Iraqis selling Antiquities ( FLASHBACK 1996)

Hurt by Sanctions, Iraqis Sell Antiquities, Despite Export Laws By BARBARA CROSSETTE

Browsing the antiques markets of London a few years ago, McGuire Gibson, an expert on Mesopotamian art and archaeology at the University of Chicago, found some of his worst fears confirmed.

In the stalls of Portobello Road and the shops of Bond Street, dealers offered him antiquities probably smuggled from Iraq, a modern nation in distress that sits astride the remains of several ancient civilizations.

Cylinder seals, which were once used on tablets of wet clay in something like an ancient version of notarization, were for sale by the bagful. There were clay tablets with cuneiform writing from as early as the Babylonian period and other objects of uncertain origin.

"For decades, the Iraqis kept a very tight lid on stuff, and there was very, very little getting out," said Gibson, a professor at the university's Oriental Institute and a leading archaeologist who conducted digs in Iraq from 1964 until the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

"After the war, the selling started. Now stuff is just pouring out. They are selling everything. If this continues, there won't be an archaeological site left that won't be damaged."

With stringent economic sanctions against Iraq in place since 1990 and little relief in sight, art experts and archaeologists say precious artifacts from some of the world's oldest civilizations -- Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian among them -- are pouring into the international market mainly to raise cash in hard times.

Experts say they cannot estimate the total value of Iraqi antiquities reaching the market illegally, but given that even small individual pieces can be priced at $50,000 in some cases, and that there are so many objects involved, the figure probably runs into the millions of dollars.

Mesopotamian antiquities exported legally from the 19th century until the 1960s have fetched high prices -- in one case $12 million paid for an ancient palace relief.

Experts at Sotheby's and Christie's, auction houses that are careful to authenticate objects and know their origins, say they have not encountered pieces from the new wave of illegal exports.

While some of the sellers of Mesopotamian antiquities are middle-class families parting with heirlooms and Iraqi traders unable to sustain themselves because of an embargo imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, looters and grave robbers working with international smugglers are doing most of the damage, some experts say.

There have been reports of hundreds of looters swarming over archaeological sites, perhaps with semiofficial complicity, and a truckload of cuneiform tablets intercepted on the way to Saudi Arabia. So successful is the largely illegal trade in Iraqi antiquities that a thriving business in Mesopotamian fakes is also growing.

Diplomats, collectors, dealers and university experts -- most of whom do not want to be identified, so their future work in the region will not be disrupted -- disagree on some details about the boom. Some believe that individuals, including government employees, are taking the best pieces out overland through Jordan; others think that most of the smuggling is done by professional rings operating through the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq into Iran.

As might be expected, Nizar Hamdoon, Iraq's envoy to the United Nations and an architect by training, blames the Kurds, who are in a permanent state of rebellion against central authority. But he also says Iraq is unable to guard all its archaeological sites, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and some objects are so close to the surface that they are easily removed.

Hamdoon said that many pieces had disappeared from provincial Iraqi museums after the war. American scholars and collectors have varying opinions about the value of missing museum pieces. But several said they believed that the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, which they described as one of the world's finest, had survived with most of its collection intact.

Constance Lowenthal, executive director of the International Foundation for Art Research in New York, which with the independent Art Loss Register monitors stolen art and antiquities, said Iraq had been vigilant in watching over its major museums and helpful in compiling lists of missing objects.

But questions remain about how some objects, especially large pieces, get out of the country undetected. In the current issue of Ms. Lowenthal's newsletter, IFAR Reports, John M. Russell, an art historian and archaeologist at Columbia University, reports that parts of three large reliefs from the throne room of the Sennacherib Palace in Nineveh that he photographed in 1990 are now on the international market.

Iraq has laws against exporting antiquities, and selling illegal imports is a crime in the United States. But this trade is new, and many items are small and easily concealed.

Bonnie Goldblatt, a senior agent of the U.S. Customs Service who specializes in art fraud in New York, said law enforcement officials had not yet seized any illegal Iraqi objects. She added that such items were often camouflaged as goods from another country.

A collector in New York described a lot of the early museum pieces pilfered during and just after the gulf war as "rubbish" but concurred that many very valuable objects began to appear later from other sources, including the private collections held by families who, Iraqi and American experts say, have also sold off their modern art, antique carpets, furniture and wooden doors to stay afloat financially.

Sympathy for these Iraqis seems widespread among collectors and archaeologists in the United States, who are critical of continued sanctions against President Saddam Hussein's government. They say the sanctions are hurting cultured families and intellectuals more than Iraq's leaders and soldiers, some of whom may be involved in trafficking in antiquities for profit.

