War and World Heritage: Iraq’s Archaeological Tragedy The National Museum of Iraq was looted in mid-April 2003, following the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s government. Antiquities delineating the rise of civilization in Mesopotamia were spirited away or smashed. These treasures, some dating back more than 7,000 years ago, were the hard-won legacy of countless archaeological excavations. The world community is already rallying to recover and salvage as many artifacts as possible. It will take time, however, just to document the extent of the damage to this legacy, in part because at the time of the looting scholars were still struggling to make an inventory of the museum’s holdings following losses incurred during the 1990–1991 war. Even more uncertainty surrounds the destruction and plundering that may have befallen numerous scattered archaeological sites and regional museums. These losses are not just Iraq’s, but the world’s. For the June 2003 issue of Natural History, journalist David Keys prepared the update below. Following that, the feature article “Robbing the Archaeological Cradle,” by archaeologist John Malcolm Russell, presents an appreciation of this ancient heritage and details how it has been at risk since the Gulf War. Originally published in the February 2001 issue, this essay remains a relevant lesson in the cultural costs of war. Aftershocks By David Keys Around the world, the initial response to the looting of Iraq’s internationally important museums and archaeological sites was, in the catchphrase of the moment, shock and awe. Early reports claimed near-total destruction of the collections in Iraq’s National Museum in Baghdad, numbering some 170,000 ancient artifacts. Three weeks after the looting began, paralysis continued to dog the military reaction. Meanwhile, however, an international roster of organizations and scholars had begun to move toward coordinated action. Subsequent estimates put the losses at roughly 15 percent of the collections, either smashed, damaged, or looted. Despite the disaster in the museum, virtually all 80,000 of the institution’s cuneiform tablets appear to be safe, as do most of the precious Mesopotamian cylinder seals. The losses remain devastating, but they fall far short of complete ruination. What is more, in response to appeals by Muslim religious leaders, some of the stolen objects are gradually being returned. By the end of April, an alliance of leading Western museums and universities had announced a multimillion-dollar initiative to provide expertise and funding for the repair and conservation efforts. But the basic police work—sealing borders, hunting for thieves, tracking down illicit Iraqi antiquities that reach Western art markets—had been left to governments. Cultural institutions could do little more than beg political leaders to devote resources to an effective, aggressive recovery effort. The looting of the National Museum itself began on April 10 and continued sporadically for several days. Successive waves of looters broke into dozens of rooms. Tens of thousands of documents, photographs, slides, and index cards were scattered over floors throughout much of the building. Some of the papers had been gathered into piles by vandals who, it is thought, had intended to turn them into bonfires to burn the building down. But they must have been disturbed—possibly by other gangs of thieves. Some looters came equipped with glass and metal cutters and other tools—as well as trucks and vans for hauling away heavy pieces of looted treasure. The better-organized gangs ignored replicas and stole only genuine ancient treasures. And with considerable organization, they manhandled all the museum’s safes into one room—presumably where they had installed their metal-cutting equipment. Looters also attacked the National Library, the library of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, and the library at Baghdad University. The museum in the northern city of Mosul—filled with treasures from Nineveh, Nimrud, and Hatra—was also badly looted. More objects have probably been damaged than have been stolen. Many people outside Iraq have been at a loss to explain the sheer vandalism that Iraqis directed against their own cultural heritage. But as far as the poor of Baghdad are concerned, that heritage had become a surrogate for Saddam Hussein. Images of Hussein dressed as the seventh-century b.c. Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar II stared down on Baghdad’s population. Giant helmeted heads at a presidential palace in Baghdad depicted Hussein as the Muslim military leader Saladin. Top Republican Guard divisions were named after ancient Mesopotamian kings. There is, of course, also plenty of anger in Iraq that the Baghdad National Museum was not protected by U.S. forces when they first occupied the city. Just a few days before the invasion, leading academics met with officials from the Pentagon and the State Department to discuss how best to protect Iraq’s cultural artifacts, and the National Museum was number one on the list. The academics warned that serious looting would be inevitable unless the museum was properly guarded. Yet the U.S. military offered virtually no protection to the museum during the first six days of the U.S. occupation. When the museum staff asked for help from a nearby tank crew, the soldiers told them that they had no orders to protect the building. Even when top museum officials appealed directly to senior military officers, no protection materialized. The lack of a coordinated military response to what Donny George, the director of research at the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, has called “the crime of the century” was still the rule of the day three weeks after the initial occupation of Baghdad. U.S. troops stationed at border posts were still not searching vehicles for looted treasure, noted George, who personally crossed the Iraqi-Jordanian border. “Anyone can take anything and go out of the country,” George added. “It’s a tragedy.”

