpe (Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum Mainz or RGZM): the 170,000 total figure reflects the inventory numbers, however, lots of inventory numbers are used for groups of artifacts, hence the total amount of artifacts at the National Museum runs in the several 100,000s [I was blissfully unaware of this complication in estimating losses and damages till I received a much-appreciated e-mail from Dr. Ulrich Franz in Heidelberg on May 22]; quite a few of the people from the National Museum responsible for restoration of artifacts were trained at the RGZM
K. Croft, "'What If Someone Stole the Constitution and the Liberty Bell?' An American Expert in Islamic Art Tries to Measure the Cultural Devastation Caused by the Baghdad Museum Looting," in Salon.com, online, April 17, 2003: interview with "Linda Komaroff, curator of Islamic art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where she put together the current show, 'The Legacy of Genghis Khan,' in collaboration with Stefano Carboni of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. That show, which opened April 13 and runs through July 27, focuses on the cultural effects of the Mongol invasion and the fall of Baghdad in 1258.": "In the 19th century, archaeologists could remove everything they found [in Iraq]. In the first half of the 20th century it was usually a split, 50/50, between the finders and the host country. In the second half of the 20th century it's become common for whatever is excavated to remain in the country ..." "... the conquest of Baghdad by Mongols in 1258. Who knows what history will say of the fall of Baghdad in 2003. But then it was the end of the Caliphate <the 600-year period in which the Islamic world was ruled by a single theocratic ruler, the Caliph> that produced a shift in focus from Iraq being a dominant center of the Arab world to part of the Iranian empire."
Y. Trofimov, "Iraqis Say Museum Looting Wasn't as Bad as Feared," in The Wall Street Journal, April 17, 2003: I found a copy on the internet of this interview that seems to be one of the earliest mentions of the hiding of artifacts off-site (3-12-05): "Donny George, the director-general of restoration at the Iraqi Antiquities Department, Wednesday said his staff had preserved the museum's most important treasures, including the kings' graves of Ur and the Assyrian bulls. These objects were hidden in vaults that haven't been violated by looters. 'Most of the things were removed. We knew a war was coming, so it was our duty to protect everything,' Mr. George said. 'We thought there would be some sort of bombing at the museum. We never thought it could be looted.' In a city where frequent shooting occurs day and night and the telephones don't work, reliable information is often hard to obtain. Earlier this week, some museum workers reached foreign journalists to complain about an orgy of looting in the museum, saying that little of the collection remains. As secrecy long enveloped the museum -- where part of the collection had been siphoned off by Saddam Hussein's family and sold abroad -- it isn't clear whether these museum workers knew about the prewar preparations to hide the most-valuable artifacts." [we know now that they didn't]; "A belief often voiced in the streets of Baghdad holds that U.S. soldiers themselves stole the most-precious objects in the collection and used the looters to cover up the crime. Mr. George, standing side by side with the American commander in the area, Lt. Col. Eric Schwartz of the U.S. Army Third Infantry Division's Task Force 1-64, dispelled this view." " Lt. Col. Schwartz, whose functions also include feeding the lions in the abandoned Baghdad Zoo next door, said he couldn't move into the museum compound and protect it from looters last week because his soldiers were taking fire from the building -- and were determined not to respond."

Photo: "A U.S. Central Command handout photograph, released Wednesday, April 16, 2003, shows Iraqi dignitaries and representatives gathered Tuesday, April 15, 2003 at Ziggurat temple at Tillil Air base, near the southern town of Nasiriyah, Iraq ( news -web sites ) for a meeting to begin shaping Iraq's postwar government. Participants included Kurds and Sunni and Shiite Arabs from inside Iraq and others who spent years in exile. (AP Photo/U.S. Central Command)" [Yahoo! News Photos]; it seems the modernization of Iraq is well underway: forget about the ziggurat of Ur, now it's the ziggurat at the military Tillil Air Base; at least the US Air force isn't parking its jets right next to the remains like the Iraqis did in the Gulf War of 1991; by the way, a ziggurat is not a temple but a temple platform/tower, the temple itself was on top of the structure you see here; for more info, see for instance this page on the British Museum site

