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All the King’s Horses and all the King’s Men…
National Museum of Iraq, Baghdad

By Dea Adria Mallin

One of the casualties of the Iraqi war is the National Museum of Iraq, in Baghdad. Its 170,000 artifacts, worth billions on the open market and spanning 7,000 years of human history, may be lost forever. In a tearful interview with Reuters after 48 hours of looting, deputy museum director Nabhal Amin said, “If they had just one tank and two soldiers, nothing like this would have happened.” Tears are appropriate when treasures that tell us who we were and perhaps who we are get plundered wantonly, willfully, ruthlessly.

Oddly, it was looting and not bombing that took the toll on the museum, and while American troops secured the oilfields but not the museum, it was Iraqis and not the victors who emptied it of its spoils. 

If America is very young in the history of the world, Iraq is the very “cradle of civilization.” Ur, in Iraq, was the ancestral home of Abraham. Ancient Babylon, with its hanging gardens, stood in central Iraq. Ninevah, in the north, was the seat of Assyrian kings for 2,500 years. Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, gave rise to Sumeria, the world’s first great civilization, 3,500 years before Christ. The first irrigation of fields, the creation of the wheel, the development of the written word and the first code of law all took place in what is today called Iraq, and the Baghdad museum was its repository, one of the world’s great collections of antiquities, the raw data in reconstructing the human story.

From the thousands of inscribed clay tablets, including Hammurabi’s Code and the Epic of Gilgamesh, to artifacts from the excavations at Ur, including the Ram in the Thicket and golden cups, weapons, jewelry, and the first narrative image of battle, scholars must now work to identify the missing, though the collection has never been fully catalogued or published.

Definitely “disappeared” is the Sumerian alabaster vase, the Lady of Warka, from Uruk, 5,000 years old and one of the earliest representations of the human face. Gone is the huge bronze statue of Basitki from the Akkadian period, hauled out despite its weight. Gone is a wooden portal of King Sargon from 720 BC. Found shattered on the museum floors were ceramic pieces and the bodies of Roman statues, no more than shards, their hacked-off heads stolen away. Lost is the collection of 80,000 cuneiform tablets with the world’s earliest writing documenting literary, mathematical, and legal matters. Also among the missing is the solid gold harp of Ur.

While the frenzied destruction was first assumed to be the result of an impassioned populace, suddenly free, it looks as if most of the looting was done by professional thieves, well-prepared in anticipation of the unguarded moment. Storage rooms and steel-door vaults were breached with proper keys. Museum records were thoroughly burned. Glass-cutting instruments sliced deliberately through the thick glass of display cases without damaging the art. Worthless replicas such as the Black Obelisk from Nimrud were left behind while only priceless originals were whooshed out of the museum. Even an original weighing hundreds of pounds was carted carefully from the second floor to the exit.

And now where?

If the drones don’t spot them, smaller items can be smuggled across porous borders and then shipped worldwide, or they can be dismantled for their precious gold and stones. The larger items, their museum ID numbers stripped, will be too hot to sell now (artifacts stolen during the 1991 Gulf War have still not resurfaced) and will either be abandoned or go on a black market for stolen treasures and then to hidden private collections. There is a well-developed global network that specializes in stolen antiquities, and the sheer rarity – when was the last time fine Sumerian art came onto the market? – of these pieces will fuel demand by private collectors. According to a FBI agent with 27 years of undercover work in art, there are people who derive great pleasure from showing off their looted pieces to a few favored friends or to no one at all. A professor of archaeology at the University of Chicago, which has been conducting digs in Iraq for 80 years, believes that unscrupulous antiquities dealers actually “ordered” the most important pieces well in advance.

This kind of indifference -- if not greed, malignant narcissism, and destructiveness – to the quiet but essential life of museums has led to a flurry of activity to recover what has been lost. The FBI has sent in a dozen agents. Interpol called on all involved in conservation and trade of antiquities to “decline any offers of cultural property originating in Iraq.” The U.S. government wants to offer ransoms for stolen artifacts. UNESCO is meeting to discuss avenues of action. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City will hold its biggest exhibition on Mesopotamian art in years, with 400 unique objects from 12 of the world’s largest museums. Scholars from the University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago, and New York University are busy compiling an Internet database to thwart sales on the gray black markets and to help border guards and art dealers identify stolen pieces.

One can almost hear echoes of the plaint that the world is more concerned about the loss of antiquities in Iraq than about the lives lost there. It is a valid point. And so is the view of archaeologists who find the most profound loss in the charred archives from Iraq’s National Library and National Centre for Archives. Rare legal and literary documents, priceless Korans, calligraphy, and illumination are now mounds of ash. The 417,000 books, 2,618 periodicals, and 4,412 rare books and manuscripts are irreplaceable and irretrievable – an intellectual legacy gone mute. Says one archaeologist, “As for the museum’s missing artifacts, future archaeologists will have opportunities to dig again and excavate the country’s sites, and sooner or later, many of the items stolen from the National Museum of Iraq will turn up.”

They often do. At the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, for example, an ornamental crystal ball from the imperial palace in Beijing, priceless and beloved, disappeared from under the noses of the guards. Everyone despaired. And then, several years later, the crystal ball surfaced in a garage across the river. Today, it is back in the museum in the Chinese Rotunda, proudly reflecting one the largest unsupported masonry domes in the U.S. This is a story that begins in arrogant disregard and greed but ends in restoration, not only of the crystal sphere, but of our humanity. Can one hope that the museum in Baghdad will have similar good fortune?

If we come to museums and libraries to better know and understand our human essence, both spiritual and temporal, then the destruction of the record of our collective past is an estrangement from our essence. For all that we are at ease with collecting 7,000 years of artifacts telling us the history of mankind, why is it that we cannot learn from all that we have so assiduously collected?