[CPProt.net] Iraq: Raiders of the lost artifacts

[MusSecNetworkCulPropProtNet]

Raiders of the lost artifacts

    Amid the chaos of Iraq's war, the cradle of civilization is being looted

By DAVID BALLINGRUD, Times Staff Writer
Published February 6, 2005

If Elizabeth Stone had use of a spy satellite, she'd have a chance to stop
them.

A high-resolution camera looking down from space could pinpoint exactly
where and when the thieves and tomb raiders come.

It would see them swarm like ants over ancient, partially buried cities in
the Iraqi desert, gouging holes in the sand and carrying off hundreds of
thousands of treasured artifacts left by long-dead but advanced
civilizations - Babylonians, Sumerians, Assyrians.

So Stone, an anthropology professor at SUNY Stony Brook, has been looking
for a satellite to "borrow" for a survey. She has approached government
agencies and private foundations, but so far, no luck. "I am still
struggling to come up with the funds," she said.

And so in the midst of the bloodshed and suffering of war, a disaster of a
different kind is taking place: the unprecedented robbing of the cradle of
civilization.

Taking advantage of the distractions of two wars, looters have been
plundering thousands of sites in the desert between the Tigris and Euphrates
rivers - once ancient Mesopotamia. They're well organized, well equipped and
in no particular hurry; they know no one is coming to stop them.

Armed guards supplied by local tribes stand by, just in case. Soon the land
is a moonscape of holes, and antiquities that had rested beneath the sand
for thousands of years are on their way to illegal markets all over the
world.

"It's a cultural disaster," said U.N. official Mounir Bouchenaki.

"The biggest we've ever seen," agreed University of South Florida professor
of religious studies and longtime Middle East archaeologist James Strange.
"The thieves stake out the sites like they would stake a claim on a mine. No
one is enforcing the law."

The thieves - mostly poor Iraqis - often smuggle the items across the border
to Syria, where they can be more safely sold into the shadowy world of art
and antiquity collectors, dealers and even some museums willing to dispense
with questions. "It's a great tragedy," said Strange. "High art is being
stolen; history is being stolen."

Iraq's archaeological heritage has been under attack since the first Gulf
War, and since the United Nations' economic sanctions created a cash-poor
society.

"But it has escalated dramatically since the day coalition troops crossed
the border in 2003," Stone said. "The damage is really beyond calculation.
The world's first cities, many never examined, are being destroyed. These
are some of the most archaeologically important sites in the world, and they
are being lost forever."

What can be done?

"For now, nothing," said Strange. Most of the desert sites are far beyond
the protection of the Iraq government, he said, and U.S. forces have other
priorities. "It's like having 700 bank robbers and 50 cops," he said.
An attack by a mob, and by pros

Art and antiquity theft has been around forever, all over the world, and
even enjoys a kind of romantic appeal. It's not usually a violent crime,
after all. Thousands of works of art are stolen every year in countries such
as Italy, France, Germany, Belgium, Russia and the Czech Republic. In
Europe, according to Interpol, the number of thefts and the value of the
items taken are going up.

But that had little in common with what happened at Iraq's National Museum
in Baghdad in April 2003.

The museum is the archaeological repository for all artifacts from
excavations in Iraq. It contains, or did contain, hundreds of thousands of
objects covering 10,000 years of human civilization: tablets, reliefs,
weapons, seals, pottery, musical instruments, statues large and small. The
collection is made of gold, clay, stone, metal, bone, ivory, cloth, paper,
glass and wood.

U.S. troops had protected the museum, but they left to engage insurgents in
another part of the city. By April 10, the museum was teeming with poor
Iraqis who took whatever they could to trade for essentials, and with
professional thieves who left behind glass cutters and other tools of their
trade. Some robbers even knew their way around the museum, heading straight
to out-of-the-way rooms that held special valuables.

It was a mess. Looters made a determined attempt to drag off a statue that
"must have weighed a ton," said Strange. It was so heavy it smashed stairs
as it was dragged down them. The looters finally gave up.

Some items were rumored to be for sale in Paris and Tehran in a matter of
days, according to the Archaeological Institute of America. There was simple
vandalism, too, notably the methodical decapitation of 26 statues.

In the days that followed, a few items were intercepted at Iraq's borders. A
few more were seized in London, Washington and Boston, and some embarrassed
Iraqis returned what they had taken. But about 14,000 antiquities remain
unaccounted for.

Museums and sites in other Iraqi cities didn't fare well, either.

Large gold objects - a helmet, a dagger and a vase - were stolen from the
Royal Cemetery at Ur. They were later recovered.

