Below is a piece I wrote about the looting of Iraq’s heritage, five years on from the start of the war, that got the cover of the May issue of Museums Journal. One of the people I interviewed for the piece was John Curtis, the keeper of the Middle East collection at the British Museum.
Curtis has been over to Iraq several times since the war, and has been very critical of the way in which the coalition forces have set up bases on archaeological sites at Babylon, Kish and Ur, adding to the damage that is being done by looters (read the scathing report he wrote about damage to Babylon, on the BM’s website, here). The BM’s big autumn exhibition this year is going to be focusing on Babylon, so it will be interesting to see if this contains any hint of Curtis’ criticisms…
Lost treasures
On 8 April 2003, men wearing civilian clothes entered the grounds of the National Museum of Iraq and began shooting rocket-propelled grenades at an approaching column of US tanks
It was at this moment, according to Donny George, the director of research at the Iraqi ministry of antiquities at the time, that the remaining staff left the building, fearing for their safety.
What happened between then and 12 April, when some staff returned, led to an international outcry, as the unguarded museum was ransacked and some 15,000 objects were stolen.
Five years later the exact chain of events during those few days is still unclear. A US-led investigation, set up to recover the looted objects, established that the Iraqi army had taken up positions in the museum compound, and it was this that led to a US tank, under fire, responding with a round that put a hole in the wall of the Children’s Museum, which is in the same compound. But it is less obvious why coalition troops did not secure the museum compound until 16 April, more than a week after arriving in that area.
Prior to the war, academics and archaeologists in the US and the UK, remembering the looting of Iraq’s museums after the war of 1991, had written to the coalition governments warning that those museums seen as symbols of Saddam Hussein’s regime may again become targets, and that without proper security, the archaeological sites around the country would also be vulnerable. But their warnings were not heeded.
As Iraq’s military forces were routed, opportunists across the country took advantage of the lack of security, and a free-for-all led to the looting of not just the national museum, but of provincial museums and archaeological sites. It is estimated that tens of thousands of antiquities were illicitly removed during this period.
But while a military presence was needed at the sites to prevent looting, a lack of embedded expertise meant that when they did arrive, the coalition forces were often responsible for some of the damage.
John Curtis, the keeper of the Middle East collection at the British Museum, who has been to Iraq four times since the war began, wrote in a report describing the coalition decision to establish a military base at Babylon, one of the most important archaeological sites in the world, as “tantamount to establishing a military camp around the Great Pyramid in Egypt or around Stonehenge in Britain”.
The site will be the subject of an exhibition at the British Museum later this year. This will include some criticism of its treatment by coalition troops.
More recently, sites in Kish and Ur have also suffered damage, and Curtis attributes this, in part, to the army not working together with the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities. He says of a new gateway that has been built over an ancient site at Ur: “If the military had asked any archaeologist, they would have said: ‘Don’t build there.’”
Shocked by the scale of the looting, the international heritage community has responded with a coordinated effort. A month after the start of the war, a meeting organised by Interpol, with Unesco, the International Council of Museums and the World Customs Organisation, established an experts’ working group.
This group is made up of representatives from cultural organisations around the world and is charged with identifying antiquities, advising on provenance and preparing a red list of missing items. Interpol’s Tracking Task Force takes this information and uses it to coordinate the work to find the items.
In the UK the British Museum has led the effort to recover Iraqi antiquities, helping Scotland Yard to identify objects that are suspected to have arrived from Iraq, providing workshops for customs officers to help them identify stolen antiquities, and inviting Iraqi curators and conservators to train at the museum.
Curtis is currently in discussions with the Iraqis and the British Army about the possibility of returning to Iraq later this year to conduct condition checks on sites in the Basra region and the provincial museums in the south.
In June 2003 the UK made it an offence to deal in cultural property illegally removed from Iraq since August 1990. And it was announced in May 2004 that the UK would ratify the Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, something of a U-turn given that the convention was passed in 1954 and the UK has consistently refused to sign it.
Neil Brodie, formerly the coordinator at the now-defunct Illicit Antiquities Research Centre at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in Cambridge, is the director of cultural heritage resource at Stanford University in California. He says: “The UK government has never come out with a good reason [for not previously signing the convention].
“But the looting was very embarrassing for the government, and the decision to sign the Hague Convention was one obvious public response that it could make.”
