SARASOTA -- When the Peabody Essex Museum of Salem, Mass., reopens to the public in June after a $125 million expansion, some of its priceless artifacts will be protected by an invisible shield made by Invisa Inc.
The "InvisaShield" presence-sensing equipment uses radio circuitry and hidden antennas to keep valuable objects safe from touch as well as from theft or vandalism, without any visible sign it's in place. Someone approaching a protected object will trigger a voice warning, a silent alarm, or a siren, depending on how the client wants the system set up. That makes InvisaShield an intriguing choice for situations where a museum wants objects to appear natural and unprotected by barriers, yet to be safe. The Peabody Essex order is a breakthrough for Sarasota-based Invisa. Until now, the company has been marketing its technology to keep automatic doors and gates from injuring people or damaging vehicles. Managers have been demonstrating the security applications at trade shows for the past six months, but the company is still three to six months away from having a production model of InvisaShield. Peabody Essex managers were so eager to use the product that they asked to be able to order pre-production evaluation units. The museum's security consultant is Ducibella Venter & Santore, which has worked with more than 400 museums and cultural sites throughout the world since opening for business in 1964.
"Based on our 40 years of experience in evaluating systems for protecting collection artifacts on display, this particular product has ... a level of protection that really hasn't been demonstrated by any other product in the industry yet," founder Bob Ducibella said Thursday. That ringing endorsement is at least as important as the museum's order. Ducibella has acted as a security consultant for the expansion of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the Cincinnati Museum of Art, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. In the past, the firm has overseen the development of protection systems for NASA's lunar material, the financial operations of the Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange, and a Federal Reserve Bank. Stephen Michael, president of Invisa, said two other museum security consultants in the same league as Ducibella are "picking spots to try evaluation units." "The potential in the museum industry for us is hundreds of millions of dollars," Michael said. "Over the next 12 months or so, we intend to become involved in at least 15 market segments, museums being one of them."
The U.S. Department of State has expressed interest in the Invisa technology for protecting filing cabinets, and, "we are even in conversations with Wal-Mart about jewelry cases, gun cases," Michael said. The Peabody Essex opened in 1799, making it the oldest such institution in the United States. Management closed the museum's galleries in January to make way for the expansion, which will create six new galleries connected by a soaring atrium. The reopened museum will allow visitors to wander through a full reconstruction of a circa-1800 Chinese merchant's house. The house was moved stone by stone from a remote Chinese province and has been painstakingly reassembled on the museum grounds. The home will look as if you had walked into it 200 years ago, with the now-priceless utensils and valuables typical of a prosperous merchant's home lying around for visitors to enjoy. Invisa's shares are traded in the over-the-counter market under the ticker "INSA." The company's 12 million shares have been trading in the $3.70 to $4.20 range. http://www.heraldtribune.com/
Ancient treasure seized in Drama
An important hoard of over 2,500 illegally excavated ancient coins has been confiscated following a raid on the house of a northern Greek telecom employee, police said yesterday.
Together with the 2,646 gold, silver and bronze coins, which included six silver pieces struck by Alexander the Great, officers discovered a marble stela dedicated to the Phrygian god Attis, 100 lead weights, 49 rings as well as sealstones, brooches, bracelets and other smaller ancient artifacts in the Drama house of the OTE worker — who was only identified as M. Stamboulis, 49.
Archaeologists were impressed by the illegal collection.
“There are very many rare artifacts of great archaeological value,” Drama Museum’s director, Ekaterini Preisteri, said, adding that the Attis relief probably came from the ancient town of Amphipolis. “We have found a sanctuary of the god there,” she said.
Seven metal detectors were also found in Stamboulis’s house, which he apparently used to locate his finds.
http://www.ekathimerini.com/
Dealer duped by tale of 'Gauguin' painting
19.04.2003 By EUGENE BINGHAM
Tony Martin stared at the photograph of the painting brought in to his Palmerston North art gallery on spec.
Sure, he appreciated the painting itself - a Polynesian outrigger canoe against an island backdrop - but it was the signature that stood out. In neat black handwriting was the word "Gauguin". Steven McKelvey, a local tradesman, had dropped into Mr Martin's Palmerston North gallery, Artscape, in August 1998 with what he said was a photograph of a painting that had been in his family since the late 19th century. McKelvey said his great-grandfather, a Captain Ernest Frederick Hughes Allen, had been given it by Paul Gauguin. Mr Martin went to the Palmerston North library to find examples of Gauguin's signature. Very quickly, he discovered a match and within days he had a legal agreement drawn up to have the painting authenticated and to sell it on Mr McKelvey's behalf. Under the deal, Mr Martin would recover his expenses and pocket 18 per cent of the proceeds of any sale. Mr Martin, a former farmer turned public gallery director who had stood for Parliament as a candidate for the Natural Law party, was possibly on to a cash windfall.
He contacted London auctioneers Sothebys and Christies but was told that he would need to have the painting authenticated by the Wildenstein Institute in Paris. Mr McKelvey brought him two letters purported to be from Captain Allen while he sailed in a ship called "Laura". The letters said that Captain Allen had commissioned the painting of the canoe while Gauguin was in Auckland in 1895. Other drawings and a carving bearing Gauguin's name, and a painting said to be by Auguste Renoir, were also discovered. The Wildenstein twice wrote to Mr Martin saying it was not prepared to authenticate the artwork. But armed with affidavits signed by a Justice of the Peace from Mr McKelvey, his mother and an uncle setting out the story of the captain and the artworks, Mr Martin decided to go ahead with the exhibition. For $5000 he hired the Copthorne Gallery on the Auckland waterfront at the height of America's Cup fever in February 2000, offering the artworks for sale by tender or auction. The sale stood to reap millions - until controversy brewed over whether the works were genuine or fakes. Art critic John Perry looked at advertising material for the exhibition and was immediately suspicious.
"It was just overall bad art," said Mr Perry. "It didn't appear to be from the hand of one of the greatest artists of the late 19th and early 20th Century." When he saw the tapa cloth one of the drawings was on, he recognised it as "something that had probably been bought in the Fiji markets in the 1970s". Mr Perry went to the media saying: "If they are by Paul Gauguin, I'm Vincent van Gogh." The auction was cancelled but Mr Martin was determined to prove authenticity. Over the next year, he suffered a series of blows. Ethnologists confirmed the tapa cloth was post-1920s and he discovered that a postcard said to have been given to Gauguin by Captain Allen was not in production before 1907. Police documents examiners found a 1932 watermark in the paper of one of the drawings. (Gauguin died in 1903.) According to court documents, Mr Martin discovered inconsistencies in the letters, including doubts about whether Captain Allen was on "Laura". In October 2001, he contacted Mr McKelvey's mother who denied knowing anything about the painting. The JP who had apparently witnessed their affidavits denied ever signing the documents or meeting Mr McKelvey.
Mr Martin had to accept that he had been duped and publicly embarrassed and decided to write to people who had helped him to explain what had happened. "I've had amazing replies back and the feeling of embarrassment is not quite so difficult to take."
