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How Iraq's art treasures were
saved
By Charles Recknagel
PRAGUE - In the days immediately after United
States forces took Baghdad, the world was shocked to
learn of what appeared to be the wholesale looting of
Baghdad's National Museum of Antiquities.
Initial reports talked of mobs of looters racing
through the museum's corridors and making off with its
world-class collection of artifacts. The antiquities -
painstakingly gathered over decades of excavations -
included statues, vases and cuneiform tablets from the
Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian periods, to name just
a few of Mesopotamia's ancient civilizations.
Later reports added more disturbing details. The
United Nations cultural agency, UNESCO, made a
preliminary estimate that concluded 2,000 to 3,000
objects were missing. Art experts also revealed that
some of the pieces were stolen not by uninformed looters
but by professional gangs of thieves who knew exactly
what they were after and contracted people in Baghdad to
get them.
Chiara Dezze-Bardeschi, an
archaeologist in the division of cultural heritage for
Iraq at UNESCO, describes the condition of the Baghdad
museum in the aftermath of the looting: "UNESCO carried
out the first assessment mission at the end of May. It
was a first assessment of the condition of the museum.
The damage inflicted to the gallery collections
[included not only] looted objects but also objects
smashed over on the floor."
But now, after so
much bad news, continuing inventories of just what was
stolen show that the losses are not as great as first
feared. In recent days, a team of investigators from the
US Customs Service confirmed that some 2,000 to 3,000
pieces are, indeed, missing from the museum, but that
most of the best objects have been kept safe by the
museum's curators.
The service said that only 47
notable pieces were lost out of a total of some 8,000
particularly prized objects held by the museum before
the Iraq war. The total museum collection numbers some
170,000 pieces, but many are repetitious, including vast
quantities of cuneiform tablets used by ancient
Mesopotamian states for record keeping.
The new
assessment of the Baghdad museum's losses comes as the
museum's curators are gradually telling the story of how
they secured their most valuable pieces long before the
US-led invasion of the country. The arrival of US troops
in Baghdad set off days of disorder that gave looters
and art thieves ample opportunities to steal.
Donny George, director general of research and
study of the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities, said that
a secret vault was used to house many of the museum's
best statues and figurines. He refused to reveal the
vault's whereabouts, but said that the pieces inside it
are "all safe and sound". He also said that museum staff
members had taken some of the more valuable items home
with them for safekeeping during the war and now are
returning them.
At the same time, museum
officials and members of the US-led Coalition
Provisional Authority have confirmed that a separate
collection of antiquities whose whereabouts had been
kept hidden for a decade is also intact and safe in an
Iraqi Central Bank vault. That collection is the
so-called Treasure of Nimrud - more than 600 pieces of
gold jewelry from the height of the Assyrian
civilization in 800 BC - which was hidden by Iraqi
authorities before the 1991 Gulf War. There had been
fears that members of Saddam Hussein's family might have
made off with the treasure, along with large amounts of
hard currency, when the government fell two months ago.
Still, if not as much was stolen as originally
feared, the losses from the Baghdad museum remain
substantial. Dezze-Bardeschi says that among the missing
pieces is the famous Vase of Warka - a three-foot
alabaster relief sculpture from the earliest times of
recorded history. "The Warka vase - Warka is the ancient
[Sumerian city of] Uruk - is dated around 3,000 BC. It
is a vase with representation of ceremonies dedicated to
a goddess," Dezze-Bardeschi said. The vase, on which are
depicted priests, goats, and grain, is often pictured in
introductory art history books.
Also missing is
the famous Lady of Warka - sometimes called the Warka
Face or Warka Mask - which is one of the world's oldest
naturalistic sculptures of a woman's face. The marble
sculpture dates back to about 3,000 BC.
These
pieces are now likely to make their way into some
illegal private collection at a huge profit for the
thieves who stole them. Art lovers can only hope that
perhaps one day they will be recovered by police. Or,
perhaps generations from now, they may be returned to a
museum by some future owner who recognizes they belong
to the world and should not be hidden.
The
Baghdad museum is now cleaning up the extensive damage
from its looting and is planning to partially re-open as
early as next month. Meanwhile, its staff is continuing
to painstakingly pore through collection records to
fully account for what remains and what has disappeared.
The Baghdad National Museum of Antiquities has
one of the most extensive collections of Mesopotamian
works in the world. Other major collections are kept in
the British Museum and the Louvre in Europe and in
museums in the US.
Copyright (c) 2002, RFE/RL
Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio
Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut
Ave NW, Washington DC 20036
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