The looting of Baghdad’s museum and library
*
US government implicated in planned theft of Iraqi artistic treasures
By Ann Talbot
19 April 2003
As the full extent of the looting of Iraq’s National Museum in Baghdad
emerges, it becomes clear that there was nothing accidental about it. Rather
it was the result of a long planned project to plunder the artistic and
historical treasures that are held in the museums of Iraq.
Had the National Museum of Iraq been looted by poor slum dwellers it would
have been crime enough, and the responsibility would have rested with the
American administration that refused, despite repeated warnings, to provide
for the security of Baghdad’s cultural buildings.
Once the museum staff were able to communicate with the outside world,
however, it became apparent that the looting was not random. It was the work
of people who knew what they were looking for and came specially equipped
for the job.
Dr. Dony George, head of the Baghdad Museum, said, “I believe they were
people who knew what they wanted. They had passed by the gypsum copy of the
Black Obelisk. This means that they must have been specialists. They did not
touch those copies.”
Speaking on Britain’s Channel 4 News, he told Dr. John Curtis of the British
Museum that among the artifacts that have been stolen are the sacred vase of
Warka, a 5,000-year-old golden vessel found at Ur, an Akkadian statue base,
and an Assyrian statue. It was, said Dr. Curtis, “Like stealing the Mona
Lisa.”
It was only almost a week after the museum was originally looted that Dr.
George was able to alert archaeologists worldwide to what had been stolen.
The American military authorities had made no effort to prevent the objects
leaving Baghdad or to put in process an international search for the stolen
artifacts.
The US reluctance to act cannot be explained by any lack of warning.
Professional archaeologists and art historians had told the Pentagon of the
danger of looting beforehand. Dr. Irving Finkel of the British Museum told C
hannel 4 that the looting was “entirely predictable and could easily have
been stopped.”
The museum was the victim of a carefully planned assault. The thieves who
took the most valuable material came prepared with equipment to lift the
heaviest objects, which the staff could not move from the galleries, and had
keys to the vaults where the most valuable items were stored. Not since the
Nazis systematically stripped the museums of Europe has such a crime been
committed.
The US online publication of BusinessWeek magazine reiterated the theme of
premeditation and conspiracy in the looting of Iraq’s museums in an April 17
article headlined “Were Baghdad’s Antiquity Thieves Ready?” The article
carries the subtitle: “They may have known just what they were looking for
because dealers ordered the most important pieces well in advance.”
BusinessWeek writes: “It was almost as if the perpetrators were waiting for
Baghdad to fall to make their move. Gil J. Stein, a professor of archaeology
at the University of Chicago, which has been conducting digs in Iraq for 80
years, believes that dealers ordered the most important pieces well in
advance. ‘They were looking for very specific artifacts,’ he says. ‘They
knew where to look.’”
Since the last Gulf War in 1991 Iraqi antiquities have flooded onto the
market from the museums that were looted then and from archaeological sites
that have been attacked with bulldozers. At such locations ancient statues
have been sawed apart so they could be exported.
This plundering of Iraq’s cultural heritage has only whetted the appetite of
collectors who are already responsible for looting Far Eastern, Latin
American and Italian archaeological sites. 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. According to a report by the
McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, “The Trade in illicit
Antiquities: the Destruction of the World’s Archaeological Heritage,”
produced in 2001, London and New York are the main markets for this trade.
Switzerland, which allows an art work that has been in the country for five
years to be granted a legal title, is a key trans-shipment point.
Professor Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn, director of the McDonald Institute at
Cambridge, told a press conference at the report’s launch that the trade
continued because “The government is in the pocket of the art market, which
wants to keep the flow of antiquities.” He added, “It’s a scandal.”
As news of the latest looting broke, the Labour government of British Prime
Minister Tony Blair organised a hasty press conference in the British
Museum, at which Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell promised official support to
protect Iraqi antiquities.
Even as she spoke, the National Library of Iraq was being looted. Home to
rare, centuries-old illuminated copies of the Koran and other examples of
Islamic calligraphy, as well as irreplaceable historical documents from the
Ottoman Empire, the building was set on fire, destroying an untold number of
texts.