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/
Fake art man ordered to pay $100,000
19.04.2003 By EUGENE BINGHAM
An unemployed tradesman has been ordered to pay $100,000 to an art gallery director who exhibited paintings that were claimed to be the work of the French master Paul Gauguin.
The case, said to be one of the country's biggest art deceptions, was brought by the gallery director who publicly defended the authenticity of the works before realising he had been duped. "I don't feel I was gullible [although] I did feel from a professional point of view a little bit embarrassed," said Tony Martin, director of the Artscape Gallery in Palmerston North. In February 2000 Mr Martin exhibited paintings, drawings and a carving said to be by Gauguin and another painting by Auguste Renoir. He said at the time that he was selling the works on behalf of a family who had inherited them from their sea-faring great-grandfather, said to have met Gauguin in 1895. Critic John Perry and others in the art world denounced the works as fakes but Mr Martin said he had researched their provenance and believed they were genuine. The Herald can reveal that Mr Martin was dealing with Steven McKelvey, 44, who moves between Gisborne, Ashhurst near Palmerston North, and Drury in Auckland. Court documents show watermarks found in one of the works eventually proved they were fakes. Mr Martin sued Mr McKelvey, accusing him of deception and misrepresentation. Mr McKelvey did not defend himself in court but Judge Chris Tuohy said it seemed there had been a deliberate attempt at fraud and ordered him to pay Mr Martin $100,000 to cover his expenses and costs. Mr McKelvey said this week that he had not tried to deceive anyone. "The gentleman went public with artwork that he shouldn't have after it was clearly shown by the Wildenstein Institute [the world authority on Gauguin] that the works were not genuine," said Mr McKelvey. He refused to comment when asked about the letters and affidavits he provided to help prove the authenticity of the paintings, and denied knowing anything about how the artworks came about.
"I simply took him some artwork to assess whether they were genuine or not." Mr Perry, the critic who first raised the alarm about the paintings, said he was pleased they had been proved as fakes. "It was certainly the biggest attempt to defraud the art public of New Zealand." Asked who he thought could have produced the fakes, Mr Perry said: "I can't help thinking it all pointed towards the Carl Sim school of forgery." Sim, the country's most notorious art forger, goes by the name C. F. Goldie after the famous New Zealand artist whose work he has copied. He has denied having anything to do with the Gauguins. The Herald has learned that another "Gauguin" drawing sold in Auckland by the International Art Centre in 1999 was returned after questions were raised about its authenticity. Centre director Richard Thomson confirmed this week that it had refunded the original buyer. Mr Martin, 56, said he believed that fake could be connected to the ones he exhibited. "The thing that you can't rule out is that there are two or three people who are involved in the business of creating fake artworks and selling them. I have got no evidence of this but ... maybe the Gauguins represented an attempt to break into the international art scene."
Mr Martin said he believed he had been careful about verifying Mr McKelvey's claims. "I set everything up as professionally as I could but then I realised the whole thing hinged on him. I had quite a bit of thought about that but in the end I thought, yeah, I trust him. "If somebody came to me now and said, 'We've got this,' I would say, 'Yes, this is worth investigating'. But I would be a little bit more guarded about my processes. I would not make my processes so clear. "If I made a mistake in the whole thing - and I'm not saying I have - that would be it."
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/
Painting stolen from courthouse
04-17-2003
On the anniversary of the Confederate surrender at Appamatox, someone decided to steal an oil on canvas painting of Southern General Patrick Cleburne which hung in the rotunda of the Cleburne County Courthouse. Cleburne County Probate Judge Ryan Robertson said court had been in session that day and he noticed the painting missing from its’ position on the wall in late afternoon. “If someone knows the whereabouts of the stolen painting or have knowledge of it they should contact the Cleburne County Sheriff’s Department,” he said. Janet Baber, who spent several months painting Cleburne’s portrait, presented it to the county last year. A plaque, detailing the artwork, was placed beneath it during Cleburne Day, celebrated March 16. Baber valued the painting between $3,000 - $6,000. Baber said she felt the theft might be a hate crime since the incident occurred on April 9, the day of the Confederate surrender. “There are still some people out there who take this stuff really seriously and it’s almost like the war is still going on,” she added. http://www.cleburnenews.com/
U.S. on Lookout for Stolen Iraq Artifacts
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) - Customs inspectors and Border Patrol agents were alerted Friday to watch for and seize any stolen Iraqi art works and antiquities headed for the U.S. black market.
``It is important that we work with the new leaders of Iraq to preserve their cultural heritage,'' said Robert Bonner, commissioner of the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection. Bonner said 50,000 pieces were known to be missing from the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad, including some of man's oldest artwork and writings and a 5,000-year-old solid gold harp. Bonner asked Iraqi museum officials for photographs and descriptions of the items and said they will be made available to Customs inspectors and Border Patrol agents as soon as possible. The alert was not triggered by any specific intelligence that U.S. collectors are trying to purchase the stolen goods, he said. The bureau, part of the new Homeland Security Department, has authority to seize stolen artifacts belonging to other countries. No matter how many times such items change hands, U.S. law prevents anyone from gaining legal title to stolen art, artifacts and antiquities.
On the Net:
Customs and Border Protection: http://www.cbp.gov/
ANNOUNCE: ENG: UNESCO Expert meeting on Iraqi Cutural Heritage - Resolutions - Message from the ICOM Secretariat
Jacques Perot, the President of ICOM, attended the Expert Meeting on Iraqi Cultural Heritage held at UNESCO on 17 April 2003.
The meeting agreed on the following recommendations to those responsible for civil order in Iraq:
"1) That all museums, libraries, archives, monuments and sites in Iraq be guarded and secured immediately by the forces in place
2) That an immediate prohibition be placed on the export of all antiques, antiquities, works of art, books and archives from Iraq
3) That an immediate ban be placed on the international trade in objects of Iraqi cultural heritage
4) That a call be made for the voluntary and immediate return of cultural objects stolen or illicitly exported from Iraq
5) That there be an immediate fact-finding mission under UNESCO coordination to assess the extent of damage and loss to cultural property in Iraq
6) That there be the facilitation of international efforts in assisting cultural institutions in Iraq."
Jacques Perot strongly advised that the fact-finding mission that will be organised in the very near future should be international and multidisciplinary.
As stated in the message of 16 April, the ICOM Secretariat is at present compiling a list of the existing documentation - databases, Web sites, exhibition catalogues - on Iraqi museum collections. This list will be available as soon as possible on the ICOM Web site. In order to collect as much information as possible, Jacques Perot asks ICOM members to forward to the ICOM Secretariat the bibliographical references of all documentation available in their country on Iraqi collections. Please send this information to Email: programmes@icom.museum
We would like to thank you for all the initiatives undertaken and all your efforts to preserve the Iraqi cultural heritage.
Valérie Jullien Communications Officer
The looting of Baghdad’s museum and library
US government implicated in planned theft of Iraqi artistic treasures
By Ann Talbot 19 April 2003
As the full extent of the looting of Iraq’s National Museum in Baghdad emerges, it becomes clear that there was nothing accidental about it. Rather it was the result of a long planned project to plunder the artistic and historical treasures that are held in the museums of Iraq.