U.S. government officials, who acknowledge that sanctions have caused Iraqis to sell off a lot of their private wealth, including art and antiquities, nevertheless say that Saddam need only meet his promises to destroy his weapons of mass destruction to end the hardship. Officials also say the Iraqi leadership has shown its contempt for history by tampering with ancient sites.

"Saddam Hussein's regime has chosen consciously to build luxury palaces on significant archaeological sites near the ruins of Babylon," said James P. Rubin, spokesman for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations.

"And by refusing to meet the demands of the international community," Rubin added, "he is forcing his own people to sell their artwork, compounding the economic and material hardships with psychological and cultural suffering."

Experts agree that London, New York and Tokyo have become the prime centers of the Mesopotamian antiquities trade, with Asians often paying the highest prices.

Gibson of the University of Chicago said that dealers were sometimes sent videos of objects from Middle Eastern sellers, with offers to bring pieces to a prospective buyer anywhere in the world for inspection.

With the slump in stocks, property and artworks in the 1980s, the market in antiquities was already on the rise when objects from Mesopotamia began to appear in larger numbers a few years ago. The exploding market for cylinder seals -- the Mesopotamian equivalent of Chinese chops or European signet rings or raised stamps to press into sealing wax -- has been the most extraordinary.

These seals from the Fertile Crescent are tiny columns of semiprecious stones, precious metals or occasionally clay, carved around the outside in concave relief and then rolled, not stamped, on clay tablets (or later, wax) to make identifying marks.

They may have identified the tablets' owners and been buried with them, sometimes in large numbers, in tombs that date to 2500 B.C. or earlier.

"Cylinder seals are special because they are very small, and to carve them takes extraordinary skill," said Gibson, who has edited a catalogue of objects presumed stolen from Iraq. "They are spectacularly beautiful things."

"Except for the Assyrian reliefs with battle scenes and ritual scenes carved into them, there is nothing as wonderfully narrative or varied as a cylinder seal," he said.

"Because they are so small and are often made of semiprecious stones -- really wonderful stones -- they have taken on a value way above most other artifacts. Unfortunately they are easily transportable, easy to carry around and get out of the country. The biggest one would be something like three inches high and, say, an inch and a half in diameter. Most of the seals are an inch long and half an inch in diameter."

Ancient amulets are also small and easy to steal and smuggle, a New York collector said. Many were also carved from semiprecious stones and worn on a string. Scholars believe that engravings on them indicate that they could have been intended to ward off illness or evil. Gibson has seen one that says, in effect, "This is to scare away demons." They may also have been used to protect a household.

Ancient graves in Iraq, including the royal tombs at Ur, contain many other objects illustrating the daily life of succeeding civilizations. At Nippur, where Gibson had been working, archaeologists found 17 layers of cities built atop one another, tracing human settlements from around 5000 B.C. to 800 A.D.

"Mesopotamia is the first place in the world where what we call civilization does pop up," Gibson said. "This is the first place where you get monumental architecture on a really grand scale, the first place you get an organization of people along craft lines, the first place you get monumental art."

"By 3500 B.C. you have already laid in certain motifs that will stay there right through Mesopotamian civilization and beyond it," he added, stressing the region's importance to the study of subsequent ancient history.

"Here we see the relationship of rulers to gods, the relationship of people to the ruler and in certain ways the relationship of people to nature. That was a tremendously strong tradition, and some of it found its way through Alexander the Great into Greece, influencing both the Western and Eastern worlds."

Another point that should be brought up, not only in terms of the museums and libaries, but also in terms of hospitals, is that all the head honchos of these government institutions were, naturally, Baathists. Their howls of indignation at us strike me as a little suspect. In some cases, I'm sure they hope to cover up regime misdeeds and even perhaps their own mismanagement by blaming a chaotic state of affairs on "looters" or "pillaging" or some such thing. In other cases, they probably are simply so used to defending the Party that it is unthinkable for them not to continue to do so.

Very little has been said about the complicity of "intellectuals" with Saddam's regime. Nobody gets a high-level job (such as curator or director) under a dictatorship unless they've paid their dues to the dictator and are loyal to him. This includes the people in charge of the museums.

De-Baathizing the country is going to be as difficult as getting the old Communist Party connections out of Russia. Judging by the behavior of ex-KGB honcho Putin, that still hasn't been completed. Saddam and his party were in charge for a long time in Iraq, and there are probably many people, particularly among the intellectuals and privileged classes, who are not going to be happy to see the old regime go.

I got the same point made to me by a liberal recently (they get this stuff en masse, don't they?). I reminded him of how we'd just seen & learned that the Fedayeen + Baath Party types had, in fact, taken over hospitals and schools to use as their bases and to store supplies, to the degree those places became near indistinguishable from any other government agency or ministry.

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