Looters Sack Iraq's Relics

In the chaos of post-war Iraq, the country’s priceless antiquities—and the world’s cultural heritage—are up for grabs. Gangs of looters ransacked museums and ancient sites for objects that can fetch thousands or millions of dollars on the black market.

The outside world was first alerted to the plunder by reports of looting and vandalism at Iraq’s National Museum in April. According to the early bulletins, about 170,000 artifacts were stolen, a number that was subsequently revised (as of July 1) to about 30 major items from the galleries and some 10,000 less important ones from museum storerooms.

Even though the scale of the looting turned out to be smaller than first reported, the sacking of the National Museum in Baghdad horrified archaeologists and historians. Some compared it to the destruction of the royal library at Alexandria in Egypt 2,000 years ago. The museum looting has ended, but the assault on the country’s numerous and rich archaeological sites is continuing.

“ There is a sense in which the heritage of Iraq is the heritage of all humankind, because this was a pivotal place in human history,” said Richard Zettler of the anthropology department and curator-in-charge of the Near Eastern section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (UPM). As a graduate student in archaeology, Zettler did research at the National Museum in Baghdad. He also took part in the University of Chicago’s dig at Nippur in Iraq, but has directed UPM’s excavations in Tell es-Sweyhat in Syria since 1989.

Penn’s Museum of Anthropology and Archeology has played a leading role in the excavation and interpretation of Iraq’s antiquities. The museum’s first expedition went to Nippur in 1888, and its excavations in Iraq in the 1920s and ’30s brought back a substantial collection of artifacts.

The objects housed in the Baghdad museum and concealed in ruin mounds and archaeological sites around the country tell the story of the “cradle of civilization” between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers some 5,500 years ago in Mesopotamia. “By looking at material remains [from the area], we can . . . watch human beings making the transition from hunters and gatherers to sedentary farmers and herders. We can then watch . . . humans gradually developing larger population agglomerations and cities,” Zettler said.

The extent of looting in the south of Iraq is unprecedented, according to U.S. officials and archaeologists quoted in the June issue of Science magazine. University of Chicago archaeologist McGuire Gibson, who directed Zettler’s dissertation research, watched a band of 200 or 300 looters digging trenches and tunnels at the important Sumerian city of Umma. At Isin, another ancient site, U.S. soldiers chased off a “huge number” of illicit diggers. In some places, the raiders have been seen using bulldozers.

If an artifact disappears from a museum, curators still retain records about its history and its original location, Zettler explained. Knowledge gained from the work of archaeologists is preserved. At the unopened sites in the Iraqi countryside, there are no such records because the archaeological treasures are being “discovered” there for the first time—by the looters. “What’s coming out of the looted sites is a total loss because . . . we don’t know what it is and we don’t know where it came from,” Zettler said. “An awful lot of what we learn comes not just from the artifact or what’s written on it or what’s carved on it . . . but from where it comes from in the ground.”

At an archaeological dig, field crews meticulously remove the trash and treasures of civilization, carefully documenting what comes from where at every level of the site. Knowing whether an object comes from a government building, a temple, or a private home is crucial to understanding its significance and interpreting
the culture in which it had meaning. That contextual information is lost when ancient relics are removed wholesale by people concerned chiefly with financial gain, even if they are only trying to feed their families. “The losses suffered by the [Baghdad] museum may pale by comparison to the damage the diggers are wreaking,” Zettler wrote in a June 17 editorial for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

“ As archaeologists, we deplore the destruction of context as much as we mourn the loss of the objects themselves,” wrote Jane C. Waldbaum, president of the Archaeological Institute of America, in a recent issue of the organization’s journal. “Stripped of all their associations . . . they have lost much of their cultural and historical meaning. This is the real tragedy of the looting.”

Jon Hurdle is a freelance writer based in Ambler, PA.

The Birth of Civilization -- in a Vase

One of the most important artifacts plundered from the collection of the Iraq National Museum is the Warka vase, a 5,000 year-old vessel of alabaster, carved with images that speak to scholars about the dawn of civilization. “It comes from a very early phase of ancient Mesopotamia,” Zettler explains, “when we begin to see cities in the archaeological record—when we can first document the existence of kings, complex economies, and administrative systems.” Before this time, people lived in small villages, working their own plots of land to provide for their own needs.

The sculpted vase, unearthed at Uruk (in southern Iraq) in the 1930s, pictures in art the state-sponsored religion and its hierarchy that made cities, hence civilization, possible. Three levels of images in carved relief show how the Sumerians arranged their world. Around the base of the vessel are images of water, crops, and livestock, the food and drink that gave life to complex urban societies. On the middle tier, naked tribute bearers carry baskets of fruits and vegetables, and stone jars of what is likely barley beer. “They mobilize the resources of the land and bring them to this major figure, who is probably the deity of the city.” The goddess, almost certainly Innana, reigns from the vase’s top register along with a king figure. “So it’s the temples that were mobilizing resources that would go to the deity and then to the community at large. . . . That is a kind and scale of resource mobilization we hadn’t yet seen up to that point in time.”

During a no-questions-asked amnesty in early June, the Warka vase was returned to the National Museum—unceremoniously and in pieces—in the trunk of a car.