Had the National Museum of Iraq been looted by poor slum dwellers it would have been crime enough, and the responsibility would have rested with the American administration that refused, despite repeated warnings, to provide for the security of Baghdad’s cultural buildings. Once the museum staff were able to communicate with the outside world, however, it became apparent that the looting was not random. It was the work of people who knew what they were looking for and came specially equipped for the job. Dr. Dony George, head of the Baghdad Museum, said, “I believe they were people who knew what they wanted. They had passed by the gypsum copy of the Black Obelisk. This means that they must have been specialists. They did not touch those copies.” Speaking on Britain’s Channel 4 News, he told Dr. John Curtis of the British Museum that among the artifacts that have been stolen are the sacred vase of Warka, a 5,000-year-old golden vessel found at Ur, an Akkadian statue base, and an Assyrian statue. It was, said Dr. Curtis, “Like stealing the Mona Lisa.” It was only almost a week after the museum was originally looted that Dr. George was able to alert archaeologists worldwide to what had been stolen. The American military authorities had made no effort to prevent the objects leaving Baghdad or to put in process an international search for the stolen artifacts. The US reluctance to act cannot be explained by any lack of warning. Professional archaeologists and art historians had told the Pentagon of the danger of looting beforehand. Dr. Irving Finkel of the British Museum told Channel 4 that the looting was “entirely predictable and could easily have been stopped.”
The museum was the victim of a carefully planned assault. The thieves who took the most valuable material came prepared with equipment to lift the heaviest objects, which the staff could not move from the galleries, and had keys to the vaults where the most valuable items were stored. Not since the Nazis systematically stripped the museums of Europe has such a crime been committed. The US online publication of BusinessWeek magazine reiterated the theme of premeditation and conspiracy in the looting of Iraq’s museums in an April 17 article headlined “Were Baghdad’s Antiquity Thieves Ready?” The article carries the subtitle: “They may have known just what they were looking for because dealers ordered the most important pieces well in advance.” BusinessWeek writes: “It was almost as if the perpetrators were waiting for Baghdad to fall to make their move. Gil J. Stein, a professor of archaeology at the University of Chicago, which has been conducting digs in Iraq for 80 years, believes that dealers ordered the most important pieces well in advance. ‘They were looking for very specific artifacts,’ he says. ‘They knew where to look.’” Since the last Gulf War in 1991 Iraqi antiquities have flooded onto the market from the museums that were looted then and from archaeological sites that have been attacked with bulldozers. At such locations ancient statues have been sawed apart so they could be exported. This plundering of Iraq’s cultural heritage has only whetted the appetite of collectors who are already responsible for looting Far Eastern, Latin American and Italian archaeological sites. With the collapse of global stock markets, works of art and antiquities have come to be regarded even more highly as a secure investment, fuelling an already huge underground market.
The illegal trade in antiquities is thought to be as lucrative as drugs trafficking, to which it is often linked. According to a report by the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, “The Trade in illicit Antiquities: the Destruction of the World’s Archaeological Heritage,” produced in 2001, London and New York are the main markets for this trade. Switzerland, which allows an art work that has been in the country for five years to be granted a legal title, is a key trans-shipment point. Professor Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn, director of the McDonald Institute at Cambridge, told a press conference at the report’s launch that the trade continued because “The government is in the pocket of the art market, which wants to keep the flow of antiquities.” He added, “It’s a scandal.” As news of the latest looting broke, the Labour government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair organised a hasty press conference in the British Museum, at which Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell promised official support to protect Iraqi antiquities. Even as she spoke, the National Library of Iraq was being looted. Home to rare, centuries-old illuminated copies of the Koran and other examples of Islamic calligraphy, as well as irreplaceable historical documents from the Ottoman Empire, the building was set on fire, destroying an untold number of texts. Reporter Robert Fisk, who saw the flames, ran to get US marines in an attempt to save some of the collection, but they refused to help. Fisk wrote in the Independent, “I gave the map location, the precise name in Arabic and English. I said the smoke could be seen from three miles away and it would take only five minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there wasn’t an American at the scene and the flames were shooting 200 feet into the air.”
After the fate of Baghdad museum, it can only be concluded that the generalised looting and arson at the library served to cover up a more systematic crime, in which select manuscripts were stolen for wealthy collectors. In the process they connived in the burning of books—another Nazi practice.
The role of the ACCP
In the aftermath of these two devastating attacks on culture, attention has focused on the activities of the American Council for Cultural Policy. Even the British press that works under some of the toughest libel laws in the world has been willing to suggest that the ACCP may have influenced US government policy on Iraqi cultural artifacts.
The ACCP was formed in 2001 by a group of wealthy art collectors to lobby against the Cultural Property Implementation Act, which attempts to regulate the art market and stop the flow of stolen goods into the US. It has defended New York art dealer Frederick Schultz, who was convicted under the National Stolen Property Act, and opposes the use of the 1977 US v. McClain decision as a legal precedent in cases concerning the handling of stolen art objects.
In the McClain case a US judge accepted that all pre-Columbian art or jewellery brought into the US without the express consent of the Mexican government was stolen property. Mexican law regards all archaeological artifacts as state property and bans their export. Mexico is one of a number of countries that has such legislation.
Ashton Hawkins, a leading art lawyer and founder of the ACCP, regards such legislation as “retentionist”. He has condemned the archaeologically rich “source” countries for attempting to protect their archaeological sites and museums by such measures, and has argued that under the Clinton administration such “retentionist” policies came to dominate US government policy.
Hawkins has his sights set on the great Middle Eastern museums. He has called for the Egyptian antiquities that are held in the Cairo Museum to be dispersed. “I would like to propose,” he said, “that the Cairo Museum offer museums around the world the opportunity to acquire up to 50 objects for their collections. In return, the museums would make a very substantial contribution for the construction of the new museum under the Giza plateau—$1 million each, for example.”
The ACCP’s inaugural meeting took place at the Fifth Avenue apartment of Guido Goldman, a collector of Uzbek textiles. Among those present were Arthur Houghton, the former curator of the Getty Museum at Malibu in California, which is notorious for displaying works of suspicious provenance. Hawkins himself retired in 2000 as vice president of the trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, an institution that, according to its own former director, Thomas Hoving, holds many artifacts looted from Etruscan tombs.
Before the war began, the ACCP met with Pentagon officials, declaring their great concern for Iraqi antiquities. What that concern means is evident from the remarks of William Pearlstein, the group’s treasurer, who also describes Iraqi laws on antiquities as “retentionist”. The ACCP deny that they want Iraqi laws changed, but the looting of the museum and library will effectively circumvent that problem if US law on stolen art objects and archaeological material can be changed.
Professor John Merryman of Stanford Law School and a member of the ACCP has called for a “selective international enforcement of export controls” in US courts. In other words, it should be perfectly legitimate to import the objects looted from Baghdad if a US court chooses not to recognise Iraqi legislation.
Merryman set out the organisation’s principles in a 1998 paper in which he argued that the fact that an art object had been stolen did not in itself bar it from lawful importation into the US.
He went on to claim, “The existence of a market preserves cultural objects that might otherwise be destroyed or neglected by providing them with a market value. In an open, legitimate trade cultural objects can move to the people and institutions that value them most and are therefore most likely to care for them” ( International Law and Politics, vol. 31: 1).
