The Devastation of Iraq\'s Past

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Volume 55, Number 13 · August 14, 2008 The Devastation of Iraq's Past By Hugh Eakin
BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS ARTICLE Catastrophe! The Looting and Destruction of Iraq's Past an exhibition at the Oriental Institute Museum, Chicago, April10December 31, 2008.
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Geoff Emberling and KatharynHanson. Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 87 pp.,$29.95 (paper) The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Iraq edited by Peter G. Stone and Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly
Boydell, 319 pp., $95.00 Antiquities Under Siege: Cultural Heritage Protection After theIraq War edited by Lawrence Rothfield
AltaMira, 322 pp., $80.00;$29.95 (paper) Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle forIraq by Patrick Cockburn
Scribner, 226 pp., $24.00 Reclaiming a Plundered Past: Archaeology and Nation Building inModern Iraq by Magnus T. Bernhardsson
University of Texas Press, 327 pp., $45.00 The Buried Book:The Loss and Rediscovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh by David Damrosch
Henry Holt, 315 pp., $26.00 American Hostage by Micah Garen and Marie-Hélène Carleton
Simon and Schuster, 288 pp., $15.95 (paper)
In May 2003—some eight weeks after the American invasion hadbegun— Abdul-Amir Hamdani, the archaeology inspector of DhiQar province in southern Iraq, traveled to Najaf to call on theGrand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. He had an urgent request. "Weneeded his help to stop the pillage," Hamdani recalled. Theprovince, which is midway between Baghdad and Basra, covers much ofwhat was once the land of Sumer. In the third millennium BC, it wasa fertile plain densely populated by such cities as Ur, Lagash,Girsu, Larsa, and Umma; today, the shifting course of the Euphratesand Saddam Hussein's brutal campaign to drain the marshes, to thesoutheast, have left it in large part an impoverished wasteland.With the fall of the Baathist regime, hundreds of poor farmers andvillagers—often backed by armed militias—were turningto archaeological plunder; in some Dhi Qar towns, such as al-Fajr,the black market trade in antiquities was accounting for upward of80 percent of the local economy.
Al-Sistani was sufficiently moved by Hamdani's plea to pronounce afatwa. He proclaimed that digging for antiquities is illegal; thatboth Islamic and pre-Islamic artifacts are part of Iraqi heritage;and that people who have antiquities in their possession shouldreturn them to the museum in Baghdad or in Nasiriya, the capital ofDhi Qar province. Copies of the fatwa were distributed widely inthe south, and published in the Iraqi press. "At this point some ofthe looters stopped their work, because when Ayatollah al-Sistanisays something, they listen," Hamdani said.
The fatwa was a small victory in what has been, for Hamdani, alargely intractable struggle to save one of the deep sources ofhuman culture. Settling in the southern part of what the Greekslater called Mesopotamia some six thousand years before the birthof Christ, the Sumerians developed year-round cultivation, builtthe earliest city-states, and devised a complex system of writing.Over time, the area came under the sway of the Akkadians, theBabylonians, and the Assyrians; later, it fell under Persian andHellenistic influence before the Islamic conquest in the seventhcentury. Left behind were the rich remains of history andliterature, often in the form of baked mud-brick tablets coveredwith wedge-shaped script called cuneiform; and small engravedseals—cylinder-shaped objects made of imported hematite,lapis lazuli, and other semiprecious stones that, when rolled ontowet clay or other soft material, produce intricate and oftenstunningly beautiful impressions of ancient life and ritual.
Remote and mostly lacking in monumental architecture above ground,the buried cities in which this material was preserved withstoodcenturies of violence, from the arrival of Cyrus the Great in thesixth century BC to the Mongol invasion in 1258. An absence of muchsubsequent urban development also meant that the archaeologicalrecord was unusually clear. Yet since 2003, several important siteshave been destroyed beyond recognition; perhaps tens of thousandsof cylinder seals and cuneiform tablets have been removed andchanneled into the underground art market.
"What is currently taking place in southern Iraq," Gil Stein, thedirector of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, writesin the catalog to "Catastrophe!," the institute's disturbing newexhibition on the subject, "is nothing less than the eradication ofthe material record of the world's first urban, literatecivilization." All the more remarkable, at a time of growinginternational concern for the devastating effects of archaeologicalplunder, the destruction of Sumer following the 2003 invasion waslargely unchallenged by American and British forces. How did thishappen? 1.
Since the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad in April 2003, theinternational press has accorded considerable space to thecountry's imperiled ancient heritage. Much of this coverage,however, has been devoted to the museum, the impressive campaign torecover its stolen works, and the continued struggle to reopen itsgalleries. (They remain closed.) Only occasional, anecdotalreports—mostly from the first year of the conflict—haveborne witness to large-scale plunder of archaeological sites, towhich the damage is irreversible.
In large part, the problem for journalists is the number ofsites—there are over a thousand, many of them remote, in DhiQar province alone—and the danger posed by any attempt toinvestigate them. Micah Garen, a freelance filmmaker andphotographer who, along with his partner Marie-HélèneCarleton, is perhaps the only Western journalist to have reportedextensively on the looting in the south, was kidnapped by a gangwith links to the Mahdi Army while visiting a black market inNasiriya in 2004. He was held hostage for nine days, an ordealrecounted in Garen and Carleton's recent memoir, American Hostage . The looters also have powerful connections that can intimidatetheir enemies: in early 2006, Hamdani was thrown into jail forthree months on trumped-up charges after attempting to rein in theactivities of a developer with close ties to the antiquities trade.
