umour and Fact at Baghdad Museum
Free Britannia journal ^ | April 18, 2003) | Anat Tcherikover
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/895943/posts Posted on 04/18/2003 11:46 AM PDT by quidnunc
Media outlets worldwide lament the fate of Iraq's National Museum at Baghdad, said to have been looted on 12 April. All refer to the important archaeological treasures, now nowhere to be seen, and quote museum officials on the horrors of the marauding mob. The Americans are generally blamed for failing to protect the museum. A petition in this matter, organized by Cambridge and Oxford scholars, has already gone to UNESCO (14 April).
Only a few reporters have detected some strange flaws in this story. In the Daily Telegraph (14 April), David Blair observes that the heavy steel doors of the vaults, about one foot thick, show no sign of having been forced open. He also reminds his readers that "Saddam's regime is thought to have removed some artefacts from the museum before the onset of the war". Similarly in the New York Times (12 April), John Burns notes that it remains unclear whether some of the museum's treasures "had been locked away for safekeeping elsewhere before the looting, or seized for private display in one of Mr. Hussein's myriad palaces."
A cursory check of older reports on the Baghdad Museum, published long before the war, in fact upholds these suspicions and more beside. An article by Alistair Lyon, published in www.museum-security.org on 2 December 1998, describes the state of the museum at that time: "Dusty showcases that once glowed with treasures from ancient Mesopotamian cultures now lie empty in the locked rooms of the Iraqi Museum. The Iraqi authorities removed the finest jewellery, statues, pottery and other prized artefacts and stored them in secret caches during the 1990-91 Gulf crisis. Even I don't know where they are, said Donny Youkhanna, assistant director of the museum'. Significantly, Mr. Youkhanna is described in more recent sources as Iraq's chief archaeologist, director general of Iraq’s Antiquities Research Department. If he did not know where the items were in 1998, who did?
On 11 May 2000, CNN's correspondent Jane Arraf reported on the reopening of Baghdad Museum on the occasion of Saddam's birthday. This is how the article concludes: "The museum had been infested with termites, and years of storage have damaged the artwork. … Some of the more spectacular pieces, treasures from the royal tombs in Ur and recent excavations from Nimrod, won't be on exhibit until summer." Ms Arraf was no doubt quoting the Iraqi authorities on the intention to exhibit these treasures, indirectly informing us that they were nowhere to be seen at the time.
With this information at hand, it is instructive to examine the precise sources on the supposedly total looting of 12 April 2003. Both the Telegraph and the New York Times articles say that the story came from a museum official, who may or may not be telling all. There is no corroboration from any other direct witness. It is equally instructive to examine the bulk of photographs taken in the museum between 12 April and 15 April. All show disarrayed storage spaces, which easily fit with CNN's description of the desolation incurred by May 2000. One photograph, reproduced here, shows empty glass showcases. The caption given to this photo by Agence France Presse claims "empty shelves after a mob of looters ransacked and looted Iraq's largest archeological museum in Baghdad". However, this cannot be true because the glass of the showcases is intact. Clearly, these showcases were emptied in an orderly fashion without being broken, which fits best the evidence of 1998, given above.
Surely, the misfortunes of the Baghdad museum are a matter for concern, but likewise the misfortunes of the press on this issue during the chaotic days of 12-15 April 2003.
Sources:
1. Alistair Lyon's article of 1998:
http://www.museum-security.org/reports/07798.html#11 2. Sources mentioning Mr. Youkhanna's poistion as chief archaeologist:
http://www.cairotimes.com/content/archiv06/iraq.html http://www.geocities.com/iraqinfo/index.html?page=/iraqinfo/sum/articles/graves.html 3. CNN's article of 2000:
http://www.cnn.com/2000/STYLE/arts/05/11/iraq.museum/ 4. Photographs of Baghdad museum 12-15 April 2003:
http://search.news.yahoo.com/search/news/?adv=1&p=baghdad+museum&ei=UTF-8&c=news_photos&o=a&s=&n=20&2=3&3= 5. Academic petition to UNESCO, 14 April 2003,
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~wolf0126/petition.html and its background website:
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~wolf0126/index.html 6. NYT article of 12 April 2003:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/12/international/worldspecial/12CND-BAGH.html 7. Telegraph article of 14 April 2003:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2003%2F04%2F14%2Fwmus14.xml At source #2, I came across this:
In recent decades, scholars of early Islamic history have realized that linguistic research can explain much of the mysteries surrounding the early development of Arab-Islamic civilization.
Christoph Luxenberg, a scholar of Semitic languages in Germany, has argued the term houri, which medieval Muslim scholars of the Quran took to mean young virginal maidens, could derive from an Aramaic word for white raisins.
Does that the martyrs who were expecting 72 virgins should have been expecting 72 raisins instead? This could reduce the number of homicide bombers considerably.