Amid the chaos of Iraq's war, the cradle of civilization is being looted 

By DAVID BALLINGRUD, Times Staff Writer
Published February 6, 2005

 
Mushin Hasan, deputy director of Iraq's National Museum in Baghdad, holds his head in his hands as he sits amid artifacts destroyed by looters in April 2003.

If Elizabeth Stone had use of a spy satellite, she'd have a chance to stop them.

A high-resolution camera looking down from space could pinpoint exactly where and when the thieves and tomb raiders come.

It would see them swarm like ants over ancient, partially buried cities in the Iraqi desert, gouging holes in the sand and carrying off hundreds of thousands of treasured artifacts left by long-dead but advanced civilizations - Babylonians, Sumerians, Assyrians.

So Stone, an anthropology professor at SUNY Stony Brook, has been looking for a satellite to "borrow" for a survey. She has approached government agencies and private foundations, but so far, no luck. "I am still struggling to come up with the funds," she said.

And so in the midst of the bloodshed and suffering of war, a disaster of a different kind is taking place: the unprecedented robbing of the cradle of civilization.

Taking advantage of the distractions of two wars, looters have been plundering thousands of sites in the desert between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers - once ancient Mesopotamia. They're well organized, well equipped and in no particular hurry; they know no one is coming to stop them.

Armed guards supplied by local tribes stand by, just in case. Soon the land is a moonscape of holes, and antiquities that had rested beneath the sand for thousands of years are on their way to illegal markets all over the world.

"It's a cultural disaster," said U.N. official Mounir Bouchenaki.

"The biggest we've ever seen," agreed University of South Florida professor of religious studies and longtime Middle East archaeologist James Strange. "The thieves stake out the sites like they would stake a claim on a mine. No one is enforcing the law."

The thieves - mostly poor Iraqis - often smuggle the items across the border to Syria, where they can be more safely sold into the shadowy world of art and antiquity collectors, dealers and even some museums willing to dispense with questions. "It's a great tragedy," said Strange. "High art is being stolen; history is being stolen."

Iraq's archaeological heritage has been under attack since the first Gulf War, and since the United Nations' economic sanctions created a cash-poor society.

"But it has escalated dramatically since the day coalition troops crossed the border in 2003," Stone said. "The damage is really beyond calculation. The world's first cities, many never examined, are being destroyed. These are some of the most archaeologically important sites in the world, and they are being lost forever."

What can be done?

"For now, nothing," said Strange. Most of the desert sites are far beyond the protection of the Iraq government, he said, and U.S. forces have other priorities. "It's like having 700 bank robbers and 50 cops," he said.
An attack by a mob, and by pros

Art and antiquity theft has been around forever, all over the world, and even enjoys a kind of romantic appeal. It's not usually a violent crime, after all. Thousands of works of art are stolen every year in countries such as Italy, France, Germany, Belgium, Russia and the Czech Republic. In Europe, according to Interpol, the number of thefts and the value of the items taken are going up.

But that had little in common with what happened at Iraq's National Museum in Baghdad in April 2003.

The museum is the archaeological repository for all artifacts from excavations in Iraq. It contains, or did contain, hundreds of thousands of objects covering 10,000 years of human civilization: tablets, reliefs, weapons, seals, pottery, musical instruments, statues large and small. The collection is made of gold, clay, stone, metal, bone, ivory, cloth, paper, glass and wood.

U.S. troops had protected the museum, but they left to engage insurgents in another part of the city. By April 10, the museum was teeming with poor Iraqis who took whatever they could to trade for essentials, and with professional thieves who left behind glass cutters and other tools of their trade. Some robbers even knew their way around the museum, heading straight to out-of-the-way rooms that held special valuables.

It was a mess. Looters made a determined attempt to drag off a statue that "must have weighed a ton," said Strange. It was so heavy it smashed stairs as it was dragged down them. The looters finally gave up.

Some items were rumored to be for sale in Paris and Tehran in a matter of days, according to the Archaeological Institute of America. There was simple vandalism, too, notably the methodical decapitation of 26 statues.

In the days that followed, a few items were intercepted at Iraq's borders. A few more were seized in London, Washington and Boston, and some embarrassed Iraqis returned what they had taken. But about 14,000 antiquities remain unaccounted for.

Museums and sites in other Iraqi cities didn't fare well, either.