Virtually all of Iraq is an archaeological site, so the 1990–91 Gulf War inevitably took a toll on the remains of ancient settlements, some well known and others still awaiting discovery and exploration. One of these sites was Ur of the Chaldees, the reputed birthplace of Abraham, where excavations in the 1920s and 1930s had yielded a great temple complex as well as royal tombs packed with sacrificed servants and gold treasures rivaling the riches of Tutankhamen. Bombing and strafing left four large craters in the temple precinct and some 400 holes in the temple’s great ziggurat, or stepped tower. Far worse, following the cease-fire and the imposition of sanctions, the weakened Iraqi authorities were powerless to protect most of the country’s museums and archaeological sites from looting and theft. Even now, a decade later, the nation’s Department of Antiquities and Heritage is short of needed resources. As a result, thousands of artifacts have been smuggled out of Iraq and offered on the international market. Furthermore, in the course of an emergency agricultural development program aimed at averting food shortages, the Iraqis have bulldozed, plowed, inundated, and irrigated countless ancient sites. What is being lost is not only Iraq’s heritage but the world’s.

Called Mesopotamia by the Greeks and variously Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia, and Assyria by its own ancient inhabitants, Iraq has an excellent claim to be the cradle of Western civilization. The emergence of complex communities was accompanied by developments such as writing, the wheel, irrigation agriculture, cities, monumental architecture, state-sponsored warfare, organized religion, written laws, kingship, a wealthy class, imperialism, centrally organized production of hand-crafted goods, and large-scale trade. By and large, the first eleven chapters of Genesis are set in southern Iraq, in the land of Shinar (Babylonia). Eden, the Sumerian word meaning "steppe," was the name of a district in Sumer, or southern Babylonia. Mesopotamian royal gardens, notably the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, may have inspired the story of the Garden of Eden. According to Genesis, the first cities founded in Shinar after the flood were Babel (Babylon), Erech (Uruk), and Accad (Akkad), while the first cities in Assyria (northern Iraq) were Calah (Kalhu, now Nimrud) and Nineveh. With the exception of Akkad, well-preserved remains of all these cities can be seen in Iraq today.

Archaeologists were relatively slow to tackle the region’s countless tells, the earth mounds that mark the sites of ancient settlements. Consisting largely of the accumulated remains of mud-brick buildings, they were less enticing than the standing stone ruins of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and their historic identity was not always apparent, even to local inhabitants. The first archaeologists to explore them were Paul-Émile Botta, a French diplomat, and Austen Henry Layard, an adventurous English lawyer. In the mid-nineteenth century they both probed mounds in and near present-day Mosul, a city in northern Iraq that embraces the site of ancient Nineveh. Between the two of them, they uncovered the remains of five Assyrian palaces.

One, excavated by Layard in Nineveh, was the "palace without rival" of Sennacherib, a king of the Assyrian empire. The inner walls and courtyards were lined with two miles of sculptured stone slabs depicting the king’s various campaigns, from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. Sennacherib is best remembered for his unsuccessful siege of Jerusalem in 701 b.c. The siege was cut short, according to conflicting biblical accounts, either by the angel of the Lord or by a large bribe paid by the Judaean king. An inscription on a statue found in the doorway of Sennacherib’s throne room also recounts the bribery tale, providing the first-known independent written account corresponding to a story in the Bible.

Within the palace Layard discovered thousands of clay cuneiform tablets, constituting the world’s earliest-known comprehensive collection of written knowledge. In 1872 George Smith, a young Assyriologist at the British Museum, discovered that one of these tablets told the story of a great flood that had covered Earth. Suddenly it appeared that eyewitness accounts might be able to enrich the entire biblical narrative, if only the right tablets could be unearthed. This prospect precipitated a refocusing of archaeological attention in the last quarter of the nineteenth century—from art to tablets and from northern to southern Iraq, the setting of Genesis. Although little direct evidence for the historicity of the biblical accounts emerged from these excavations, they did reveal a previously unknown civilization that had profoundly shaped the biblical texts.

At the turn of the twentieth century, German teams initiated extensive excavations at three major sites: Babylon, Ashur, and Uruk. In about 1750 b.c., Babylon was the capital of an empire under Hammurabi, a king whose law code recorded principles of justice still recognized today. More than a thousand years later, Babylon became the capital of an even greater empire under King Nebuchadrezzar II (Nebuchadnezzar), who reigned from about 605 to about 561 b.c. and is traditionally credited with establishing the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The Tower of Babel, the great ziggurat beside Babylon’s temple of Marduk, dates to this era. Its foundations are visible today. Babylon was also famous for its city wall, part of which—the polychrome brick Ishtar Gate—was carried off to Berlin by the German excavators. Two earlier versions of the gate, adorned with bulls and dragons in brick relief, still stand at the site.