Reporter Robert Fisk, who saw the flames, ran to get US marines in an
attempt to save some of the collection, but they refused to help. Fisk wrote
in the Independent, “I gave the map location, the precise name in Arabic and
English. I said the smoke could be seen from three miles away and it would
take only five minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there wasn’t an
American at the scene and the flames were shooting 200 feet into the air.”
After the fate of Baghdad museum, it can only be concluded that the
generalised looting and arson at the library served to cover up a more
systematic crime, in which select manuscripts were stolen for wealthy
collectors. In the process they connived in the burning of books—another
Nazi practice.
The role of the ACCP
In the aftermath of these two devastating attacks on culture, attention has
focused on the activities of the American Council for Cultural Policy. Even
the British press that works under some of the toughest libel laws in the
world has been willing to suggest that the ACCP may have influenced US
government policy on Iraqi cultural artifacts.
The ACCP was formed in 2001 by a group of wealthy art collectors to lobby
against the Cultural Property Implementation Act, which attempts to regulate
the art market and stop the flow of stolen goods into the US. It has
defended New York art dealer Frederick Schultz, who was convicted under the
National Stolen Property Act, and opposes the use of the 1977 US v. McClain
decision as a legal precedent in cases concerning the handling of stolen art
objects.
In the McClain case a US judge accepted that all pre-Columbian art or
jewellery brought into the US without the express consent of the Mexican
government was stolen property. Mexican law regards all archaeological
artifacts as state property and bans their export. Mexico is one of a number
of countries that has such legislation.
Ashton Hawkins, a leading art lawyer and founder of the ACCP, regards such
legislation as “retentionist”. He has condemned the archaeologically rich
“source” countries for attempting to protect their archaeological sites and
museums by such measures, and has argued that under the Clinton
administration such “retentionist” policies came to dominate US government
policy.
Hawkins has his sights set on the great Middle Eastern museums. He has
called for the Egyptian antiquities that are held in the Cairo Museum to be
dispersed. “I would like to propose,” he said, “that the Cairo Museum offer
museums around the world the opportunity to acquire up to 50 objects for
their collections. In return, the museums would make a very substantial
contribution for the construction of the new museum under the Giza
plateau—$1 million each, for example.”
The ACCP’s inaugural meeting took place at the Fifth Avenue apartment of
Guido Goldman, a collector of Uzbek textiles. Among those present were
Arthur Houghton, the former curator of the Getty Museum at Malibu in
California, which is notorious for displaying works of suspicious
provenance. Hawkins himself retired in 2000 as vice president of the
trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, an institution that,
according to its own former director, Thomas Hoving, holds many artifacts
looted from Etruscan tombs.
Before the war began, the ACCP met with Pentagon officials, declaring their
great concern for Iraqi antiquities. What that concern means is evident from
the remarks of William Pearlstein, the group’s treasurer, who also describes
Iraqi laws on antiquities as “retentionist”. The ACCP deny that they want
Iraqi laws changed, but the looting of the museum and library will
effectively circumvent that problem if US law on stolen art objects and
archaeological material can be changed.
Professor John Merryman of Stanford Law School and a member of the ACCP has
called for a “selective international enforcement of export controls” in US
courts. In other words, it should be perfectly legitimate to import the
objects looted from Baghdad if a US court chooses not to recognise Iraqi
legislation.
Merryman set out the organisation’s principles in a 1998 paper in which he
argued that the fact that an art object had been stolen did not in itself
bar it from lawful importation into the US.
He went on to claim, “The existence of a market preserves cultural objects
that might otherwise be destroyed or neglected by providing them with a
market value. In an open, legitimate trade cultural objects can move to the
people and institutions that value them most and are therefore most likely
to care for them” ( International Law and Politics, vol. 31: 1).
This is a self-justifying argument that reeks of hypocrisy. Wealthy
collectors can now point to the chaos on the streets of Baghdad, the looting
of the museum and the burning of the library as evidence that the Iraqis are
unable or unwilling—too poor or too ignorant—to look after their treasures,
which would be better housed in American museums or private collections.
