 Reuters Photo |
Posted on 06/08/2003 7:33:59 AM PDT by MizSterious
By Andrew Marshall
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Baghdad's famed antiquities museum, ransacked by looters as Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s rule crumbled, will reopen next month after many of the treasures feared lost forever were found stashed in secret vaults around the city.
|
Museum research director Donny George said Sunday that among the items on show would be the Treasure of Nimrud, a priceless set of gem-studded gold Assyrian jewelry that has been displayed only once, briefly, in the last 3,000 years.
The treasure was recovered Thursday from flooded vaults below the gutted shell of the looted central bank.
Discovered between 1988 and 1990 in ancient royal tombs below an Assyrian palace dating from the ninth century BC, it was exhibited in the Baghdad Museum before being hidden in the central bank ahead of the 1991 Gulf War (news - web sites).
The treasure will be on show from July 3, when the museum's large Assyrian gallery will also reopen.
Besides the Nimrud artifacts, U.S. investigators also recovered thousands of items from the museum's main exhibition collection last week when employees led them to a secret vault somewhere in Baghdad. The items had been taken there for safekeeping ahead of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq (news - web sites).
"It's a secret place where we still have the whole collection of the museum that was displayed and it's safe," said George, standing among debris in the wrecked museum.
Asked by Reuters where the secret vault was, he said: "If I tell you, it will not be a secret."
GREAT LOSS FOR HUMANITY
George said museum staff had also returned items they took home during the war. U.S. investigators say around 3,000 museum pieces are still missing, most of which were not of exhibition quality. The number is far lower than initially feared.
The failure of U.S. forces to prevent Baghdad Museum being plundered sparked a storm of protest around the world in April. The U.S. military said its men were initially too busy fighting in the streets around the museum to halt the looting.
George said 33 items from the main collection were missing, probably stolen by professional thieves. Among the lost treasures are the Vase of Warka, a Sumerian votive bowl dating from 3200 BC, and the bronze statue of Basitki from 2300 BC.
"I'm not so optimistic about them because I believe they were taken by professionals," George said. "I believe they are out of the country now."
He said the loss of these artifacts was a tragedy.
"The Iraq museum was maybe the only museum in the world that had a complete chain of human history starting half a million years ago to the beginning of last century. These items were very important links in that chain," he said.
"You could trace the development of art, you could trace the development of philosophy in these things. Now they are missing and that is a great loss not only for the museum, but for the whole of humanity."
|
|
"The PFC Jessica Lynch rescue was just a publicity stunt"
"There never were any WMDs"
How many more can we add to the list?
NEWSBRIEFS Volume 50 Number 6 November/December 1997 NIMRUD RELIEFS FOR SALE
he stream of reliefs looted from Assyrian sites in Iraq continues to flow westward. Recently, several dealers in Europe and America have been shown photographs of two fragments from the palace of Tiglath-pileser III at Nimrud, as well as two images of pieces from the site museum of Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh. The Nimrud fragments originally decorated Tiglath-pileser's central palace and are the first from that site to appear on the market. They were awaiting publication in a storeroom at the site following a 1974-1976 Polish excavation.
(Photos by W. Jerke. Courtesy of the Polish Center of Archaeology, Warsaw) One of the fragments, depicting a charioteer (above left, ), was originally part of a larger relief that included two spearmen, a tree, and an archer. Looters used a blunt instrument to separate the charioteer from the rest of the slab. The second fragment (above right, ) was broken in antiquity and shows two royal officials addressing a standing king; only the king's right hand and staff survive. Photographs of one of these two pieces are known to have been shown to Robin Symes, a London antiquities dealer, who was seeking to check the provenience of the piece in advance of purchase. Symes was not eager to acquire a piece stolen from a site museum, according to Prudence O. Harper, curator of ancient Near Eastern art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Harper advised Symes to contact the Polish excavators. Samuel M. Paley, an Assyriologist at the State University of New York at Buffalo, says that 30 other reliefs from Nimrud may now be on the market.
(Photo by J.M. Russell) The Nineveh pieces were originally displayed in the throne room suite of the palace of Sennacherib. Once part of a single relief (above, ), depicting a soldier leading a horse, they are the fourteenth and fifteenth sculptures to have emerged in the past two years. John M. Russell, a Columbia University archaeologist who in 1990 photographed the reliefs at the Nineveh museum, speculates that all 100 of them have been broken up and offered for sale. One of the Nineveh fragments recently surfaced in London in the possession of a British resident who bought it from a dealer in Brussels. Russell discounts the possibility that the Iraqi government is involved. "All evidence I have is that the state officially deplores this...and is doing everything it can to reclaim the fragments," he says. "The isolated nature of Nimrud and Nineveh makes them vulnerable to thieves."--SPENCER P.M. HARRINGTON
For full account with photographs and a site plan, see "Stolen Stones: The Modern Sack of Nineveh" by John Malcolm Russell.
Source--there are photos there, but I can't seem to get them to post on FR. You'll have to go to the site to see them.
Okay, and who's going to be coming to see these magnificent treasures?
You raise a question that has worried me for some time- the old-time leftists took opposing positions, but ( mostly ) didn't lie-- the new ones lie about everything- the idea of "facts and evidence" is alien to them.
How on earth can you conduct a debate with people like that?
One of my favorite old timers was Pat Moynihan, who said "We are all entitled to have different positions- we are not entitled to our own set of facts..."
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