In 587 b.c. Nebuchadrezzar II captured Jerusalem and herded its population east to Babylonia. Some biblical scholars believe that, after arriving in Babylon, the captives drew on the traditions of their conquerors to compose the story of a people that originated in Eden, survived the Flood, built the Tower of Babel, and then, in the person of a great patriarch, migrated westward to Israel. Abraham’s journey became a source of inspiration for the exiled Judaeans.

The ancient city of Ashur, on the Tigris River in northern Iraq, gave its name to the god, the land, and the people of Assyria. Early in the second millennium b.c., Ashur grew wealthy through trade with Turkey, later becoming the center of an empire that encompassed all of what is now Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Egypt, as well as large parts of Turkey and Iran. At Ashur the German excavators uncovered monuments and documents from the entire span of Assyrian history.

Uruk, in southern Iraq, often considered the world’s first true city, is the place where writing first appeared. Its legendary king, Gilgamesh, is the subject of the oldest-known epic story, in which he fails in his quest to elude death but achieves immortality by building Uruk’s great city wall. So complete was the city’s economic dominance of Mesopotamia from about 3500 to 3000 b.c. that mosaics made of baked clay cones, a feature considered evidence of an Uruk administrative or mercantile presence, are found from Turkey to Egypt. While the German archaeological work was permanently cut short at Babylon and Ashur by World War I, it was resumed at Uruk prior to World War II and again in 1953. Over the course of a century of excavations there, the German team has recovered more evidence for the rise of Mesopotamian civilization than is available from any other site. Discoveries there include early evidence of kingship and monumental architecture and clear representations of religious rituals.

Prior to World War I, the area that is now Iraq was part of the Ottoman Empire. The excavations of Layard, Botta, and other foreign archaeologists in the nineteenth century were carried out under permits issued by the government of the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul. At first the sultan showed little interest in ancient remains,

The earth mounds that mark the region’s ancient sites were less enticing to archaeologists than were the stone ruins of Egypt, Greece, and Rome.

and excavators in the mid-nineteenth century were allowed to export whatever they wished. This is when the British Museum and the Louvre acquired the bulk of their renowned Mesopotamian collections, which aroused great scholarly and public excitement. Stung by the loss of irreplaceable treasures from the empire and anxious to establish Istanbul as a center for the study of ancient art, the Ottoman statesman Hamdi Bey founded the Archaeological Museum of Istanbul in 1881. Thereafter, foreign archaeologists were obliged to share their discoveries with the museum, which divided duplicate finds with the excavators and had the right to retain unique pieces.

After World War I, Iraq became a separate state administered by Britain. With the energetic guidance of a British official, Gertrude Bell, who advocated that antiquities be retained by the country of origin, the Iraq Museum was founded in 1923 in Baghdad. Upon the end of the British mandate in 1932, Iraq began to take charge of its own patrimony. An antiquities law enacted in 1936 decreed that all the country’s antiquities more than 200 years old, whether movable or immovable, above ground or below, were the property of the state and that none could be excavated, sold, or exported without government authorization. Initially, the Ottoman tradition of dividing duplicate finds with their excavators was still permitted, but amendments to the law in the 1970s eliminated this provision.

Artifacts from archaeological sites were now housed in the Iraq Museum, in the heart of downtown Baghdad, which accumulated the most important collection of Mesopotamian antiquities in the world: gold from Ur, ivories and gold from Kalhu, thousands of clay tablets, and major works of sculpture from all periods. The Iraqi Department of Antiquities and Heritage created a nationwide program to educate the populace about their country’s cultural history. The centerpiece was a network of regional museums, each of which displayed hundreds of objects chosen to provide a microcosm of Iraqi heritage. Largely as a result of the enthusiasm and cooperation engendered by this program, the plundering of archaeological sites was rare.

At the time of the Gulf War, archaeology was experiencing an extraordinary revival in Iraq, after a dry spell during the nation’s 1980-88 war with Iran. Dozens of foreign and Iraqi teams were working at an unprecedented rate, often in response to threats posed by modern urban and agricultural development.

Robbers chopped off the human head of a colossal winged bull and sawed it into eleven pieces in an attempt to smuggle it abroad.

At the ancient site of Sippar, just southwest of Baghdad, Iraqi archaeologists had discovered an extensive library from the late Babylonian empire. A wide variety of clay tablets (literary works, omens, incantations, astronomical records, mathematical exercises) were found, still arranged on the shelves. British and Polish teams in northern Iraq were excavating Nemrik, Qermez Dere, and M’lefaat, three of the oldest villages in the world. (These settlements, dating to about 8000 b.c., were contemporary with the first domestication of plants and animals for subsistence purposes.) And at least five American teams had recently renewed or initiated fieldwork at the sites of Nippur, Lagash, Mashkan-Shapir, Dilbat, and Nineveh. Knowledge of Iraq’s past was increasing exponentially.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990, virtually all archaeological activity ceased, and the war and subsequent imposition of UN sanctions have left Iraq’s patrimony in peril. Not only is almost no money available for the preservation of antiquities, but in addition, some Iraqi citizens, squeezed between ruinous inflation and shortages of basic necessities, have turned to looting and selling artifacts from excavated and unexcavated sites and even from museums. In the past few years, for example, robbers have hacked up the sculptured stone slabs from the palace of Sennacherib, which had been reconstructed as a museum in the 1960s, and some of the best-preserved fragments have been smuggled abroad to satisfy collectors.