This is a self-justifying argument that reeks of hypocrisy. Wealthy collectors can now point to the chaos on the streets of Baghdad, the looting of the museum and the burning of the library as evidence that the Iraqis are unable or unwilling—too poor or too ignorant—to look after their treasures, which would be better housed in American museums or private collections.
The ACCP’s ideas represent the interests of particularly rapacious sections of the US ruling class, who operate on the principle that everything—even an object of priceless artistic or scientific value—is defined by its “market value”.
What they mean is price, since the real value of the objects stolen from the Museum of Baghdad and the Iraqi National Library is incalculable. These are quite literally people who understand the price of everything and the value of nothing. The prescription for the market to determine possession of and access to works of art and archaeological material would place these artifacts in the hands of a rich minority and make public access to them depend on the good will of their wealthy owners. Despite the fact that many of the ACCP members have been associated with major public institutions, their agenda is profoundly opposed to the public dissemination of art and archaeology. They are not only trying to change the law in other countries, but are working against the most progressive traditions of American society, which has always prized its public museums.
A scientific tradition
The development of public museums went hand in hand with the development of a scientific understanding of archaeological artifacts and the societies that produced them. Publicly funded museums represented a break with the tradition of private treasure hunting. Their exhibits aimed to display the material artifacts of the past in a rational and scientific manner.
The accumulation of archaeological artifacts in private hands tends to disrupt scientific work, since material becomes scattered, is difficult to catalogue and much of it remains unknown to scholars working in the field. Public museums are public not only in their funding and because they open their galleries to visitors, but in the sense that they make knowledge available to all—something that has been recognised as a primary requisite of the scientific process since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century.
One of the effects of the looting of the Baghdad museum has been to destroy the card catalogue and computer records of the museum’s holdings. This has not only made tracking down its treasures more difficult, but has also undermined generations of patient archaeological work. To destroy such a catalogue is, both in a symbolic and practical sense, to make a collection private, because its contents become unknown to the outside world.
While the major objects are well known internationally, a museum’s records goes far beyond these spectacular works of art. It includes all the minor finds of archaeological excavations that, in themselves, are not eye-catching, but when studied together produce a picture of a society that cannot be gained from its art alone.
Archaeologists spend their time sifting the detritus of past civilisations, often literally. They may sieve tons of earth looking for beetle wing cases or seeds. Cess pits and rubbish heaps produce a wealth of knowledge. What is thrown away and discarded provides a context for the relics of great temples and palaces, or royal tombs. Petr Charvat’s recent book Mesopotamia before History [1] contains lovingly photographed images of pieces of mud impressed with rush matting. This is not the stuff to grace a collector’s cabinet, but reveals vital information about the craft skills and way of life of ancient Mesopotamians.
A blow to world scholarship
The Baghdad museum was more than a place to display artifacts. All excavations carried out in Iraq by international teams of archaeologists were reported to it. The museum therefore possessed a database of knowledge that was accessible to researchers internationally, and was the hub of a vast cooperative endeavour. Its looting and the destruction of its records are a blow to world scholarship. It threatens to turn the clock back more than 150 years to the period before scientific archaeology in Mesopotamia.
Early excavations were by modern standards unscientific, as excavators were still learning their discipline by a process of trial and error. One of the most elementary lessons of that learning process was that context is everything in archaeology. An artifact can only tell its full story if its context is known.
By context, an archaeologist means the physical position of an artifact in the ground, its relationship to other artifacts and to the layers of earth around it. From this information it is possible to determine an artifact’s relative date and considerable information about its practical use and social significance. Ripped out of this context, it loses much of its meaning. Even the finest work of art can be better appreciated when its context and the social conditions of its creators are understood.
In its widest sense, understanding an artifact’s context means understanding its relationship to the entire archaeological site at which it was found, to other sites round about it, and to the historic landscape in which it belongs. While national feelings are often evoked to justify keeping archaeological artifacts in their country of origin, the more important scientific reason for doing so is that the context of the artifact is preserved by keeping it close to where it was found.
It is still possible to see in modern Iraq houses built by similar methods to those employed by ancient builders and to see boats built to similar designs. The full significance of Mesopotamian artifacts can only be appreciated by seeing them in the context of the extraordinary landscape of modern Iraq—a country where every hill that rises above the plain has been built up from layers of mud brick representing generations of occupation.
The American colonial administrator, retired general Jay Garner, tried to co-opt the emotional impact of that landscape for his own political purposes by holding his big tent meeting within view of the 4,000-year-old ziggurat of Ur, which was the temple platform for the moon god Nanna. But by allowing the museum of Baghdad to be looted, the US authorities have shown they have no regard for the real importance of Iraq to human history.
When the medieval European cartographers who drew the thirteenth century Hereford map of the world set out to represent the planet on which they lived, they put Asia at the top because to them it was the most important continent. There lay the lands of the Bible. Jerusalem was at the very centre of their world view, and beyond it lay Babylon, the scene of the Jewish captivity, the Tower of Babel and Abraham’s home in the city of Ur.
So deeply impressed on the European mind was the Biblical image of the world that the first excavators of ancient sites in this region were looking for confirmation of the Bible. Even in the twentieth century, Leonard Woolley referred to his excavations at Warka by the Biblical name of Ur of the Chaldees.
Yet the material that came out the excavations carried out by Woolley, and others such as Layard, Botta and Hormuzd Rassam, shook the Biblical view of the world. Not the least important discovery was that familiar Bible stories such as Noah and the Flood had their origin in Mesopotamia long before the Bible was written. As the cuneiform writing of thousands of clay tablets was deciphered, it was realised that numerous complex and highly developed civilisations had existed in Mesopotamia of an antiquity never before guessed. The full extent of this history only became apparent as the technique of Carbon 14 dating and other scientific methods were refined. Only in the second half of the twentieth century was it realised that settled farming could be traced back to the mid-eleventh millennium BC in the Middle East.
The cradle of civilization
The earliest farming communities do not occur in the area that is present-day Iraq, but in the better watered highlands of the Zagros Mountains, Anatolia, the Levant and the Deh Luran Plain. Nevertheless, Iraq was the centre of the second phase of the protracted Neolithic Revolution that began with the domestication of animals and cereal crops.
In Iraq that revolution went a significant step further with the development of irrigation, a technique that vastly increased agricultural productivity. The surplus produced by irrigation allowed the first urban civilisation on the planet to emerge in the very region that the combined military forces of the US and the UK are reducing to a wasteland.
By 5800 BC, small farming communities were appearing along the Euphrates. Within a few centuries they had coalesced into dense urban settlements, each of several thousand people centred on a temple which was largely responsible for managing the irrigation system, distributing food, and importing stone, minerals and timber from the neighbouring highlands.
Over two millennia these Mesopotamian cities developed the art of copper smelting, alloying bronze and, most importantly, writing. Writing was essential to the administration of cities that depended on a largely artificial ecosystem created by irrigation, and which needed to import even the most vital raw materials.[2]
Writing enabled a dramatic intellectual development to take place. What began as a method of recording stores and deliveries became a medium for writing poetry, stories and history. Science and mathematics flourished.