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. Despite the fact that many of the ACCP members
have been associated with major public institutions, their agenda is
profoundly opposed to the public dissemination of art and archaeology. They
are not only trying to change the law in other countries, but are working
against the most progressive traditions of American society, which has
always prized its public museums.
A scientific tradition
The development of public museums went hand in hand with the development of
a scientific understanding of archaeological artifacts and the societies
that produced them. 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.
Public museums are public not only in their funding and because they open
their galleries to visitors, but in the sense that they make knowledge
available to all—something that has been recognised as a primary requisite
of the scientific process since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth
century.
One of the effects of the looting of the Baghdad museum has been to destroy
the card catalogue and computer records of the museum’s holdings. This has
not only made tracking down its treasures more difficult, but has also
undermined generations of patient archaeological work. To destroy such a
catalogue is, both in a symbolic and practical sense, to make a collection
private, because its contents become unknown to the outside world.
While the major objects are well known internationally, 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.
Archaeologists spend their time sifting the detritus of past civilisations,
often literally. They may sieve tons of earth looking for beetle wing cases
or seeds. Cess pits and rubbish heaps produce a wealth of knowledge. What is
thrown away and discarded provides a context for the relics of great temples
and palaces, or royal tombs.
Petr Charvat’s recent book Mesopotamia before History [1] contains lovingly
photographed images of pieces of mud impressed with rush matting. This is
not the stuff to grace a collector’s cabinet, but reveals vital information
about the craft skills and way of life of ancient Mesopotamians.
A blow to world scholarship
The Baghdad museum was more than a place to display artifacts. All
excavations carried out in Iraq by international teams of archaeologists
were reported to it. The museum therefore possessed a database of knowledge
that was accessible to researchers internationally, and was the hub of a
vast cooperative endeavour. Its looting and the destruction of its records
are a blow to world scholarship. It threatens to turn the clock back more
than 150 years to the period before scientific archaeology in Mesopotamia.
Early excavations were by modern standards unscientific, as excavators were
still learning their discipline by a process of trial and error. One of the
most elementary lessons of that learning process was that context is
everything in archaeology. An artifact can only tell its full story if its
context is known.
By context, an archaeologist means the physical position of an artifact in
the ground, its relationship to other artifacts and to the layers of earth
around it. From this information it is possible to determine an artifact’s
relative date and considerable information about its practical use and
social significance. Ripped out of this context, it loses much of its
meaning. Even the finest work of art can be better appreciated when its
context and the social conditions of its creators are understood.
In its widest sense, understanding an artifact’s context means understanding
its relationship to the entire archaeological site at which it was found, to
other sites round about it, and to the historic landscape in which it
belongs. While national feelings are often evoked to justify keeping
archaeological artifacts in their country of origin, the more important
scientific reason for doing so is that the context of the artifact is
preserved by keeping it close to where it was found.
It is still possible to see in modern Iraq houses built by similar methods
to those employed by ancient builders and to see boats built to similar
designs. The full significance of Mesopotamian artifacts can only be
appreciated by seeing them in the context of the extraordinary landscape of
modern Iraq—a country where every hill that rises above the plain has been
built up from layers of mud brick representing generations of occupation.
The American colonial administrator, retired general Jay Garner, tried to
co-opt the emotional impact of that landscape for his own political purposes
by holding his big tent meeting within view of the 4,000-year-old ziggurat
of Ur, which was the temple platform for the moon god Nanna. But by allowing
the museum of Baghdad to be looted, the US authorities have shown they have
no regard for the real importance of Iraq to human history.
When the medieval European cartographers who drew the thirteenth century
Hereford map of the world set out to represent the planet on which they
lived, they put Asia at the top because to them it was the most important
continent. There lay the lands of the Bible. Jerusalem was at the very
centre of their world view, and beyond it lay Babylon, the scene of the
Jewish captivity, the Tower of Babel and Abraham’s home in the city of Ur.
So deeply impressed on the European mind was the Biblical image of the world
that the first excavators of ancient sites in this region were looking for
confirmation of the Bible. Even in the twentieth century, Leonard Woolley
referred to his excavations at Warka by the Biblical name of Ur of the
Chaldees.