The Cultural Property (Armed Conflicts) Bill, which will see the convention pass into UK law, is currently going through parliament, but many feel that the gesture is too little, too late. According to Interpol, Jordanian customs has seized more than 4,000 Iraqi antiquities since 2004, most of them thought to be from illicit excavations in Iraq.
Objects have also been found in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, the US and Italy. A source told Museums Journal that the US has recovered fewer than 700 objects, while the UK has only recovered hundreds.
Vernon Rapley, the head of Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Squad in London, confirms that there have been investigations into a number of suspected items in the UK, although they have all been from archaeological sites, rather than items from the National Museum of Iraq. There have also been reports of sales on eBay, but Rapley says that these have tended not to be significant items.
And although a number of items have been returned to Iraq, there have been no prosecutions in the UK, he says, because of the difficulties of proving beyond reasonable doubt that the objects were illicitly looted from Iraq. Establishing provenance of objects shorn of their context is not easy.
Matthew Bogdanos, the US Marine Corps Reserves colonel who led the US investigation into the looting of the national museum, says the losses can be split into three categories: the storage rooms, public galleries and sealed basement. He thinks some of this was the work of professional criminals and random looters, while the basement was an inside job. Of the 15,000 objects that were stolen, just under half have been recovered, including some very valuable items (see box below).
But of the 10,600 objects stolen from the sealed basement, including cylinder seals, amulets and beads, fewer than 2,500 have been recovered, according to Bogdanos. This is partly because the entire theft from the sealed basement could fit in a rucksack.
An amnesty, coupled with targeted raids, led to the early recovery of many items that had not yet left Iraq, but it is thought that many objects are still in the country.
It is also suspected that trade in these objects is fuelling the ongoing insurgency. In his book about the investigation, Thieves of Baghdad, Bogdanos describes a raid on an underground bunker in north-west Iraq resulting in the recovery of a chest containing more than 30 artefacts from the museum, alongside weapons and ammunition.
“The Taliban in Afghanistan has opium,” Bogdanos told Museums Journal. “The insurgency in Iraq has antiquities. If you are a terrorist or insurgent, then this is just good business.”
Five years on, the same insurgency is preventing the national museum from reopening, despite the recent refurbishment of its Assyrian and Islamic halls. The Italian Ministry of Culture funded the refurbishment, which was carried out by Iraqi contractors overseen from Italy by the Turin-based Centro Ricerche Archeologiche e Scavi.
In the galleries, only large unmovable objects, including stone panels from the royal palace at Khorsabad and the eighth-century mihrab from the Al-Mansur mosque in Baghdad, are on display as there are fears that smaller items might be stolen. Roberto Parapetti, the Italian architect leading the project, says that he hopes that there will be a partial reopening of the museum soon, but that it is down to the Iraqi Ministry of Culture and State Board of Antiquities.
Donny George, now living in America, is not so sure. “I would love the museum to be reopened tomorrow, but the security situation will not allow it,” he says. “It should be the last thing to open after peace has been restored.”
Lost and found
Matthew Bogdanos, the colonel in the US Marine Corps Reserves who headed the US investigation into the looting, estimates that of the 15,000 artefacts stolen from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad, nearly half have been recovered.
About 3,100 objects were taken from the above ground storage rooms and more than 3,000 of these have been recovered. There were 10,600 artefacts taken from the underground storage room, with only 2,500 recovered.
Of the 40 pieces stolen from the galleries, 13 have been recovered. These include five of the museum’s finest artefacts:
Assyrian ivory headboard
This object comes from Nimrud and was made in about 900 BC. After being stolen from the national museum, it was found by Jordanian customs officials.
Bassetki statue
The lower part of a seated nude figure from 2300 BC. Made from copper and originally discovered in the 1960s during a road construction project, it features cuneiform inscriptions commemorating the victories achieved by an Akkadian king. It was recovered in a raid in November 2003.
Mask of Warka
Described as the “Sumerian Mona Lisa”, the 20-cm high limestone sculpture dates from 3100 BC, and depicts the head of a woman. It was found in September 2003 after a search by US troops and Iraqi police led them to a farm just north of Baghdad.
Ninhursag Bull
This copper relief of a bull from the Ninhursag temple at Al-Ubaid was returned as part of an amnesty programme in 2003. It dates from 2500 BC.
Sacred Vase of Warka
This carved alabaster stone vessel comes from the temple complex of the Sumerian goddess Inanna in the ancient city of Uruk in southern Iraq. It dates from 3200-3000 BC. The vase was returned to the museum after some negotiation in June 2003 as part of an amnesty programme for looted artefacts.