Modern research has revealed evidence of multiplication tables, tables of reciprocals, squares, square roots, cubes and logarithms to bases 2 and 16. Other texts show volumes and areas, linear and quadratic equations. Babylonian mathematicians calculated the value of pi to 3.125, close to its true value. Astronomy was highly developed and if it was understood in terms of omens and prophecy, its predictions of eclipses and the movement of the planets were nonetheless accurate.[3]
The social and political structure of Mesopotamian society cannot be traced directly from its material remains, and archaeologists differ about its character and the course of its development, but Petr Charvat finds in Mesopotamian society to 3000 BC that “in all spheres of society the principle of universality and equality comes to the fore ... the material standard of living is equalised by redistribution ... people meet in assemblies to discuss and decide matters of common interest.... All receive the same treatment in life and death” ( Mesopotamia Before History, pp. 158-59).
From 3000 BC there is some evidence of social stratification and the emergence of a political elite or ruling class in the “royal burials” of Ur, but some archaeologists dispute this characterisation of those burials.
In this period two great civilisations emerge: in the south of present-day Iraq is the Sumerian civilization, and in the north the Akkadian, which are both based on a collection of city states that preserve many of the cultural traditions of the earlier period. Not until 2334 BC does the first empire appear under the rule of Sargon of Agade, who unites these two confederations.
Sargon’s short-lived empire was replaced by that of Ur Nammu in 2112 BC. The thousands of clay tablets that survive from this period testify to the careful management of resources that kept this empire alive until 1990 BC, when it was replaced by the Babylonian empire, which reached its high point under Hammurabi in 1792 BC.
The mid-fourteenth century BC saw the rise of the first Assyrian empire. The Assyrians were to dominate Mesopotamia again, and the whole region from the Gulf to the Mediterranean in the ninth century BC. In 612 BC the Babylonian empire was established. It most outstanding ruler, Nebuchadnezzar, built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the double walls of the city, the great ziggurat and the processional way. He was responsible for sacking Jerusalem and taking many of the Jews into captivity.
This succession of empires and the Persian empire that followed were sustained by the immense productivity of the irrigation system and the complex system of administration that maintained it. The sophisticated concepts that had been developed in the process fed into the intellectual systems of later societies. Even the Greeks, from whom we derive the name for the land between the rivers, stood in awe of Mesopotamia’s achievements. One of the ministries that has been systematically destroyed in the recent days of looting is the Ministry of Irrigation. We might say that by this act the US administration seeks to drive Iraq back to the dark ages, except that Iraq has never known a dark age in the sense that Europe has. Empires might rise and fall, but as long as the irrigation system continued to function the land between the rivers could produce more food than it needed. By attacking the irrigation system, the US administration is causing more damage in a few weeks than any other previous invader.
Iraq’s cultural significance did not end with the close of the Persian empire. Throughout the European dark ages it remained a haven of learning, preserving under the Caliphs of Baghdad classical texts lost in the West. Islamic scholarship was to prove vital to the re-emergence of Aristotelian philosophy in thirteenth century Europe and to the Renaissance.
The full extent of the losses in this respect will only become apparent when the looting at the National Library is itemised. That account is yet to come.
What is already clear is that a great crime has been committed against not only the Iraqi people, but against the whole of humanity, since it is the history of humanity that has been attacked. For this reason the sack of Baghdad marks a significant point on the trajectory of the Bush administration as it attempts to plunge the world into a new barbarism that would outstrip anything that history can show from the past.
Notes: 1. Petr Charvát, Mesopotamia before History, Routledge, 2002. 2. Brian M. Fagan, People of the Earth, Prentice Hall, 2001. 3. Michael Roaf, Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia, Equinox books, 1990
Looting of Iraq's National Museum prompts criticism of U.S. forces. LYON, France (CNN) -- Interpol has formed a team to track down art and antiquities dating back thousands of years that have been stolen from Iraqi cultural institutions, including the country's national museum in Baghdad. The international police agency made the announcement Friday, the day after a panel of antiquities experts said it suspected some of the looting had been "commissioned" by collectors who had anticipated the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. The team will meet officials in Kuwait later this month to determine exactly what has been stolen before traveling on to Baghdad. FBI agents from the U.S. are also being sent to Iraq to assist with criminal investigations against anyone suspected of involvement in the looting.
Interpol, based in Lyon, France, said it had told police in its 181 member countries to make border guards, customs authorities, art dealers, auction houses, and the wider public aware of the situation. "The conflict in Iraq has unfortunately resulted in large-scale destruction and theft of the cultural heritage of the country," said Karl-Heinz Kind, the agency's specialist in the theft of art and antiquities. "Interpol is calling on organizations and institutions involved in conservation and trade of antiquities to categorically decline any offers of cultural property originating from Iraq," he added. "In case of doubts concerning the origin of certain items, these bodies should immediately contact Interpol and seek expert evaluation of what is being offered for sale." (Looting 'commissioned') A meeting of experts and other interested parties, including representatives from the United Nations, the International Council of Museums and the World Customs Organization, will take place in Lyon between May 5 and May 6, to determine a strategy to deal with the thefts, Interpol said.
Much of the looted treasures could surface in London, one of the world's largest centers for trade in Islamic art, said Dick Ellis, an expert in recovering stolen art. "The first thing to do is to assess what has been stolen and create a circular of the key objects and get it into the marketplace to close down the market," he said. U.N. officials say they warned the United States government several months in advance of the war that the museum and other cultural institutions were at risk. The U.S. has also been widely criticized for having taken steps to protect Iraqi oil fields but failing to take similar steps to protect the Iraqi National Museum. The chairman of a committee that advises the White House on protecting antiquities around the world has resigned over what he says is the U.S. failure to stop the looting. In a letter sent to U.S. President George W. Bush, Martin Sullivan, who headed the White House Cultural Property Advisory Committee said the "tragedy was foreseeable and preventable." "While our military forces have displayed extraordinary precision and restraint in deploying arms -- and apparently in securing the Oil Ministry and oil fields -- they have been nothing short of impotent in failing to attend to the protection of (Iraq's) cultural heritage," Sullivan said in his letter.
http://edition.cnn.com/
Looters return objects to museum
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 now-unlit underground vaults in which they had stashed many pieces for safekeeping as war came.
Even in the dark, he said, it was clear the storage rooms had been breached. "We cannot say how many pieces were taken, but it is disastrous," Donny George, director general of research for the state board of antiquities, told reporters. Museum officials declined to let journalists into the museum to see the damage directly. Interpol and the FBI pledged to try to help recover the goods. Museum officials yesterday indicated that they had had no contact from the US investigators. They urged governments around the world to block any sale of the looted goods -- citing Switzerland, the US, Israel and Japan as the markets where smuggled art was most likely to surface.
http://www.express.co.uk/
U.S. archaeologists hope to document missing Iraqi treasures
By MARYCLAIRE DALE The Associated Press
4/18/03 8:54 PM
PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- Archaeologists from the University of Pennsylvania hope to help catalog the losses at Iraq's plundered national museum, relying in part on the school's own collection of artifacts from the region. Penn sponsored 19th- and 20th-century excavations in Iraq and has a large collection of royal jewelry, gold vases, clay writing tablets and other objects from the "cradle of civilization" dating back to 3000 to 4000 B.C. Penn's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology also has replicas of ancient items thought to have been stolen from the National Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad after U.S. forces toppled Saddam Hussein's regime.
