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Artifacts survive war--not chaos
Looters seize museum treasures
By Bill Glauber, Tribune staff reporter. Bill Glauber reported from Baghdad. Tribune staff reporter Flynn McRoberts contributed to this report from Chicago. Tribune photos by Stephanie Sinclair
Published April 13, 2003
BAGHDAD --
The plundering that has descended upon this ancient city has invaded what amounts to the storehouse of civilization's cradle.
Gone from the National Museum of Iraq is an ornate animal-covered cosmetics container from Nimrud. Gone is a finely carved tusk decorated with Assyrian and Syro-Phoenician designs. Gone is the head of an Egyptian sphinx with traces of gold leaf.
All were taken by the hordes of marauding thieves who swept through the museum after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in recent days. They made off with tens of thousands of artifacts from what one expert called "the patrimony for our entire civilization."
Gone as well, grieving museum workers said Saturday, is a delicate golden bull's head that fronts a harp dating to Sumerian rulers 4,500 years ago. The piece had been discovered at the Royal Cemetery at Ur, reputedly the same area where Abraham was born.
Leafing through an old catalog in the trashed storeroom, Mahsin Hassan, a museum official, toted up the losses. "They took gold pieces, small pieces, very important pieces," Hassan said. "They took from all subjects, from pre-history to Islamic history."
The looting of one of the world's great collections of antiquities is an archeological catastrophe: The museum survived bombing during the U.S.-led war against Iraq but couldn't survive the postwar chaos.
It was made all the more tragic because American war planners said they took into account cultural and religious sites and artifacts during their targeting procedures to avoid damaging Iraq's heritage.
On Saturday, museum workers surveyed the damage that apparently occurred over several days. They sifted through the rubble of human history, adding up losses that traveled through the ages, from prehistoric times onward.
Many display cases were empty. Museum workers said they had stored artifacts weeks before the war to protect them. But the storeroom in which many of the artifacts were placed was a trash heap. Drawers were rifled, and books were left in piles amid bits of stone.
The treasures, many from the Assyrian period several thousand years ago, are gone.
"This is the history of Iraq," said Nidal Amin, the museum's deputy director, moved to near tears of rage. She was furious that the museum wasn't secured by U.S. forces gathered in a city overrun by mobs stealing at will.
"If just one American tank stayed outside, just two American police stayed in the door," the looting wouldn't have happened, Amin said.
"They don't know this is a museum?" she cried. "They don't like a museum?"
U.S. knew of precious sites
Leading American academics, curators and arts lawyers had lobbied the Pentagon to minimize the damage war would do to Iraq's archeological treasures.
McGuire Gibson, professor of Mesopotamian archeology at the University of Chicago and head of the American Association for Research in Baghdad, said he had given the U.S. Army lists of 5,000 sites in Iraq, including a prioritized list of 150 locations that they should try to spare.
"In all the lists, I stressed that the most important site of all, the No. 1, is this museum," Gibson said. "Because of this, I assumed that it would be secured as soon as they [soldiers] were in the neighborhood."
After nine museums elsewhere in Iraq were looted during the first Persian Gulf war, what was left from them was sent to the National Museum for safekeeping. Given what occurred in 1991, this week's plundering "was absolutely predictable," said Gibson, who has been going to Iraq since 1964 as an archeologist and expert.
Another American expert, Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, noted that the museum housed the masterpieces of Mesopotamian culture.
"Mesopotamia is the world's first civilization. It's the first place to develop cities, the first place where writing was invented," Stein said. "And the artifacts from the excavations from there are the patrimony for our entire civilization and absolutely irreplaceable."
The Iraqi Department of Antiquities, which oversaw the museum, was never corrupted by Hussein's Baath Party "and had done everything they could to keep these artifacts safe," Stein said. "It's not their failure. The failure is ours."
Looters also invaded a storeroom deep in the museum, behind 2-foot-thick steel doors. The doors seemed to have been opened without a scratch.
`Looting looked organized'
Inside that storeroom, filled with dusty artifacts, it appeared the looters rifled through some items, ignored others and left the floor littered with fragments of clay and stone, plus piles of papers.
"The looting looked organized," said Raid Abdul Mohammed, a museum worker deeply upset at the theft of artifacts that are the building blocks of human history.
"This is civilization--the civilization for you and me," he said.
Many of the museum's larger pieces, displayed in the main galleries, survived the attack. Assyrian reliefs remained impervious to the bombing and the looters. Sandbags were piled in the middle of the floor to limit vibration during the bombing, and large rubber sponges were put on some of the objects to prevent cracking.
But a cast of a torso of an Assyrian king was broken, its scraps on the floor. In another gallery, a lion's head was severed.
The sacking of the National Museum of Iraq began at dawn Thursday. First, the looters took cars, then furniture. Finally, the took the archeological finds.
The neighborhood surrounding the museum suffered combat damage. A radio transmission station, about 200 yards from the museum, is a charred remnant, blasted by bombing. A hole was gouged in one wall of the museum.
Iraqi soldiers had appeared ready to defend the museum because two bunkers were dug into the front lawn.
Inside, the museum was partly in ruins. Offices were trashed. Microfilm was pulled out from spools. Index cards were scattered on the floors.
Three men with guns entered the museum. One, armed with an assault rifle, waved the weapon at museum workers and gathered journalists and began to shout. Eventually, the workers calmed him down and the man disappeared.
The workers tried to secure the museum. They shooed away journalists, locked the doors and returned to tallying the losses.
At a nearby mosque, an imam spoke over a loudspeaker, imploring people not to loot. As he did so, his words echoing on streets where gunfire could be heard, a man from a nearby television station wandered by, his face racked with emotion. He told of his station being looted and burned.
The National Museum of Iraq was founded in the 1920s after the British conquest, according to Gibson. Its present building, designed by a German architect, was opened in 1967 and expanded in the 1970s.
The museum is as big as the Art Institute of Chicago, and most of its collection was on one floor. The earliest artifacts and antiquities, dating from prehistoric times, were on the ground floor, with more recent antiquities on the second floor.
Museum was unscathed in '91
The museum was closed after the '91 gulf war and only reopened in 2000. It actually suffered no damage in that war.
Assessing the damage from the recent plundering, Stein echoed the frustration of Iraqi museum officials, saying a couple of U.S. soldiers standing outside the museum could have secured it.
"They have gone to great lengths to protect the oil wells," he said. "But the treasures of Iraq's past are immeasurably more valuable."
Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune
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