Posted on 04/12/2003 7:05:07 AM PDT by kalt
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Looters have sacked Baghdad's antiquities museum, plundering treasures dating back thousands of years to the dawn of civilization in Mesopotamia, museum staff said on Saturday.
They blamed U.S. troops for not protecting the treasures.
Surveying the littered glass wreckage of display cases and pottery shards at the Iraqi National Museum on Saturday, deputy director Nabhal Amin wept and told Reuters: "They have looted or destroyed 170,000 items of antiquity dating back thousands of years...They were worth billions of dollars."
She blamed U.S. troops, who have controlled Baghdad since the collapse of President Saddam Hussein's rule on Wednesday, for failing to heed appeals from museum staff to protect it from looters who moved in to the building on Friday.
"The Americans were supposed to protect the museum. If they had just one tank and two soldiers nothing like this would have happened," she said. "I hold the American troops responsible for what happened to this museum."
The looters broke into rooms that were built like bank vaults with huge steel doors. The museum grounds were full of smashed doors, windows and littered with office paperwork and books.
"We know people are hungry but what are they going to do with these antiquities," said Muhsen Kadhim, a museum guard for the last 30 years but who said he was overwhelmed by the number of looters.
"As soon as I saw the American troops near the museum, I asked them to protect it but the second day looters came and robbed or destroyed all the antiquities," he said.
ARMED GUARDS
Amin told four of the museum guards to carry guns and protect what remained.
Some of the museum's artifacts had been moved into storage to avoid a repeat of damage to other antiquities during the 1991 Gulf War.
It houses items from ancient Babylon and Nineveh, Sumerian statues, Assyrian reliefs and 5,000-year-old tablets bearing some of the earliest known writing. There are also gold and silver helmets and cups from the Ur cemetery.
The museum was only opened to the public six months ago after shutting down at the beginning of the 1991 Gulf War. It survived air strikes on Baghdad in 1991 and again was almost unscathed by attacks on the capital by U.S.-led forces.
Iraq, a cradle of civilization long before the empires of Egypt, Greece or Rome, was home to dynasties that created agriculture and writing and built the cities of Nineveh, Nimrud and Babylon -- site of Nebuchadnezzar's Hanging Gardens.
This wasn't a horrific event.
What happened to our POWs was horrific. The Holocaust was horrific. 911 was horrific. Losing some junk that 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999% of the world will never see anyway is not horrific.
Still isn't too late for you to go over there and be a human shield. Maybe there's still a pile of ancient Yak dung that you can guard with your life.
Liberals assert that the system and the MAN are culpable. Conservatives assert it’s the mother.
The looting was a tragedy. Saddam, the docents, the looters are to blame in different degrees. In other words the IRAQIS. (Perhaps France, but I digress.)
It’s wrongheaded and fundamentally from the left, to try and pin the blame on the military.
Besides ---look at our own liberals ---they were basically doing the same in San Francisco ---looting and destroying ---why are material things in Iraq suddenly sacred but not in San Francisco where they caused millions of dollars of damage.
Perhaps you can explain why we have troops guarding oil wells, but didn't have troops protecting this museum?
This is a big black stain on the operation, but you can't seem to see it.
That only applies to certain objects. Much of what has been taken, when recovered, will just be old objects. All knowledge of provenance and context will have been lost, greatly diminishing its value to historians.
Furthermore, museums can't buy this stuff, because of the 1970 UNESCO resolutions on cultural property. That means it will end up in the hands of private collectors, much of it unavailable for scholars to research.
A third point is that many of the things looted are made of unbaked clay and will not be returned in the same condition that they were in before. While you may not think a little damage on a sculpture is important, that's not what I mean. I'm talking about the partial and sometimes entire destruction of clay tablets.
A fourth thing to consider is that the value of some of these objects comes from studying them together, such as an archive of economic texts from a single site. Scattering the archive across the globe makes it impossible for them to give up their story.
Sure, we can't protect everything. But if we can guard oil wells, we could have guarded this museum, where their heritage and cultural treasures were kept. Before the war, the US Army was given a prioritized list of sites of historic and cultural importance. The list was compiled by McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago. This museum was at the top of the priority list. It should have been protected as soon as we sent forces into Baghdad. Furthermore, after the first Gulf War, there were nine museums in Iraq plundered, so this catastrophe was predictable.
And there is something sick about the museum currator, who worked for Saddam, running around crying about her lost precious stones and whatnot. Did she care for the lost lives her boss caused? Academics can be sickening in their myopia.
Thank you for your honesty. Sorry to have wasted your time.
I am not too familiar with other histories, but I do pick it up from time to time because I find it fascinating.
I did know that Roux was an MD because of the brief biographical sketch in the front of the book.
BTW - I've had it since I was in college, and also have another book I've held onto, The Ancient Near East by James Pritchard.
The latter book has texts like the Gilgamesh Epic, the Code of Hammurabi and some great photos of artifacts.
Quite a few of them are noted as being in the Iraq Museum.
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