The trashing of civilisation

THE AGE (AU) ^ | 2003-04-15 | Eleanor Robson

[DTA]

The trashing of civilisation

April 15 2003

This is a tragedy with echoes of past catastrophes: the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258, and the fifth-century destruction of the library of Alexandria. For the loss is not just Iraq's but ours, too.

Iraq has not been called the cradle of civilisation for nothing. Five thousand years ago it was the birthplace of writing, cities, codified law, mathematics, medicine and astronomy. The House of Wisdom in ninth-century Baghdad kept classical scholarship alive and promoted a vigorous intellectual reaction to it while Europe was stumbling through the dark ages.

In 1976 - 10 years after its opening - the Iraq Museum published a catalogue with a mission statement. It read:

"The relics of the past serve as reminders of what has been before, and as links in the chain of communication between past, present and future. The society which possesses many and fine museums has a correspondingly stronger historical memory than the society without them."

The catalogue described in loving detail many of the thousands of objects displayed in the 20 galleries, from 100,000-year-old stone tools from the Kirkuk area to Sumerian jewellery and gold from the third millennium BC, from Babylonian cuneiform tablets and Assyrian ivories to Parthian sculpture, glassware and manuscripts from medieval Baghdad.

Ten years after the 1991 Gulf War, the museum opened its doors again - despite sanctions, which meant staff went unpaid, conservation materials were unobtainable, and contact with foreign colleagues was restricted. The launch party was attended by more than 60 scholars representing the global academic community.

The museum's galleries are laid out in a quadrangle on two floors around the central courtyard. They are cool and dark, with natural light filtering through the skylights at the top of the rooms. The first galleries one enters contained sculptures from the Assyrian palaces in northern Iraq: magnificent life-size carvings showing the rulers of the Middle Eastern world in the ninth to seventh centuries BC. A sequence of smaller rooms housed innumerable fragments of exquisitely carved ivory furniture from the same palaces.

Further on are the Hatra galleries, devoted to the desert city which is Iraq's only UNESCO world heritage site. Here were displayed the funerary statues of the men and women of Hatra: inhabitants of the border between the Roman and the Iranian worlds 2000 years ago, who chose a glorious hybrid of Eastern and Western styles to commemorate their dead.

The Islamic galleries housed tilework from medieval mosques, priceless Korans, fittings and furniture from ninth-century palaces, and jewellery, textiles and coins.

There was not enough time to see everything when I visited the museum two years ago, and now I never will. Most of the collection lies in ruins, trampled and smashed by looters, if not stolen. Many objects from Iraq's long rich past are in smithereens.

After the previous Gulf War there was a project to document what had been lost to looting. It took five years to catalogue 4000 objects, few of which have been recovered. This time the stakes are far higher and the problem immeasurably more difficult.

Most immediately, the museum should be treated as a crime scene, both forensically and legally. Every reporter, photographer and sightseer risks disturbing the destruction stratum (as archaeologists would describe it), which must remain intact if anything is to be pieced together again. If the debris is swept up into bin bags it will be impossible to reconstruct.

Second, border security should be stepped up to prevent as much as possible from leaving the country.

Auction houses and dealers worldwide must look out for artefacts coming on to the market. Such objects will almost certainly have been illegally acquired and any documentation of ownership is likely to be fraudulent. Police must prosecute.

UNESCO is holding an emergency meeting on Iraq next week. The US authorities must allow it into the country as soon as possible to begin working with Iraqi archaeologists and curators to reconstruct the shattered remnants of Iraq's heritage and rebuild links in the chain between past, present and future.

Eleanor Robson is a fellow of All Souls, Oxford, and a council member of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. This article first appeared in The Guardian.

[DTA]

For the loss is not just Iraq's but ours, too. The question here is: CUI BONO?

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[MEG33]

I hate the looting..perhaps some of the staff could be helpful.Things are not always as they seem.We were not responsible for the looting..the looters were.Collectors and dealers should be investigated.

[Mark Felton]

The new government need only offer a reward and amnesty for the return of the items. Most of the people would rather have the cash.

Personally I think private individuals should be able to own such treasures.

[Bluntpoint]

Check the Clinton Library.

[MEG33]

Not if they are stolen.

[vannrox]

The artifacts are not destroyed or lost forever. They are simply in the hands of people who wish to sell them to museums and collectors. That's all. Get real. I love history, esp ancient sumerian, but let's put this all in perspective ok?

[wideawake]

The House of Wisdom in ninth-century Baghdad kept classical scholarship alive and promoted a vigorous intellectual reaction to it while Europe was stumbling through the dark ages.

More PC idiocy from the press.

