Posted on 05/01/2003 2:15:33 PM PDT by Earl B.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 30 — Even though many irreplaceable antiquities were looted from the National Museum of Iraq during the chaotic fall of Baghdad last month, museum officials and American investigators now say the losses seem to be less severe than originally thought.
Col. Matthew F. Bogdanos, a Marine reservist who is investigating the looting and is stationed at the museum, said museum officials had given him a list of 29 artifacts that were definitely missing. But since then, 4 items — ivory objects from the eighth century B.C. — had been traced.
"Twenty-five pieces is not the same as 170,000," said Colonel Bogdanos, who in civilian life is an assistant Manhattan district attorney.
There is no doubt that major treasures have been stolen. These include a lyre from the Sumerian city of Ur, bearing the gold-encased head of a bull, dated 2400 B.C.; a Sumerian marble head of a woman from Warka dated 3000 B.C.; a white limestone votive bowl with detailed engravings, also from Warka and dated 3000 B.C.; a life-size statue representing King Entemena from Ur, dated 2430 B.C.; a large ivory relief representing the Assyrian god Ashur; and the head of a marble statue of Apollo, a Roman copy of a fourth century B.C. Greek original.
Even if the damage may not be as widespread as originally reported, there is still no clear answer to the most important question: just how much has been taken?
"I don't know exactly," said Jabbir Khalil, chairman of the State Board of Antiquities.
John Limbert, an American diplomat who is a senior adviser in the new Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq, concurred. "How bad was it?" he asked. "We just don't know yet."
While many museum officials watched in horror as mobs and perhaps organized gangs rampaged through the museum's 18 galleries, seized objects on display, tore open steel cases, smashed statues and broke into storage vaults, officials now discount the first reports that the museum's entire collection of 170,000 objects had been lost.
Some valuable objects were placed for safekeeping in the vaults of the Central Bank before the war; the bank was bombed and is in ruins, but officials say its vaults may have survived.
Other objects were placed in the museum's own underground vaults; only when power was restored this week could curators begin assessing what was lost. Even in some of the looted galleries, a few stone statues are intact.
Still more encouragingly, several hundred small objects — including a priceless statue of an Assyrian king from the ninth century B.C. — have been returned to the museum, in some cases by people who said they had taken the treasures to keep them out of the wrong hands. In addition, a steel case containing 465 small objects was confiscated by soldiers of the Iraqi National Congress and returned to the museum.
But some items that have been handed back to the museum are copies. "One of the storerooms that was looted contained almost entirely documented authenticated copies," Colonel Bogdanos said. "I got six items today. They were all from the gift shop."
The difficulty in determining what is missing is compounded by the lack of a master list of the museum's collection. Although inventories survive, they were compiled department by department and not computerized. And in some cases, they are not complete.
Nor is there a clear consensus about how much of the looting was organized. As evidence of a planned assault, museum officials say they found keys and glass-cutters. One official said he saw two "European looking" men enter the museum with the mob, point to various treasures and leave.
"Behind the looting there were wicked hands," Mr. Khalil said. "They took precious pieces and left less valuable ones."
For Mr. Limbert, the case is undecided. "One theory is that this was done by people who knew which were the best pieces and came equipped to get them," he said. "I'm told 27 pieces were taken from the actual galleries. But the other theory is that this was a smash-and-grab operation, mostly by people from the neighborhood. What supports this is that a lot of very good pieces have been returned. If you like conspiracy theories, you can go on forever here."
Antiquities experts, foreign museums and governments have mobilized to block traffic in smuggled treasures. At a meeting in London on Tuesday, representatives of some of the world's leading museums vowed to work to rebuild Iraq's plundered cultural institutions. Donny George, the research director of the Baghdad museum, said he was convinced that a significant part of the looting was organized.
Officials at the National Museum, whose scholars and scientists are widely respected, dismissed the idea that the museum was targeted as another symbol of Mr. Hussein's rule. They conceded, however, that particularly in recent years, the government had supported the work of the museum, which reopened in 2000 for the first time since the 1991 gulf war.
Colonel Bogdanos said that some Iraqis returned looted objects to him, rather than to the museum itself, which was identified with Mr. Hussein. "It has been a challenge to us that the Iraq museum is closely identified with both the prior regime and its Baathist Party," he said. "Everyone says this looting was anger at the regime."
Supporting that thesis is the destruction of numerous other cultural institutions where nothing but furniture and computers were stolen. The National Center of Books and Archives, also known as the National Library, was destroyed by fire, although Mr. Limbert said he had heard that 90 percent of its books and documents had been removed for safekeeping. The Awgaf or Religious Endowment Library, however, was burned, and it lost 6,500 Islamic manuscripts. The Central Library of Baghdad University and the Science Academy were also looted and destroyed by fire.
One piece of good news is that 50,000 Islamic and Arab manuscripts, dating back 14 centuries, were saved from the Saddam House of Manuscripts. Osama Nassir al-Naqsa Bandy, the director-general of manuscripts in the Ministry of Culture, had his entire collection removed to a safe place one week before the war began in March. He also took 150 boxes of books and catalogs from the library of the National Museum for safekeeping.
"The House of Manuscripts was attacked by saboteurs who took all the installations and furniture but everything important was gone," he said. "The library of the museum was bricked up and it also escaped vandalism."
Colonel Bogdanos said he had visited the hiding place of the manuscripts and books and was satisfied they were well protected by the local community.
"We had planned to bring them to the museum, but community members were insistent it would be a mistake," he said. "I was assured they were safe where they were. We took an inventory of the locked cases and left."
Word of what happened to regional museums is only just reaching Baghdad. Mr. Khalil, who is responsible for all national antiquities museums, said he had been told that the museums in Nimrud, Ashur, Hadra, Samarra and Nineveh had not been looted, but that serious damage, including looting of storerooms, was done to the museum in Mosul in northern Iraq.
"We were about to open a new museum in Tikrit, but it was bombed," he added.
Information is also just trickling into Baghdad about the situation at the 32 excavation sites operated by the National Museum.
Hanna A. Khaliq, general director of excavations, said the sites had been well protected from looters until the beginning of the wars. She said that she had so far heard from nine sites. In five — Mosul, Kirkuk, Nadjaf, Baa-Kuba and Ashnuna — buildings linked to the sites were looted, but she had no detailed information of the extent of the theft of recently found objects.
Ms. Khaliq said that it was hard to work because her department's entire fleet of 40 new cars as well as trucks had been stolen. At the museum itself, where administration offices were vandalized, Mr. Khalil said the staff needed material assistance, from cars to laboratory equipment for restoration.
"We have the people, but they have nothing to work with," he added.
The Iraqi cultural officials cannot help looking back to April 8 and 9, when their appeals for American military protection of the museum went unheeded. In conversation after conversation, the subject resurfaces, invariably with a bitter reminder that American forces were already protecting the nearby Ministry of Oil.
"I asked some soldiers why they did not stop the looting," Mr. Naqsa Bandy recalled. "They said, `This is not our duty.' "
Mr. Khalil said his experience was similar. "The U.S. forces and tanks were near the museum," he said. "They could have done as they did at the Ministry of Oil. Why didn't they? I don't know. We asked them. They said they were in the middle of a war."
The American response since then has been to try to fix what has been broken.
Next!
I guess Mr. Khalil didn't notice?
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