Another affected site is Dur Sharrukin (modern Khorsabad), where Botta discovered the palace of the Assyrian ruler Sargon II (reigned 721–705 b.c.). Before the Gulf War, little of the building itself remained standing, and its monumental sculptures were on display in Baghdad and Paris. Immediately prior to the war, however, Iraqi archaeologists had excavated a colossal human-headed winged bull from one of the city gates. A few years later, robbers chopped off its head and sawed it into eleven pieces in an unsuccessful attempt to smuggle it abroad. The mutilated remains are now on display in the Iraq Museum, and ten of the perpetrators are reported to have been executed.

At Kalhu, Layard excavated the site of the palace belonging to King Tiglath-pileser III (reigned 744–727 b.c.). The building had been dismantled by one of the king’s successors, and its sculptured wall slabs stacked neatly in preparation for recarving. Recently, many of the slabs were stolen and cut up into smaller pieces, which are now appearing on the international art market. The fate of more than a hundred pounds of gold jewelry

One of the tablets told the story of a great flood that covered Earth. Might eyewitness accounts exist to enrich the biblical narrative?

and other fabulous artifacts that Iraqi archaeologists excavated just before the Gulf War from the burial sites of four Assyrian queens remains unknown.

The site of Telloh ("the mound of tablets"), excavated by French archaeologists beginning in 1877, was the cult city Girsu in the ancient city-state of Lagash. Among the cuneiform records found there is an inscribed stele (upright stone slab) from about 2500 b.c. that constitutes the earliest known documentation of state-sponsored warfare. Lagash was competing with neighboring Umma for irrigation rights, and the dispute was settled by armies that rode into battle in war wagons, among the earliest documented wheeled vehicles. After the Gulf War, Telloh was apparently plundered, because previously unknown temple records from the site appear regularly for sale on the Internet.

Lagash’s rival, Umma, unexcavated before the war, recently fell prey to wholesale looting, resulting in large numbers of tablets from the site being offered on the antiquities market. In response, the Iraqi Department of Antiquities and Heritage initiated its own excavations at Umma and last year discovered a monumental palace or temple and a huge cemetery, described by the excavators as “a city of graves”—all dating from about 2500 b.c. Perhaps a stele with Umma’s version of the war with Lagash will eventually come to light.

During the bombing of Baghdad, the Iraq Museum was closed and its holdings dispersed for safety to the regional museums and the vaults of the Central Bank in Baghdad. The unanticipated sequel was that the bank was bombed, and during the uprisings that followed the cease-fire, at least seven of the regional museums were looted. The full extent of the losses is not yet known; however, some 4,000 objects have been reported missing from the regional museums. Last year the Iraq Museum reopened, but it may take years to evaluate and conserve the collections. Rebuilding the professional staff, diminished by hardships and cutbacks, is a major challenge, because the education of the upcoming generation has been disrupted.

Arguing that Iraq has not fulfilled the terms imposed by the cease-fire, the United States has consistently used its UN Security Council veto to maintain the sanctions. As a result, over the years, most kinds of nonhumanitarian assistance to Iraq have been blocked, including a planned UNESCO mission to assess damage and even a request to import photographic supplies to reproduce images of stolen artifacts for Interpol. The Department of Antiquities and Heritage has managed to protect and document a few major sites and to reopen the Iraq Museum, but for the most part, we are witnessing the destruction of a very promising past. Once gone, it can never be recovered.

Art historian John Malcolm Russell has witnessed some of the ways in which Iraq’s heritage has been lost following the Gulf War. While excavating in 1989 and 1990 at Nineveh, he photographed sculptures from the palace of the Assyrian king Sennacherib, a monarch whose exploits are recorded in the Bible. In 1995 he was shown many of the same sculptures, but by then plunderers had cut them up to sell piece by piece on the antiquities market. An associate professor of art history and archaeology at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, Russell is the author of The Final Sack of Nineveh (Yale University Press, 1998). Photojournalist has worked in the Middle East, eastern Europe, central Asia, and Africa for such publications as National Geographic, Time, Life, and the New York Times Magazine. She thought that a story on the state of Iraq’s archaeology would be a fresh way to address the impact of sanctions on that country and its people. On a couple of occasions she had to work during sandstorms, which, she concluded, gave her photographs an appropriately moody feeling. In particular, she liked photographing villages near the sites, knowing that they had been there, in some form, for thousands of years.

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