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The world's leading museums are to join forces to send an emergency team to Iraq to help rebuild its shattered cultural heritage. The Louvre, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, New York's Metropolitan and the Hermitage in St Petersburg are among those preparing to contribute to a task force led by the British Museum. The alliance is being co-ordinated by Neil MacGregor, the British Museum's director, who last week pledged to send his own curators to help assess the extent of the cultural "catastrophe" suffered by the Iraqi capital. Up to 170,000 priceless antiquities – many hailing from the earliest...

Baghdad residents returned 20 looted pieces from Iraq's ransacked national collection holding some of the earliest artefacts of civilisation. Iraq's antiquities chief, Jabar Hilil, yesterday called looting of Iraq's national museum following entry of US forces the "crime of the century." And he questioned why US forces made no move to safeguard it in the days of chaos that followed the toppling of President Saddam Hussein's government. But Hilil left open the possibility that losses were not as absolute as first thought. With no electricity in Baghdad, he said, museum operators had yet to make a full assessment of the...

U.S. troops committed the cultural "crime of the century" when they failed to protect priceless Iraqi artefacts from looters and likely trampled archaeological sites during the invasion, top antiquities officials here charged yesterday. They also said a small number of "valuable" missing museum pieces were returned after appeals by religious leaders, but denied reports from a UN conference that Iraqi officials may have been involved in an organised theft. "With what I'm expecting has happened in the (archaeological) sites in the field and what happened to the Iraq museum, I would say it's the crime of the century because it...

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...

Matsuura said top museum officials tried to protect the institution, but the thieves may have succeeded in paying off guards or other low-ranking personnel. He said he doesn't blame the U.S. military, even though UNESCO had urged the U.S. government before the war to safeguard it and other cultural sites. "If I were to blame somebody, it would be those armed bandits who looted their own cultural treasury," Matsuura said. The museum was assaulted during "a power vacuum" following the collapse of Saddam Hussein's government, and "anything could happen in such confusion and turmoil," he said.

Expert Thieves Pillaged Iraqi Museums JOCELYN GECKER Associated Press PARIS - Professional thieves, likely organized outside Iraq, pillaged the nation's priceless ancient history collections by using the cover of widespread looting - and vault keys - to make off with irreplaceable items, art experts and historians said Thursday. The bandits were so efficient at emptying Iraqi libraries and museums that reports have already surfaced of artifacts appearing on the black market, some experts said. Certain thieves apparently knew exactly what they wanted from the irreplaceable Babylonian, Sumerian and Assyrian collections, and exactly where to find them. "It looks as if...

3 resign from U.S. art panel to protest Iraq museum looting Friday, April 18, 2003 Associated Press WASHINGTON -- Three members of the White House Cultural Property Advisory Committee have resigned to protest U.S. military unresponsiveness as Baghdad's National Museum of Antiquities was looted, even though reports suggest the thefts may have been carried out by professional thieves. FBI Director Robert Mueller, meanwhile, said his agency was in on the hunt for looted Iraqi treasures. Martin E. Sullivan, Richard S. Lanier and Gary Vikan, each appointed by former President Clinton, said they were disappointed by the military's failure to protect...

<p>We shouldn't have been surprised that, after the looting of Baghdad's antiquities museum last weekend, negligent Americans, not the looters themselves, got most of the blame. For much of the media, every bad thing since the invasion has been America's fault. So adding another charge to the indictment was an easy call.</p>

Looting of the Iraq National Museum, long home to many rare and unique antiquities, has been big news. While much of the concern expressed about the fate of the museum certainly is genuine, at least some of the discussion has been driven by the anti-war crowd. If only the United States and the Coalition force had not invaded, their argument goes, then precious artifacts would not have been lost. But there's much more to the story. Like much else about the regime of Saddam Hussein, the museum was run with great secrecy about what it actually possessed. It seems that...

According to a report by Greg Palkott at the museum in Baghdad, it is unclear how many priceless items were actually lost. He said that the staff was trained to secure the entire collection in 24 hours. A British team of curators which visited in the past, said that a great number of displayed items were "fakes" with the real artifacts safely secured. Palkott asked a "spokesman" for the museum, how many priceless items were lost. His answer was "some". Palkott pressed him, "not the 170,000 that we've been told about?" The spokesman said "We don't know".

<p>Baghdad's museums, deplorably, have been looted. Determining the extent of the loss and assessing blame will take months, if not years. But there is an immediate question for the archaeological establishment to face: What to do now? Do we try to rescue what is left? Or do we simply write off the whole thing as a total loss?</p>

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 trashing of civilisation April 15 2003 This is a tragedy with echoes of past catastrophes: the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258, and the fifth-century destruction of the library of Alexandria. For the loss is not just Iraq's but ours, too. Iraq has not been called the cradle of civilisation for nothing. Five thousand years ago it was the birthplace of writing, cities, codified law, mathematics, medicine and astronomy. The House of Wisdom in ninth-century Baghdad kept classical scholarship alive and promoted a vigorous intellectual reaction to it while Europe was stumbling through the dark ages. In 1976 -...

<p>This is no fairy tale, even though it involves a centuries-dead British knight, a lady distressed, heraldry, provenance and a joust for justice.</p> <p>It is instead a present-day international art story in search of a happy ending, a drama being played out among a 12th-century church in a tiny English village, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a Grove City family and a Tennessee art professor.</p>

<p>As Pittsburgh's oldest building, the Fort Pitt Blockhouse has seen a lot of living in its 239 years, from its days as a Colonial stronghold, to its long run as a 19th century dwelling, to, finally, a 21st century museum.</p>

WEST POINT -- The coffee-colored waters of the Chattahoochee River are a bone-numbing 52 degrees. The brisk wind adds a bitter edge to a frosty November morning.At the water's edge, a dozen divers, swaddled in layers of neoprene, with snorkels, regulators and clipboards dangling from their wet suits, make final checks of their gear. They are eager to enter the river, even though one quips, "It's so cold velcro won't stick."The divers are the first of what state officials hope will become a legion of sport divers interested in surveying and preserving the forgotten history that lies beneath Georgia's rivers,...

Second-century artifacts found From correspondents in Jerusalem, Israel November 19, 2002 A cave survey in Israel's Judean Desert has found papyrus scrolls, coins and arrow heads from the time of the Jewish rebellion against the Romans in the second century, archaeologists said. The scrolls, while believed to be less significant than the Dead Sea Scrolls found in the region in 1947, will shed light on the time of the revolt led by Simon Bar Kochba, said Zvika Tzuk, an archaeologist for the National Parks Authority. The artifacts were found in the Ein Gedi Nature Reserve, near the Dead Sea, by...

UNSOLVED MYSTERY: ORIGIN OF 800-YEAR-OLD ARTIFACTS ELUDES EXPERTS Sunday, October 6, 2002 By DEAN BAKER, Columbian staff writer With almond-shaped eyes and dreadlocked hair, the faces on the 800-year-old clay amulets have been a mystery since they were first discovered on the banks of the Columbia River more than 80 years ago. Who were these guys who lived around modern Ridgefield at the time Genghis Khan conquered Persia and King John of England signed the Magna Carta? "They were not Chinook Indians," said David Fenton, executive director of the Clark County Historical Museum. "Where they came from and where they...