If the Carolingian Renaissance of the IXth century was a "dark age", it was still far brighter than Baghdad's society was for the following millenium.

The backwater of rural Ireland in the IXth century was able to produce a John Scotus Eriugena - I wonder if the subsistence farmers enslaved to the Caliphate of Baghdad produced such minds.

[MEG33]

The article was a real hand wringer..

[TopQuark]

This is a tragedy with echoes of past catastrophes: the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258, and the fifth-century destruction of the library of Alexandria.

Absolutely. But the parallels are wrong: the museum fell to the enemy from within. The parallels should be with the distructions of churches and burning of icons by the Russian communists, for instance. Or with Palestinians exloding a 2000-year-old sinagogue in Jerico and destruction of the Davids tomb. The author, I am sure, did not lament any such savagery.

[Mark Felton]

Stolen? The previous government had stolen them in the first place. The government that owned them no longer exists. They had no owner.

Let the new government pay to get them back.

The promise of personal fortune has historically been one of the greatest motivators for archealogical discovery (yes, these were already discovered).

The idea that the government has some superior right to own antiquities is pure socialist nonsense. Let a private museum be established to procure back the items if needs be.

[LiteKeeper]

read later

[Tacis]

All this tells me is that Eleanor Robson represents European buyers (probably, French) of antiquities and wants to get her agents into Baghdad as quickly as possible to identify sellers and get her bids down before the market opens up.

[Sabatier]

There's been more boohooing over the looting than the discovery of torture chambers and other evidence of Saddam's repression that has emerged in the last few weeks.
There was a CNN report earlier today in which the reporter, a guy named Wederman, solemnly intoned that the wreckage of schools and police stations by rampaging Iraquis represented a social disaster of huge proportions. Then a clip of a sad-looking Iraqui woman was accompanied by a voiceover which cautioned that for this woman, "the new Iraq was no better than the old Iraq."
There are obviouly a number of people in the media for whom the liberation of the Iraqui people means nothing. They now have to find ways to show the Iraqui people as victims, but not of Saddam Hussein. They find every way they can to portray the Iraqui people as victims of the US, as in this CNN coverage.
Fortunately, the Iraqui people by and large don't seem to have any trouble at all understanding who the good guys are.

[wjeanw]

I wouldn't be surprised if the museum wasn't first looted by Hussein's gang and then left open for the mobs to destroy so as to cover their tracks. One also needs to consider that the part of Iraqi society that considered itself faithful Muslims would have regarded Hussein's resurrecting and honoring of Iraq's ancient past as an affront to Allah (not just in the museum, but in rebuilding some of the ancient temples). It is hard to remember that multiculturalism is an expression of the nihlistic post-Christian West.

[DTA]

>>>>>The parallels should be with the distructions of churches and burning of icons by the Russian communists, for instance. Or with Palestinians exploding a 2000-year-old sinagogue in Jerico and destruction of the Davids tomb

You are spot on. After all, Liberal media and humanitarians did not object destruction of more than 100 Christian shrines in Kosovo, by "poor innocent Kosovo Albanians".

Liberals in their stupidity/rottedness were patting on the forehead Soviet Communists, Palies, Kosovo Albanians and encouraged them to destroy world heritage to their heart's content. No wonder "poor innocent oppressed Shiite" got the hint.

Now they are blaming Bush as if they have no responsibility.

That one who is faultless among Liberals may throw the first stone.

[wildbill]

Believe me, the libs are throwing stones about this in ever increasing volume.

No recriminations about the Iraqis who were responsible but blaming the US.

Also, it would take a lot of trucks to move over 100,000 items overnight. Do you think the museum staff just might have some information that would be valuable?

[DTA]

Please do not take me wrong, there are two issues here and liberals have mudded water.

First of all, perps are Shia muslims. They have DESTROYED the majority of artifacts in museum, not looted them.

the stuff is still there, but in tiny shreds. Floors are covered with debris. From the description of the way how museum was destroyed I see there was deliberate plan to destroy in a such way that no reconstruction will be possible. Total write-off.

Liberal are appealing to our emotions and project the picture of poor city dwellers who stole a tile or two to feed their children. Not so, very few items will resurface on the grey antiquities market, because DESTRUCTION was the goal, not theft.

The biggest damage was in the subteranean vaults, because those items were never analyzed by archeologists.

Someone has ordered, organized and orechestrated destruction. With fake stories of looting liberals are protecting those criminals.

Why this was allowed to happen is totally different issue. U.S. Army is responsible for not preventing desctruction. One roof-mounted gun and grenade launcher on a Humvee could prevent it.

[SunkenCiv]

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