"We can collect all this history, but we can't learn from it," lamented Holly Pittman, a Penn museum curator and art history professor who faults U.S. leaders for not protecting the cultural treasures. Fellow curator Richard Zettler plans to be in London later this month when archaeologists gather for a U.N. meeting on how to recover the lost artifacts. Scholars hope to organize an Internet database of the missing items to thwart their sale on the black market, offer to repair items damaged by looters and push for a plan to buy back items if necessary. Iraqis have started returning a handful of items, but researchers believe more than 70,000 pieces could be missing. "The people in the neighborhood with these objects should be rewarded for bringing them back. That creates a bad precedent, I know, but these are unusual circumstances," said Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.
Vikan was one of three members of the White House Cultural Property Advisory Committee who resigned this week, saying the United States had failed to protect Iraqi artifacts. "This is not just Iraq's problem, it's our world heritage at stake," Vikan said. "All of mankind, the basic ingredients of what it is to be human -- all sprang from within the borders of Iraq, and to have that sacked and looted is a major loss for us all."
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On the Net:
Archaeological Institute of America http://www.archaeological.org/
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology: http://www.museum.upenn.edu/
US shamed by looting of antiquities
DAN MCDOUGALL
THE ACRID smell of cordite and burning metal consumed Mushin Hasan as he drained the last of the "drinking water" supply from the rusting air conditioning vent - around him, Baghdad shuddered as the allied bombing continued into the night. Three floors below, surrounded by sandbags in the cold darkness of the basement, sat his remaining colleagues from the National Museum of Iraq, devotedly guarding some of the world’s most important ancient treasures. Even in the middle of the death and destruction, the assembled historians and curators had no doubt about the gravity of their task - surrounding them, among more than 170,000 items labelled priceless by UNESCO, were mankind’s earliest written documents. Hidden elsewhere in the catacombs of the museum were treasures dating from 7000 BC to 1000 AD, chronicling the achievements of the Uruk, Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian and early Islamic civilisations. Hasan, the museum’s deputy curator, had slept little in the past fortnight. The building housing Iraq’s antiquities was at particular risk from bombing due to its proximity to Baghdad’s foreign ministry. He also knew that teams of professional looters had raided other museums in the Iraqi capital. In the darkness, he hoped in vain that the United States would offer the museum protection from the hordes when they arrived; within days, his worst nightmare had come true.
On 10 April, a day after Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed and Baghdad was in the hands of US military forces, the National Museum of Iraq was ransacked by looters who forced their way in, brandishing iron bars. The curators were overwhelmed in the chaos and two days later, almost all of the museum's 170,000 artefacts were either stolen or damaged. In the middle of the carnage, ancient vases were smashed and statues beheaded. Priceless items, including a 2,000-year-old, solid gold harp, disappeared into the night. Barely half a mile away from the desperate scene of plunder, US tanks and ground troops had turned a blind eye on the carnage, choosing instead to set up a protective cordon around Iraq’s oil ministry. As news of the looting broke around the world, archaeologists and academics looked on in horror at television images of the decimated interior of the museum. Inside, the curators picked through the broken statues and shards of pottery littering the floor. Glass display cases had been smashed open and emptied. In the grounds of the museum, two Assyrian reliefs and 5,000-year-old tablets bearing some of the earliest known writing were in pieces. In the wake of the seemingly indiscriminate raids Mushin Hasan himself appeared before western television cameras in tears. He said: "They have looted or destroyed 170,000 items of antiquity dating back thousands of years. They were worth billions of dollars. The Americans were supposed to protect the museum. If they had just one tank and two soldiers, nothing like this would have happened.
"This may be the work of desperate looters, but I hold the American troops who failed to guard the museum personally responsible." Worse still were reports that Iraqi looters had not only stripped the National Museum in Baghdad, but an errant US bomb had also destroyed the National Library, leaving the building a smouldering ruin and turning thousands of ancient Qurans at the ministry for religious affairs to ashes. Across the Middle East, the decision to overlook the museum in favour of the Ministry of Oil was seized upon as further ammunition to anti-war lobbyists that the future of Iraq’s vast oil reserves were the prime motive for the invasion. Even in Washington the anger amongst leading academics was palpable. Professor McGuire Gibson, one of the world’s leading scholars on Mesopotamia, angrily blamed George Bush’s generals for the looting and even disclosed he had met Pentagon officials several times before the war, imploring them to post guards at the museum. In January, Prof Gibson was among a small group of archaeologists and art curators who met Joseph Collins, who reports directly to US deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, at the Pentagon. The purpose of the meeting was to talk about how the US military could protect Iraq’s cultural and archaeological sites from damage and destruction during the forthcoming war. Prof Gibson even gave the officials a list of 5,000 cultural and archaeological sites; first on the list was the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad.
According to Prof Gibson, a number of Pentagon officials personally assured him they would do their utmost to preserve Iraq’s cultural heritage. He said: "I pointed to the museum’s location on a map of Baghdad and I asked them to make assurances that they would make efforts to prevent looting and they said they would. I thought we had assurances, but they obviously didn’t pan out. "In my opinion the looting of this museum is catastrophic. It’s a lot like a lobotomy. The deep memory of an entire culture, a culture that has continued for thousands of years, has been removed. There was 5,000 years of written records, even Egyptian records don’t go back that far. It’s an incredible crime." As Baghdad comes increasingly under US control, the failure of the Pentagon to ensure the preservation of Iraq’s cultural heritage is coming under serious scrutiny. This weekend, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has called an emergency meeting in Paris to review the disaster. The key question the UNESCO conference is likely to address is why, on the back of a promise to preserve what they could, did the US military make no attempt to place a cordon around the National Museum and other important sites? After the first reports of looting at Iraq’s museums, when the first questions were raised about the failure of the forces to intervene, the initial comments of the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, signalled that the US did not think that protection of antiquities and art was a priority. At a news conference last Friday, he blamed press coverage for inflating the problem: "The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over and over and over, and it’s the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, ‘My goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?’"
Not surprisingly, Mr Rumsfeld’s comments outraged archaeologists and historians. Jane Waldbaum, the president of the Archaeological Institute of America, even claimed she was more outraged by Mr Rumsfeld’s response than the looting. She said. "Donald Rumsfeld in his speech basically shrugged and said, ‘Boys will be boys. What’s a little looting?’ Freedom is messy, but freedom doesn’t mean you have the freedom to commit crimes. This loss is almost immeasurable." The public outcry among US academics, and particularly the early involvement of UNESCO, has obviously had an impact on military thinking. In the past few days, Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, issued a statement claiming that anyone caught dealing or possessing stolen antiquities would be prosecuted under Iraqi law and the United States National Stolen Property Act. He also said that Central Command issued orders to all troops in Iraq to protect museums and antiquities throughout the country. And Mr Powell vowed that the American Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Affairs will help Iraqis and international experts in their efforts to restore artefacts and the catalogues of antiquities that were damaged by looters.
