Ancient Treasures Lost

At his desk in the Semitic Museum, Professor of Assyriology Piotr Steinkeller shuffles papers as he describes how it felt to hear that the National Museum in Baghdad had been looted. He says that at first, he couldn’t believe that such a collection had been lost.

“I cried when I heard about the museum,” he says.

Without access to inventory lists, it has been difficult to calculate the damage to the vast treasury of the Iraqi National Museum, which contained the discoveries of a century of intensive archeology in the lands of ancient Mesopotamia. But news reports suggest that looters nearly completely ransacked the museum, taking advantage of the chaos attending the American occupation of Baghdad earlier this month.

Among the missing objects is a solid gold harp from the ancient city of Ur, a carved bird dating from 8000 B.C.E., and priceless Arabic texts and cuneiform tablets. For scholars with interests ranging from the earliest signs of civilization to the art and literature of the medieval Muslim world, the loss of such a collection is a disaster.

Since news of the lootings came out last week, scholars at Harvard, along with their colleagues throughout the United States and the world, say they’ve experienced distress, despair and anger.

“It felt like losing someone in the family,” says Steinkeller, who recently published a study of some of the museum’s cuneiform tablets.

But the scholars say there is little time to linger over emotions.

Working from her office at the Sackler Museum, Boardman Professor of Fine Arts Irene J. Winter is part of an international effort to retrieve the missing artifacts.

Winter usually spends her days immersed in the study of art theory, archeology and the history of the ancient Near East.

But since last week, she has spent “twenty-two hours a day” on her phone and e-mail, talking with anyone—reporters, FBI agents, senators and colleagues—who might help.

“We are all passionately anguished over what happened,” Winter says. “And so each of us has found a pathway, a way to do something about it.”

And it is not an easy task. Winter and her colleagues say the artifacts—including renowned pieces such as the Warka Vase and the so-called “Mona Lisa of Nimrud”—are likely to become hot items on the black market.

But since art and antiquites trafficking makes up one of the world’s most sophisticated and powerful crime networks, there is little hope of recovering objects once they leave Iraq, says Associate Professor of Assyriology Paul-Alain Beaulieu.

“A lot of these fragile pieces are bound to be destroyed in transit, and libraries of tablets will be fragmented into smaller lots to be sold,” he says. “Once that happens, it will be very difficult to decipher the meaning of many of these texts, if they are ever recovered.”

The National Museum housed between 150,000 and 200,000 objects, a vast collection that scholars say will be impossible to reassemble if it becomes dispersed among private collections.

“That is why time is of the essence,” Beaulieu warns. “Once these pieces leave Iraq, we won’t get them all back.”

Throughout the U.S., scholars of the ancient Near East are also working feverishly.

Kathryn Slanski, who earned her doctorate at Harvard in 1988, spearheaded a “Petition for the Safeguarding of Iraqi Cultural Heritage,” which was submitted to the UN last week with hundreds of signatures. John Malcolm Russell of the Massachusetts College of Art and McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago are organizing a database of missing objects that they say they hope will inhibit their sale on the art market. And American and European archeologists are planning an emergency trip to meet up with their Iraqi counterparts.

Above all, academics have taken the initiative to explain the scope of the loss.

The fate of the musuem’s artifacts will have great implications for the cultural heritage of “your average mid-western American,” Winter says. She points out that Iraq was home to the ancient city of Ur, the birthplace of the the Biblical patriarch Abraham.

But the significance of Iraq’s ancient civilizations—Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian—extends beyond the Judeo-Christian tradition.

“We are used to talking about the Middle East, but geographically, Iraq is part of western Asia,” Winter says. “Ancient Sumeria was the birthplace of mathematics and astronomy in both Asia and Europe. It was of profound importance to polytheistic cultures to the east, in India. That is why we are talking of a great loss to world culture. It’s not just about Abraham at Ur.”

One loss that Winter mentions is the Sippar library, a collection of Babylonian clay tablets that comprises one of the oldest libraries in the world. Unearthed in the 1980s, the library was still awaiting close study.

