Museum looting not as catastrophic as feared

Michael Jansen visited Iraq's splendid National Museum in Baghdad, which is now a tragic sight

The looting of Iraq's National Museum at the end of the war that overthrew Saddam Hussein was not as comprehensive and catastrophic as feared.

But among the unknown number of the stolen items are three unique pieces. The first two are Sumerian artefacts - the marble Warka Head of a woman, possibly the first sculpted portrait of a living person, and the Warka Vase, a tall, narrow vessel decorated with votive relief. Both are 5,000 years old.

Dr Selma al-Radi, an Iraqi archaeologist conducting a survey of the museum's losses for UNESCO, told The Irish Times that the head and the vase are the most significant surviving pieces of their period.

The third missing artefact is the lower portion of a copper figure of a seated youth, an offering to the water god, cast during the reign of the Akkadian King Naram-Sin, 2250 BC.

Mr Donny George, the head of research at Iraq's Department of Antiquities, said these three items are the museum's most important objects. Other serious losses include nine specific cuneiform tablets taken from a gallery wall, another Akkadian statue in copper and an ivory relief depicting a lion attacking a Nubian dating from 850 BC.

Roman-era statues from Hatra were smashed and the heads carried away. The head of one of the red clay Babylonian lions of Harmall was shattered and lays at the foot of the beast bound in bubble wrap. The gold was stripped from the bow of the beautifully reconstructed wooden Lyre of Ur, the city where the Prophet Abraham was born.

Forty-six pieces were stolen from the galleries, and nine have been returned so far. But no one knows what was taken from the museum's looted store rooms or if the vaults of the Central Bank, where the museum's gold artefacts were placed, have been pillaged. The galleries were cleared of most objects in the three weeks before the US launched its war on March 20th.

Mr George said the objects on display there were packed in tin trunks and cardboard cartons and set out on shelves in five store rooms. "The entire museum library was taken to a secure place," Mr George said.

Reserve Col Matthew Bogdanos, outgoing head of the US army recovery team, said he had arranged with elders and clerics for neighbourhood guards to be posted at the bunker which holds the 337 boxes containing 39,453 objects, books and manuscripts removed from the museum and the nearby Saddam Archive. It is hoped the magnificent gold jewellery from the royal tombs at Ur (2600 BC) and other items (totalling 6,800-7,500 pieces), deposited in the Central Bank ahead of the 1991 war, remain in situ but no one can check because the vaults were flooded during the war.

This week the army team pumped the water from the vaults. Museum staff may have "to wait until there is an Iraqi authority to open the vaults", Col Bogdanos, a prosecuting attorney in New York city, remarked: "I'd hate to be the lawyer to untangle that problem."

Since Iraq has suffered three highly destructive wars in the past quarter of a century, the keepers of half a million objects from the 7,000-year-old civilisations of Mesopotamia - Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian and Islamic - are well drilled in squirreling away artefacts. Most of the items left in the galleries were either fixed to a stand or too bulky or too fragile to move.

Today the splendid museum is a tragic sight. The entrance hall, its walls covered in small rectangular blue tiles, is an echoing shell. The dusty and rubble- strewn galleries have been deprived of almost all their glorious treasures. In gallery one, from which the Warka Vase was taken, there are only half a dozen exhibits where there had been hundreds of objects great and small. Only one of the Assyrian galleries remains largely intact. The massive winged bulls with the heads of bearded men still peer into the distance over the heads of visitors.

Ranks of sandbags have been arranged on the floor to catch the stone sculptures if they should fall during bombing. Statues are protected with foam rubber. The floors are littered with splinters of glass.

Sitting in an office stripped of everything but a potted plant, Mr George attempted to reconstruct what happened.

Mr George, Dr Nuala Mutawali, the curator of Iraq's museums, and Dr Jaber Ibrahim, the head of the Board of the Department of Antiquities, were the last to leave the museum on April 8th, the day before Baghdad fell to the US army.

"I asked if the building was securely locked and was told that it was. The keys were handed over by Dr Nuala to Dr Jaber."

Only a watchman and his sons remained at the compound. On the 9th, witnesses allegedly testified that two US armoured vehicles entered the grounds of the museum, spent two hours there and came away with something. A videofilm of this foray is said to have been shown on French television.

The looting started early on the 10th after the US army had taken up positions not far from the museum. The initial breach in the museum's defenses was in the back. The first to enter stove in the wooden door leading to the guards' room near the front entrance and then opened the metal outer door to let in comrades. Another team of looters broke through a glass block window which had been closed but not bricked up.

The thieves targeted computers, television sets and other equipment, the watchman said. The rampaging crowd did not come until late that day to begin taking and breaking what was left in the galleries.

The watchman pleaded with the US troops to protect the museum. If the army had acted then, the collection might have been saved. But the soldiers had no orders to deploy at the museum and refused to take action.

Consequently, looting went on unimpeded from morning to dusk on the 11th and 12th and was only halted when Mr George and other staff members returned on the 13th. Persistent thieves continued to mount sporadic raids until the 16th when the US military finally placed a tank in the garden among the cana lilies and posted troops at gates and doors.

Along with the untutored mob came opportunistic art thieves who, in the opinion of Dr al-Radi, had a "wish list" of items provided by a dealer or a collector abroad. The theft of the limestone head and vase indicate that this was the case. The vase, a large piece weighing 35 kilos, was taken from the first gallery, the head from its box in a store room.

The copper sculpture, which weighs at least 300 kilos, was bounced down the main stairway from the upper gallery to the ground floor level, breaking the steps as it was dragged along. Whoever took it away would have needed a vehicle. All the administrative offices were ransacked, the safes in Dr Nuala's office were cracked and the museum staff's payroll (a modest $18,000 for two months) was stolen.

The looters, whether professionals or rowdies out on a spree, did not manage to cart away key items in the store rooms. The fine collections of cylinder seals and coins are in tact. Some 100,000 cuneiform tablets are safe, including the "Sippar Library", 800 tablets dating from the 6th century BC, the oldest library ever found on its original shelves.

The tablets in cuneiform, the first writing, provide a complete record of Mesopotamian daily life, scientific achievement, religious practices and legends. It was reported in the immediate aftermath of the pillage that the coins and seals had gone and the tablets had been either stolen or smashed. Fortunately, these reports were not correct.

Col Bogdonos said 1,000 items are missing from boxes. "Twenty to 30 of these items have been put on the Interpol website, the FBI website and the \ customs homepage."

Since his team began work on April 22nd, almost 1,000 pieces have been recovered, 100-200 items from the museum's neighbourhood, some of which were brought to the local mosque and handed over. Nine items from the galleries have been returned, half a dozen by a group of young Iraqis who saw what was going on and carried away as many pieces as they could manage so they could be kept safe until order is imposed on this unruly city.

While it will take time to sort out the mess at the museum, the five archaeologists currently visiting Iraq want the US military and civilian authorities to guard the most important of the country's estimated 10,000 sites.

Dr McGuire Gibson of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago said there has been "massive looting at an increased rate since the war started. Guards at antiquities sites are being driven off by armed men in line with the pattern established over the past 12 years."

The preservation of the past depends on, as many Iraqis have put it, "security, security, security".