UNESCO experts have also started putting together a plan to try to recover some of the missing antiquities. The Art Newspaper, an international publication, has posted pictures from a 1975 catalogue of 300 of the most prominent exhibits from the museum in Baghdad on its website. But few hold little hope for the recovery of even half the collection. Archaeologists and art curators even believe that some of the looting was organised by a conspiracy of antiquity dealers and smugglers. Proof of this, they claim, is the fact that the heavy metal doors on the storage room of the museum weren't broken down, indicating that it was opened with a key. Also, the card catalogue listing the thousands and thousands of items in the museum was destroyed, proving an effort to cover up what was going on. According to Prof Gibson, as the focus on reconstruction increases, it has become clear the US has let the world down. "In warfare, there are priorities. There are not enough troops necessary to do everything that needed to be done. But we have a responsibility under various rules in warfare to preserve the cultural patrimony of a country. It seems we simply didn’t care."
http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/
Plunder in the cradle of civilisation
(Filed: 19/04/2003)
It took looters just 48 hours to remove 170,000 artefacts from a single Baghdad museum - and many of Iraq's other collections were similarly stolen or destroyed. Sebastian Smee asks why no one saw this coming, and what can be done now
'Absolutely heartbroken" was how John Curtis, the keeper of the Near Eastern Department at the British Museum, described the state of his friends and colleagues at the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad last Tuesday. For Curtis, who seemed caught between sadness and incredulity himself, it had been a day of whirlwind activity as the world tried to get to grips with what had happened to the cultural heritage of Iraq in the aftermath of the American entry into Baghdad. "When I spoke to Dr Donny George [research director of antiquities at the museum] this morning, there were still no guards on the building," said Curtis. "They had been begging the American military authorities to provide guards, but there weren't any. As a result, he has sat there in the museum with the director and a number of junior staff, and they're not leaving the building. They are trying their best to make sure nobody comes in to continue the looting."
In the run-up to war, Curtis said that George had become mentally drained from the stress of preparing to defend the museum. Asked if he had heard whether any museum staff had been killed, Curtis said he didn't know. "I didn't really feel able to ask him on the telephone this morning how his other colleagues were. But he assured me he was well and so was the director of the museum." Precisely what has already been looted and what destroyed may not be known for months. But already it is believed that as many as 170,000 artefacts were taken from the museum in the 48 hours following the fall of the city. Photographs show the floors of some of the store rooms ankle-deep in fragments. George told Curtis that they look "as though a hurricane has blown through there. They are a terrible mess." Many who had never heard of the Iraq National Museum before this week may be wondering what kind of artefacts have been taken, or even how much, in the big picture, it really matters. In cultural terms, the truth is that the picture doesn't get much bigger: Iraq, as Curtis says, is the "cradle of civilisation". The ancient cities of Ur, Babylon, Nimrud and Nineveh may seem as exotic and mysterious as the names of their great leaders - men such as Nebuchadnezzar, Ashurnasirpal II, Sargon II, and his son Sennacherib. But they were the capitals of extraordinary empires, and for thousands of years places of great artistic achievement and learning.
Consequently, says Curtis, "there was a remarkable collection of material in the Iraq National Museum, ranging in date between about 6,000BC and the early Islamic period [c 7th century AD]." Museum staff in Baghdad have already identified several major pieces as having been stolen. "These three items were among the finest things in the museum, so it would be difficult to overestimate their importance, or their value in cultural terms," said Curtis. "Of course," he added, "I can't put a monetary value on them - these things are priceless." They include a Sumerian stone vase with figural decorations from Warka or Uruk, of about 3,000BC. "It's a very famous piece," said Curtis, "published in all of the textbooks. It's an icon of the Sumerian civilisation." Another piece taken was a gigantic bronze, circular statue base with a long cuneiform inscription showing the bottom part of a squatting figure. "That dates from about 2,400BC. It's the most ambitious bronze casting to have survived from this early date." A third piece - a life-size Assyrian stone statue, dating from about 800BC - was also taken. "These are very heavy pieces," said Curtis. "Two of them would have required three or four people to lift them." So how much of the destruction of the museum was random, frenzied pillaging and how much was premeditated theft?
According to Curtis, Donny George "very much felt that these three things were deliberately stolen. The damage could be clearly divided into two classes. First, there was the wanton destruction of the mob rampaging through the store rooms, destroying everything in sight. And second, there seemed to be this very specific theft - possibly, he said, even theft to order." Of course, what has happened at the Baghdad Museum is far from isolated. Almost nothing remains of the National Library's archive of tens of thousands of manuscripts, books, and Iraqi newspapers. And many provincial museums have been looted, too. "The museum in Mosul has been emptied," said Curtis. "If it wasn't for the Baghdad museum, we'd be sitting here talking about that. Then we've got the Mosul University library, completely stripped out - full of valuable Islamic manuscripts, and all burnt. This is just what we know about. I don't know what the scale of the damage is in provincial museums, but I suspect that it might be very great. So it is very, very unfortunate. And completely unnecessary." Museum specialists are baffled as to how this was allowed to happen. After all, many warnings were given, and military planners even had the dire precedent of what happened after the first Gulf War to forewarn them. During the insurrections in the north and south of Iraq in 1991, about a dozen museums were looted and large numbers of pieces found their way on to the market.
Curtis confirms that many letters expressing concern about the potential for damage to Iraq's cultural heritage were sent by experts to various British government ministries and to the Pentagon. Although it now seems that these letters were ignored, Eleanor Robson, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and an expert in ancient mathematics and science, is less sure. "Well, they were and they weren't," she says "They were completely ignored by the British government, who failed to acknowledge letters sent to them. That was unspeakably terrible. But meetings did take place with the Pentagon, who were given lists of endangered sites. They made contact with some of the appropriate experts, and assurances were given. But I think they were not prepared for what happened in Baghdad - for any of it. The looting of hospitals, for instance - just the scale of it all." This is echoed by Curtis. "I don't think anybody foresaw that there would be a disaster on this scale. The letters that were written were not very specific. They probably did not mention possible looting in the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad. It hadn't crossed my mind that that would even be possible. "But I'm afraid that it has been possible. It seems, now, unimaginable that the museum should have been left unguarded. It's been a catastrophe."
The questions occupying Curtis and his colleagues around the world are how further damage can be stopped, and how stolen items can be recovered. To that end, Unesco has called a conference in Paris, and the British government and the British Museum have launched a campaign to stop Iraqi artefacts being sold abroad. "There's got to be a complete ban," said Curtis. "There have to be vigorous searches at the borders and at the airports when planes start landing again. And they should also check the military personnel leaving the country, because this is often the way by which things do get taken out of countries." Although of far less significance than the looting, Eleanor Robson of All Souls said that after the first Gulf War, some young soldiers turned up at the Metropolitan Museum in New York with artefacts they had taken home as "souvenirs", wanting them valued. Curtis, who hadn't heard of this, did say that the Iraqis claimed that illegal excavations had been conducted by soldiers during that war. "They called them 'bayonet excavations' because they used their bayonets to dig." Hand-in-hand with the ban on exports, Curtis says there needs to be an amnesty, so that those in possession of stolen items will be encouraged to return them. "For those things which do slip through the net and come onto the art market we must have controls in place to make sure that they are recognised and impounded and as soon as possible returned to Iraq."