Yet the material that came out the excavations carried out by Woolley, and
others such as Layard, Botta and Hormuzd Rassam, shook the Biblical view of
the world. Not the least important discovery was that familiar Bible stories
such as Noah and the Flood had their origin in Mesopotamia long before the
Bible was written. As the cuneiform writing of thousands of clay tablets was
deciphered, it was realised that numerous complex and highly developed
civilisations had existed in Mesopotamia of an antiquity never before
guessed.
The full extent of this history only became apparent as the technique of
Carbon 14 dating and other scientific methods were refined. Only in the
second half of the twentieth century was it realised that settled farming
could be traced back to the mid-eleventh millennium BC in the Middle East.
The cradle of civilization
The earliest farming communities do not occur in the area that is
present-day Iraq, but in the better watered highlands of the Zagros
Mountains, Anatolia, the Levant and the Deh Luran Plain. Nevertheless, Iraq
was the centre of the second phase of the protracted Neolithic Revolution
that began with the domestication of animals and cereal crops.
In Iraq that revolution went a significant step further with the development
of irrigation, a technique that vastly increased agricultural productivity.
The surplus produced by irrigation allowed the first urban civilisation on
the planet to emerge in the very region that the combined military forces of
the US and the UK are reducing to a wasteland.
By 5800 BC, small farming communities were appearing along the Euphrates.
Within a few centuries they had coalesced into dense urban settlements, each
of several thousand people centred on a temple which was largely responsible
for managing the irrigation system, distributing food, and importing stone,
minerals and timber from the neighbouring highlands.
Over two millennia these Mesopotamian cities developed the art of copper
smelting, alloying bronze and, most importantly, writing. Writing was
essential to the administration of cities that depended on a largely
artificial ecosystem created by irrigation, and which needed to import even
the most vital raw materials.[2]
Writing enabled a dramatic intellectual development to take place. What
began as a method of recording stores and deliveries became a medium for
writing poetry, stories and history. Science and mathematics flourished.
Modern research has revealed evidence of multiplication tables, tables of
reciprocals, squares, square roots, cubes and logarithms to bases 2 and 16.
Other texts show volumes and areas, linear and quadratic equations.
Babylonian mathematicians calculated the value of pi to 3.125, close to its
true value. Astronomy was highly developed and if it was understood in terms
of omens and prophecy, its predictions of eclipses and the movement of the
planets were nonetheless accurate.[3]
The social and political structure of Mesopotamian society cannot be traced
directly from its material remains, and archaeologists differ about its
character and the course of its development, but Petr Charvat finds in
Mesopotamian society to 3000 BC that “in all spheres of society the
principle of universality and equality comes to the fore ... the material
standard of living is equalised by redistribution ... people meet in
assemblies to discuss and decide matters of common interest.... All receive
the same treatment in life and death” ( Mesopotamia Before History, pp.
158-59).
From 3000 BC there is some evidence of social stratification and the
emergence of a political elite or ruling class in the “royal burials” of Ur,
but some archaeologists dispute this characterisation of those burials.
In this period two great civilisations emerge: in the south of present-day
Iraq is the Sumerian civilization, and in the north the Akkadian, which are
both based on a collection of city states that preserve many of the cultural
traditions of the earlier period. Not until 2334 BC does the first empire
appear under the rule of Sargon of Agade, who unites these two
confederations.
Sargon’s short-lived empire was replaced by that of Ur Nammu in 2112 BC. The
thousands of clay tablets that survive from this period testify to the
careful management of resources that kept this empire alive until 1990 BC,
when it was replaced by the Babylonian empire, which reached its high point
under Hammurabi in 1792 BC.
The mid-fourteenth century BC saw the rise of the first Assyrian empire. The
Assyrians were to dominate Mesopotamia again, and the whole region from the
Gulf to the Mediterranean in the ninth century BC. In 612 BC the Babylonian
empire was established. It most outstanding ruler, Nebuchadnezzar, built the
Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the double walls of the city, the great ziggurat
and the processional way. He was responsible for sacking Jerusalem and
taking many of the Jews into captivity.