In the ancient section of Babylon, U.S. troops paid too little attention to
the site and caused significant damage, said SUNY professor Stone. "They
spread gravel around and filled sandbags with soil still rich in
archaeological materials."

The Ishtar Gate at Babylon is one of the world's most famous monuments from
antiquity. The top part of the gate, with glazed brick decorations showing
dragons, bulls and lions, is now in Berlin. But the foundation, with
unglazed, molded bricks showing animals, is still in Babylon. The iron gates
at either end of the sunken part were stolen in the looting after the war,
according to the Archaeological Institute, but were recovered. However,
parts have been broken off the gates, and the area is no longer secured.
There is also damage to nine of the molded brick figures of dragons.

In the early days after the war, experts agree, a military presence at
Babylon probably prevented the site from being looted. But a base should not
have been established there, wrote J.E. Curtis of the British Museum. It is
"one of the most important archaeological sites in the world. This is
tantamount to establishing a military camp around the Great Pyramid in Egypt
or around Stonehenge in Britain."

"What were they thinking?" complained Mike Pitts, editor of British
Archaeology in an article written for the Guardian. The significance of
Babylon could not have been missed, he wrote.

"Babylon the capital city . . . of Nebuchadnezzar, of the hanging gardens
described by Herodotus; Babylon the military powerhouse that ravaged its
neighbors in the 6th and 5th centuries B.C., yet also developed astronomy,
science and art to extraordinary levels. Surely no one in the West was so
ignorant at least not to ask: Should we not be concerned?"
Where is all the loot?

There are more than 10,000 identified archaeological sites in Iraq, most not
yet excavated.

In these sites are many hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets - the
written word of ancient civilizations. Most of these tablets are quite
small, said USF's Strange, the size of the palm of a human hand or even
smaller. Some might be important government communications, but most played
a more modest role in society. "Many are simple receipts," he said.

"They have yet to be translated. We just haven't gotten to them yet," said
Stone of SUNY, who is one of the leaders of a U.S. Agency for International
Development project to support reconstruction efforts in Iraq. "Only a
handful of people can read them."

A small seal, a sculpture or a cuneiform tablet can put quick cash in a poor
man's pocket. He might sell it to a middleman or a dealer for a few dollars.
That buyer might then sell it for 10 times as much. Eventually, a collector
might pay tens of thousands of dollars for something he or she never intends
to show anyone.

Demand for Mesopotamian artifacts has always been high. Private collectors
all around the world treasure them because they go back to the beginning of
civilization, and they are ready to spend large sums to possess them.

"It's not only a link to the past," said Strange. "For many people, it's a
link to their religion. Believers see their religious beliefs coming alive
before their eyes."

About 150,000 whole cuneiform tablets - "the literary history of Iraq" - are
looted each year, said McGuire Gibson of the Oriental Institute of the
University of Chicago. But it's not entirely clear where all this material
is.

"It's floating around on the market somewhere," said Gibson. "Dealers will
tell you there is nothing out there, but don't believe it. It's around."

Stone thinks there must be a huge number of cuneiform tablets bottlenecked
on their way to the open market, at least temporarily.

"Somewhere there are warehouses full to the ceiling with looted materials,"
said Stone. "We don't know how many sites are being looted, but we know
there are many. It's said that more Iraqi dirt has been turned over in last
18 months than in all the millennia before. Whole cities look like the
surface of the moon."

Buying and selling antiquities nearly always breaks one law or another in
nearly every country, but many people don't care. Only in the last 30 years
or so have many museums, large and small, begun to tidy up their reputations
for being willing to overlook the ownership history, or provenance, of an
antiquity.

Looting prevents scholars from understanding the full meaning and importance
of an object, argues Eric Meyers, director of Duke University's graduate
program in religion. "When an item is looted, there is no way to
re-establish an honest connection between the object and its original
context, because so many other individuals have been involved, all of them
illegally. When collectors become involved, especially rich ones, the price
for antiquities rises very quickly." Worse, he said, many objects are simply
tossed out if they don't fetch the desired price.

The Emergency Protection for Iraqi Cultural Antiquities Act, passed by
Congress last year, was to tighten import restrictions on cultural materials
removed from Iraq, but it has had little effect, said Strange. "People at
our borders are looking for terrorists, not artifacts," he said.

The University of Chicago's Oriental Institute maintains a Web site tracking
stolen and unaccounted for Iraqi antiquities:
http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/IRAQ/iraq.html

David Ballingrud can be reached at 727-893-8245 or by e-mail at
ballingrud at sptimes.com 


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