Only a tiny proportion of the items stolen in the aftermath of the first Gulf War have been recovered. Most of them - that is to say about 10 - were sent back through the agency of the British Museum, "a very tiny number out of the several thousand pieces that are known to have been looted and sold abroad". The chances of recovering the artefacts stolen from the Iraq National Museum are greater, he believes, "because they are likely to be of a higher quality and probably more instantly recognisable. But the first thing that needs to happen is for a detailed list to be compiled of what is believed to be missing. "With regard to the museum itself and how we can help," added Curtis, "there will obviously be a need for a lot of curatorial and conservation assistance. Curatorial, in the way of checking material, compiling inventories and so on. Conservation, because there are so many things broken and smashed and lying on the floor. "We hope to be in a position to send conservators and curators out there as soon as it is safe for them to do so. But it's going to be a long task to piece all those things together."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
FBI sends agents to recover looted treasures of Baghdad
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
19 April 2003
The FBI has sent a team of agents to Baghdad to help find artefacts stolen from the city's museums after US troops came under intense criticism for failing to prevent widespread looting.
Though the US media has shown limited interest in a cultural disaster with few precedents, two outside advisers to the White House have resigned in outrage. "It didn't have to happen," said Martin Sullivan, who was chairman of the President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property for eight years. "In a pre-emptive war that's the kind of thing you should have planned for." His fellow panel member Gary Vikan, who also quit, commented bitterly that, "we certainly know the value of oil, but certainly don't know the value of historical artefacts". The vandalism and wholesale destruction seemed to be a complete surprise to planners of the invasion, even though some historians and experts say they were assured months ago by the Pentagon that, in the event of war, cultural sites would be protected. Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, has sounded notably unmoved, suggesting that, while the looting was regrettable, it was a normal consequence of war. "It happens and it's unfortunate," he said this week, adding that the US would offer rewards to people who brought items back or helped in their recovery. More than two dozen FBI agents are in Iraq to search for treasures looted from Baghdad's antiquities musuem and national library. Interpol is also sending a team, while Unesco, the United Nations cultural organisation based in Paris, is sending specialists to assess damage. At Unesco, however, the suspicion is growing that the looting was more than spontaneous revenge by Iraqis to show their hatred of a defeated regime by ransacking every public building in sight. Participants at a Unesco meeting on Thursday suggested the pillaging had been carefully organised. Some of the looters had keys to vaults and safes, and some items are already said to have turned up on the international art black market.
http://news.independent.co.uk/
Iraqi museum thefts planned by outside experts
Looting crowds hid thieves who removed treasures
Robert J. McCartney, Washington Post
Friday, April 18, 2003
http://www.sfgate.com/
Paris -- Well-organized professional thieves stole most of the priceless artifacts looted from Baghdad's National Museum of Antiquities last week, and they may have had inside help from low-level museum employees, the head of UNESCO said Thursday.
Thousands of objects were lost at the museum, both to sophisticated burglars and to mob looting, said Koichiro Matsuura, director general of the U. N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. "Most of it was well-planned looting by professionals," he said in an interview. "They stole these cultural goods to make profits." Museum officials in Baghdad said at an emergency meeting of UNESCO on Thursday that one group of thieves had keys to an underground vault where the most valuable artifacts were stored. The thefts were probably the work of international gangs who hired Iraqis for the job, and who have been active in recent years doing illegal excavations at Iraqi archaeological digs, according to archaeological experts working with UNESCO.
Meanwhile, FBI Director Robert Mueller said in Washington that more than two dozen FBI agents have been dispatched to Iraq to help conduct criminal investigations into losses at the museum and other cultural sites. The FBI's artifacts investigation comes amid growing international furor over the ransacking of Iraqi museums and libraries that went unchecked by U.S. soldiers, resulting in the loss of countless items from ancient civilizations. Three members of the White House Cultural Property Advisory Committee said Thursday they have resigned to protest the museum looting. The 11-member committee of archaeologists, museum directors, art dealers and other experts makes recommendations on how the United States can assist other countries seeking to stem illegal trade in their ancient treasures. Martin Sullivan, Richard Lanier and Gary Vikan, all appointed by former President Bill Clinton, said they were disappointed by the U.S. military's failure to protect Iraq's historical artifacts. "The tragedy was not prevented, due to our nation's inaction," Sullivan, the committee's chairman, wrote in his letter of resignation. Lanier criticized "the administration's total lack of sensitivity and forethought regarding the Iraq invasion and the loss of cultural treasures."
Mueller said the FBI teams would aim to capture thieves, recover stolen artifacts and cooperate with Interpol, the international law enforcement organization, to track sales "on both the open and black markets." "We recognize the importance of these treasures to the Iraqi people and . . . to the world as a whole," Mueller said. At the Paris UNESCO meeting of archaeologists and museum directors, participants agreed to send an emergency mission to Iraq to measure the damage done to the national museum and other cultural institutions. The various moves came as some governments made contributions toward rescuing Iraq's heritage and as museums and archaeologists' associations mobilized to provide experts to help in the effort. Italy has pledged to contribute $1 million. Germany's Archaeological Institute has offered expertise and personnel to help restore Iraq's museums. Matsuura said he had also received offers of financial aid from Qatar, France, Britain and Egypt. Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, said the museum had offered six conservators and three curators to provide help in the crisis and was coordinating its response with the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and Berlin's museums.
UNESCO officials said the group had so far received nothing from the United States, which announced last year that it would rejoin UNESCO after an 18-year absence. The experts meeting in Paris, a group that included Iraqi scientists as well as American, European and Japanese archaeologists with experience in Iraq, said that even moves to prevent the illegal export of looted objects from Iraq would require detailed information on what was stolen from museums in Baghdad and Mosul as well as from libraries, monuments and archaeological sites. UNESCO officials said a multidisciplinary mission, comprising five or six experts, would leave as soon as it could safely enter Iraq. They said they were awaiting word from John Limbert, the U.S. official named by Secretary of State Colin Powell to coordinate efforts to recover artifacts stolen by looters. Artifacts lost at the museum include vases, statues, gold jewelry and clay tablets that are the earliest examples of writing. The University of Chicago's Oriental Institute has already listed between 2,000 and 3,000 lost objects in a database, according to Professor McGuire Gibson, who is one of the specialists advising UNESCO. "The most important, best material" was taken by professionals who "knew what they were doing," Gibson said. "Then mobs came in and just marauded." Gibson said the thieves broke heads off some statues, apparently to make it easier to carry them away.
Some of the stolen artifacts are so well known that no collector would admit having them. One is the alabaster Uruk Vase, with pictures of grain, sheep, goats and priests dating from about 3500 B.C. It is pictured in many introductory art history books. It's not clear whether the Uruk Mask, a priceless alabaster face of a goddess from the same era, was stolen. A statue of a seated king from about 2000 B.C. was another major loss.
Chronicle news services contributed to this report.