H. Shanks, "Buy Back the Looted Artifacts," in The Wall Street Journal, April 16, 2003: "The archaeological establishment, represented primarily by the leadership of the Archeological Institute of America (AIA), condemns the sale of all antiquities, vilifying collectors and suggesting that antiquities dealers are simply middlemen between looters and immoral collectors -- the latter including the Metropolitan Museum in New York and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. The idea of rescuing a looted artifact by purchasing it is anathema to the AIA." "Since there is no good solution, we must look for the least bad one. Dealing with this unsavory market may be better than a complete loss of these treasures. Until now, the AIA's solution has been utopian: If there were no collectors and no antiquities dealers (as a result of their campaigns), there would be no demand for looted artifacts, so the looters would have no incentive to loot and would therefore stop looting."
D. Jehl and E. Becker, "Experts' Pleas to Pentagon Didn't Save Museum," in The New York Times, April 16, 2003: "A senior Pentagon official said the military had never promised that the buildings would be safeguarded." "... the military [is now] working closely with scholars at the University of Chicago and other institutions to identify missing pieces and to provide photographs of them to American troops. The hope is that forces now guarding Iraq's borders might be able to intercept at least some of the looted items before they are smuggled out."
R.Z. Ahmed, "UK Leads Bid to Save Iraq's Past," in The Times of India, April 16, 2003: "... [British] Museum director Neil MacGregor launched an urgent call to 'kill the market in looted antiquities with an international declaration along the lines of that by the Allied Powers in the Second World War about works of art sold in Nazi-occupied Europe'." "Four years ago, recall doubters, archaeologists from 20 countries around the world had gathered at the Illicit Antiquities Research Centre in Cambridge to demand the setting up of an international body to prevent the looting of historic sites." "Now, they say, Iraq may be practically a bombed-out cultural shell of itself and there is still little international agreement on the issue of looted antiquities." "In an unprecedented gesture of good faith, thought likely to lead to calls for repatriation of other treasures from other countries as well, the Museum is arranging extended loans or gifts to Iraq to recreate its shattered heritage displays."

Photo: "A U.S. tank takes up position in the Iraqi museum in Baghdad, April 16, 2003. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Tuesday rejected charges that the U.S. military was to blame for the looting by Iraqis of priceless treasures from the antiquities museum in Baghdad. Rumsfeld expressed sympathy over the plunder of the Iraqi National Museum last week, when U.S. troops stood by as looters walked off with antiquities or smashed what they could not steal, but he denied at a Pentagon ( news -web sites ) briefing that the war plan for Iraq ( news -web sites ) had not adequately prepared for such a threat. REUTERS/Gleb Garanich" [Yahoo! News Photos]

J.N. Wilford, "Curators Appeal for a Ban on Purchase of Iraqi Artifacts," in The New York Times, April 16, 2003: "Museum leaders in the United States suggested the moratorium as a way of cutting off the looters from potential markets for their contraband. They also recommended an amnesty from prosecution for all Iraqis who turn in ancient artifacts seized last week in attacks on museums in Baghdad and Mosul." "Other experts ... feared that cash rewards would be ill advised." "Dr. McGuire Gibson ... no military guards were posted yesterday at the National Museum ... 'The mob will come back.'"
D. Gordon, "The Lost Cultural Treasures of Baghdad," in The Connection (NPR), with online audio, April 16, 2003: live from Baghdad, he walks through the destroyed National Library and interviews Muayed Said Damerji (former director general of antiquities in Iraq): listed by UNESCO as museum no. 11 in the world; interview with Dr. John M. Russell (Massachusetts College of Art)
M. Dowd, "History Up in Smoke," in The New York Times, April 16, 2003: "We obviously have some things to learn from the British. When they carted off the treasures of the nations they conquered to the British Museum, they at least preserved them for future generations to fight over who should own them." "The secretary of defense made it clear yesterday that he was not too worried about a few old pots in the big scheme of things. He said it was 'a stretch' to attribute the looting of the museum to 'a defect' in the war plan." "The government should have taken 20 seconds, when it was awarding the Halliburton contract, to protect the art, the books and the hospital supplies. Even when they had the museum as an awful example, the war planners let more of Iraq's priceless intellectual history be destroyed, as looters and arsonists ransacked and gutted the National Library. Just because we didn't go to Iraq to bring artistic treasures home doesn't mean we have to be utterly indifferent to their fate."

Photo: "BABYLON, IRAQ (April 16, 2003) - The walls of Nebuchadnezzar's Southern Palace give off a golden sheen as seen from the air, while the Lion of Babylon statue sits in the lower left. Saddam Hussein had the palace reconstructed during his regime, and he had the bricks inscribed with his name. U.S. Army Photo by Pfc. James Matise" [Third Army/ARCENT/CFLCC]

Photo: "Books that survived a fire set by ransackers are seen on the floor of the Iraqi National Library in Baghdad Wednesday, April 16, 2003. Looters and arsonists ransacked and gutted Iraq ( news -web sites )'s National Library and the country's principal Islamic library, dealing another terrible cultural blow to a society that prides itself on its universities, literature and educated elite.(AP Photo/Dusan Vranic)" [Yahoo News Photos]

This site is edited by Belgian archaeologist Francis Deblauwe, Ph.D., living in Streamwood, Illinois (USA), who is affiliated with Archaeos, Inc., and a research associate of the University of Vienna (Austria).