Large gold objects - a helmet, a dagger and a vase - were stolen from the Royal Cemetery at Ur. They were later recovered.

In the ancient section of Babylon, U.S. troops paid too little attention to the site and caused significant damage, said SUNY professor Stone. "They spread gravel around and filled sandbags with soil still rich in archaeological materials."

The Ishtar Gate at Babylon is one of the world's most famous monuments from antiquity. The top part of the gate, with glazed brick decorations showing dragons, bulls and lions, is now in Berlin. But the foundation, with unglazed, molded bricks showing animals, is still in Babylon. The iron gates at either end of the sunken part were stolen in the looting after the war, according to the Archaeological Institute, but were recovered. However, parts have been broken off the gates, and the area is no longer secured. There is also damage to nine of the molded brick figures of dragons.

In the early days after the war, experts agree, a military presence at Babylon probably prevented the site from being looted. But a base should not have been established there, wrote J.E. Curtis of the British Museum. It is "one of the most important archaeological sites in the world. This is tantamount to establishing a military camp around the Great Pyramid in Egypt or around Stonehenge in Britain."

"What were they thinking?" complained Mike Pitts, editor of British Archaeology in an article written for the Guardian. The significance of Babylon could not have been missed, he wrote.

"Babylon the capital city . . . of Nebuchadnezzar, of the hanging gardens described by Herodotus; Babylon the military powerhouse that ravaged its neighbors in the 6th and 5th centuries B.C., yet also developed astronomy, science and art to extraordinary levels. Surely no one in the West was so ignorant at least not to ask: Should we not be concerned?"
Where is all the loot?

There are more than 10,000 identified archaeological sites in Iraq, most not yet excavated.

In these sites are many hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets - the written word of ancient civilizations. Most of these tablets are quite small, said USF's Strange, the size of the palm of a human hand or even smaller. Some might be important government communications, but most played a more modest role in society. "Many are simple receipts," he said.

"They have yet to be translated. We just haven't gotten to them yet," said Stone of SUNY, who is one of the leaders of a U.S. Agency for International Development project to support reconstruction efforts in Iraq. "Only a handful of people can read them."

A small seal, a sculpture or a cuneiform tablet can put quick cash in a poor man's pocket. He might sell it to a middleman or a dealer for a few dollars. That buyer might then sell it for 10 times as much. Eventually, a collector might pay tens of thousands of dollars for something he or she never intends to show anyone.

Demand for Mesopotamian artifacts has always been high. Private collectors all around the world treasure them because they go back to the beginning of civilization, and they are ready to spend large sums to possess them.

"It's not only a link to the past," said Strange. "For many people, it's a link to their religion. Believers see their religious beliefs coming alive before their eyes." 

About 150,000 whole cuneiform tablets - "the literary history of Iraq" - are looted each year, said McGuire Gibson of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. But it's not entirely clear where all this material is.

"It's floating around on the market somewhere," said Gibson. "Dealers will tell you there is nothing out there, but don't believe it. It's around."

Stone thinks there must be a huge number of cuneiform tablets bottlenecked on their way to the open market, at least temporarily.

"Somewhere there are warehouses full to the ceiling with looted materials," said Stone. "We don't know how many sites are being looted, but we know there are many. It's said that more Iraqi dirt has been turned over in last 18 months than in all the millennia before. Whole cities look like the surface of the moon."

Buying and selling antiquities nearly always breaks one law or another in nearly every country, but many people don't care. Only in the last 30 years or so have many museums, large and small, begun to tidy up their reputations for being willing to overlook the ownership history, or provenance, of an antiquity.

Looting prevents scholars from understanding the full meaning and importance of an object, argues Eric Meyers, director of Duke University's graduate program in religion. "When an item is looted, there is no way to re-establish an honest connection between the object and its original context, because so many other individuals have been involved, all of them illegally. When collectors become involved, especially rich ones, the price for antiquities rises very quickly." Worse, he said, many objects are simply tossed out if they don't fetch the desired price.

The Emergency Protection for Iraqi Cultural Antiquities Act, passed by Congress last year, was to tighten import restrictions on cultural materials removed from Iraq, but it has had little effect, said Strange. "People at our borders are looking for terrorists, not artifacts," he said.

The University of Chicago's Oriental Institute maintains a Web site tracking stolen and unaccounted for Iraqi antiquities: http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/IRAQ/iraq.html