“Each one of those tablets is a piece of illumination lost to us,” says Winter.

While many of the museum’s artifacts had yet to be studied, others held canonical status in art history.

Though some of the most prized statues, vases and jewelry have been photographed, scholars lament that images and reproductions cannot compare to the value of the original items.

“Images are a very important avenue to research,” says Rubie Watson, who directs the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology. “But they can never replace the object itself, in terms of the information that is contained in the original, the tiny details that tell you how it was carved, constructed or molded.”

In other words, looking at a picture in a book cannot approximate confronting an object that was created thousands of years ago.

“The museum is a galvanizing place for experience,” she explains. “My Iraqi friends and colleagues consider those objects, including the pre-Islamic ones, as part of their cultural heritage.”

Aware of ancient objects’ national significance, Iraqi governments carefully maintained archeological sites and museums throughout the twentieth century. The National Museum was well supported by former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, who was fond of portraying himself in portraits alongside the ancient King Nebuchadnezzar.

“The modern Iraqi nation springs out of the Mesopotamian past,” Beaulieu says. “That heritage is permanent, part of the national fabric. It could also be an aspect of a modern, democratic nation.”

Besides working to identify what objects are missing, academics have proposed policy measures to combat their illegal circulation. These include a temporary moratorium on the trade of Near Eastern antiquities, tight controls at Iraq’s borders and airports, including the right to search and seizure, amnesty for those who return stolen objects and rapid reconstruction of Iraq’s museums and archeological facilities.

Contemplating the challenges that lie ahead, scholars look back with anger at what all agree was a preventable disaster.

Professor of Greek and Latin Richard Thomas was among many who bristled at defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s initial dismissive response to the looting.

“If our leaders are as ignorant of and unconcerned about protecting the cultural heritage of the countries we invade as they seem to be, [judging] from Rumsfeld’s contemptuous and brutish response, then it is precisely the duty of academics to try and point out to them what they have done,” Thomas wrote in an e-mail.

“The artifacts at the museum marked the beginning of what we conventionally call ‘civilization,’” wrote Professor of History of Art and Architecture Jeffrey Hamburger, a specialist in medieval manuscripts. “The bitter irony, of course, is that the war itself was fought in the name of supposedly civilized values.”

Steinkeller, who spent years excavating in Iraq before the first Gulf War, says he is as concerned for the fate of Iraq’s thousands of archeological sites as for the collection of the National Museum.

“It’s a terrible blemish on the United States,” he says. “What happened to the museum presents Americans as barbarians—Atilla the Hun, or the Nazis. Our European colleagues see us as co-conspirators. That’s why we have to do something, and not be silent.”

Steinkeller says he wants a Congressional hearing to assign blame for the looting of Baghdad’s museums and hospitals. He cites numerous treaties that place the responsibility for law and order on the nation’s occupying power. But after a recent meeting with Representative Barney Frank, D-Mass., Steinkeller says he’s pessimistic that such a hearing could take place in the near future.

Still, Winter says she remains confident that relations between people will be able to transcend relations between states.

“They have a saying in Persian: ‘From heart to heart there is a road,’” she says. “You can always find ways to be humane and courteous.”

While scholars anxiously await the outcome of their recovery efforts, students at Harvard have a chance to see artifacts similar to what was lost at the museum. The second floor of the Semitic Museum on Divinity Ave. displays tablets and jewelry from the ancient city of Nuzi. Excavated in a series of Harvard-sponsored expeditions in the late 1920s, the artifacts (which include a set of civil lawsuits inscribed in cuneiform) record the culture of the Nuzi civilization, which fell to its Assyrian and Babylonian neighbors in the thirteenth century B.C.E.

Part of the Nuzi collection legally belongs to the Iraqi government, and that part was mostly repatriated in the 1980’s.

—Staff writer Lindsey McCormack can be reached at lmccorm@fas.harvard.edu.