This succession of empires and the Persian empire that followed were
sustained by the immense productivity of the irrigation system and the
complex system of administration that maintained it. The sophisticated
concepts that had been developed in the process fed into the intellectual
systems of later societies. Even the Greeks, from whom we derive the name
for the land between the rivers, stood in awe of Mesopotamia’s achievements.
One of the ministries that has been systematically destroyed in the recent
days of looting is the Ministry of Irrigation. We might say that by this act
the US administration seeks to drive Iraq back to the dark ages, except that
Iraq has never known a dark age in the sense that Europe has. Empires might
rise and fall, but as long as the irrigation system continued to function
the land between the rivers could produce more food than it needed. By
attacking the irrigation system, the US administration is causing more
damage in a few weeks than any other previous invader.
Iraq’s cultural significance did not end with the close of the Persian
empire. Throughout the European dark ages it remained a haven of learning,
preserving under the Caliphs of Baghdad classical texts lost in the West.
Islamic scholarship was to prove vital to the re-emergence of Aristotelian
philosophy in thirteenth century Europe and to the Renaissance.
The full extent of the losses in this respect will only become apparent when
the looting at the National Library is itemised. That account is yet to
come.
What is already clear is that a great crime has been committed against not
only the Iraqi people, but against the whole of humanity, since it is the
history of humanity that has been attacked. For this reason the sack of
Baghdad marks a significant point on the trajectory of the Bush
administration as it attempts to plunge the world into a new barbarism that
would outstrip anything that history can show from the past.
Notes:
1. Petr Charvát, Mesopotamia before History, Routledge, 2002.
2. Brian M. Fagan, People of the Earth, Prentice Hall, 2001.
3. Michael Roaf, Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia, Equinox books, 1990
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/apr2003/loot-a19.shtml
Ron Hinds
> The looting of Baghdad’s museum and library
>
> US government implicated in planned theft of Iraqi artistic treasures
>
<snipped BS>
The article gives absolutely no proof that the US government had anything to
do with the thefts. It does seem to indicate that the looting was not
random, therefore probably not done by ordinary citizens like the looting of
government buildings and Baath-owned businesses. But much more likely than
the US government being behind it is the Iraqi Baathists and other members
of the former regime. They would have known which pieces were valuable and
which were fakes, and more importantly, actually had a *motive* for the
crimes! Even the writer of the article gives no plausible motive why the US
government would want to steal artifacts from Iraq.
*
"Ron Hinds" <donts...@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:b7v8li$1m$1...@ngspool-d02.news.aol.com...
> "*" <windri...@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:3ea2d840_3@newsfeed...
> > The looting of Baghdad’s museum and library
> >
> > US government implicated in planned theft of Iraqi artistic treasures
> >
>
> <snipped BS>
>
> The article gives absolutely no proof that the US government had anything
to
> do with the thefts.
You might want to reread it then to see that there are some disturbing
coincidences.
It is obvious that the U.S. was warned months in advance and stood by as the
looting and sacking proceeded while already having security in place for the
Iraq Oil Ministry.
How better to subjugate a country than cause it to lose its national
treasures/identity?
-----------------------------------------------------
----------------------
> It does seem to indicate that the looting was not
Neil
> >
> > US government implicated in planned theft of Iraqi artistic treasures
> >
>
> <snipped BS>
>
> The article gives absolutely no proof that the US government had anything to
> do with the thefts. It does seem to indicate that the looting was not
> random, therefore probably not done by ordinary citizens like the looting of
> government buildings and Baath-owned businesses. But much more likely than
> the US government being behind it is the Iraqi Baathists and other members
> of the former regime. They would have known which pieces were valuable and
> which were fakes, and more importantly, actually had a *motive* for the
> crimes! Even the writer of the article gives no plausible motive why the US
> government would want to steal artifacts from Iraq.
It is indeed a rather extreme postion to suggest that the US was
*behind* the looting. The more typical and appropriate criticism is
that US/British planners were negligent in *protecting* the museum and
libraries, which is still bad enough. A related side issue: the role
of the ACCP in influencing policies about antiquities is just as
interesting and worthy of exposure as other examples of potentially
consequential interest-group pressure.
Neil