The dearth of firsthand accounts, in turn, has led to muchconfusion about the extent of the looting, its chronology, and itsunderlying causes. The destruction of sites, for example, has beenblamed on everything from the Sunni insurgency and al-Qaeda in Iraq(also known as al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia) to treasure-huntingsoldiers. The mystery has been heightened by the sense, among manyin the art world, that remarkably little Iraqi material has beensurfacing on the art market. Theories about the whereabouts ofplundered objects have varied from storerooms in Damascus and Dubaito living rooms in the US and Japan.
This June, for the first time since 2003, a small group ofarchaeologists, led by John Curtis, curator of the Middle Eastcollections at the British Museum, were able to visit eight majorsites in southern Iraq in a helicopter provided by the Britishforces stationed in Basra. Their mission was limited—theeight sites were south of the region where looting has reportedlybeen heaviest. But at the sites they visited, they found that thedigging was far from uniform. Uruk, Eridu, and Lagash sufferedlittle or no looting; while Larsa and other sites had beenextensively looted. "One shouldn't underestimate the role thatlocal people can play in this," Curtis told me after the trip. "Nodoubt that at Lagash, they were actively preventing looting. Atother places, they might have been actively engaged in it." [1]
These new insights have been strengthened by an analysis ofsatellite images by Elizabeth Stone, an archaeologist at the StateUniversity of New York at Stony Brook who accompanied Curtis on theJune survey. In the months preceding the 2003 invasion,DigitalGlobe Corporation, a Colorado company, began takingsatellite photographs of southern Iraq for the Pentagon. Stonerealized that these high-resolution images were particularly suitedto documenting the mounds, or tells , of buried Mesopotamian cities, including any fresh digging andtrenches. With support from the National Geographic Society, theNational Endowment for Humanities, the State Department, andseveral other institutions, she began buying up the images, and bythe time she published her findings earlier this year, she had dataon nearly two thousand archaeological sites. [2]
As sheer documentation of knowledge destroyed, the pictures arechilling. Some of the most revealing discoveries aboutMesopotamia—from the royal tombs at Ur to the literary textsof Nippur—have come from excavations in southern Iraq. Andyet, Stone estimates that the total extent of the recent looting is many times greater than all archaeological investigations everconducted in southern Iraq—and must have yielded tablets,coins, cylinder seals, statues, terracottas, bronzes and otherobjects in the hundreds of thousands. [3]
And since these objects have been ripped from their archaeologicalsettings, which in many cases have been destroyed, much of thepotential information contained in them—even if they doresurface—has been obliterated. [4]
Still more striking, however, is what the satellite pictures tellus about the looters. First, despite the existence of importantMesopotamian sites throughout the country, intense, organizedlooting has occurred only in certain areas. Others who reported onthe issue immediately following the invasion concluded that sitesin the north had not been much targeted. But Stone is also able toshow that some areas of southern Iraq, including Central Babylonia,to the south of Baghdad, and the Eridu Basin south of Nasiriya haveremained largely intact; the heavy looting has been mostly confinedto a sizable, but well defined, swath of territory around northwestDhi Qar and the borderlands of its neighboringprovinces—precisely the area where Hamdani has observed abooming antiquities trade.
Second, the images make clear that the first big wave of lootingactually occurred before the arrival of Coalition forces. By theend of 2002, state authorities had largely abandoned the region ofSumer, along with other parts of the south, and photographs fromearly 2003 show evidence of rampant fresh digging at numerous smalland medium-sized sites, many of them unstudied by archaeologists.Stone suggests that the timing of these initial excavationscoincided with "the threat of hostilities—and presumably themistaken expectation of increased security [by the US invaders]thereafter." Digging at some larger sites also began around thistime, but seems to have accelerated greatly—and in moreorganized fashion—after the looting of Baghdad, in April andMay 2003, when several of the most important known sites, includingIsin and Umma, were largely destroyed. (At Isin the holes appearmuch blacker in the satellite images than at other sites,indicating deep trenches that reach down to the earliest stratum ofhuman history there. [5] )
Finally, Stone is able to show with some precision that thehard-core looting, where it has occurred, has been selective.Prehistoric and early Bronze Age sites down to the time ofUruk—the first great city-state, where, in the early thirdmillennium BC, the legendary Gilgamesh was king—were not muchdisturbed. Nor were the many sites in the region from theNeo-Babylonian period (630–539 BC) or from the Islamic era.In contrast, digging amounting to ransacking is evident at somesites dating from the Akkadian period (2335–2100 BC), whencylinder seals developed into an elaborate art form; there was alsoheavy looting at sites from the Old Babylonian era (2000–1600BC), particularly known for its cuneiform tablets; and at sitesfrom the centuries when the region was under Persian andHellenistic influence (538 BC–637 AD), when works of glassand coins were in wide circulation.
What are we to make of these findings? For one thing, they bear outthe observations of Iraqi archaeologists—and of the recentexpedition led by John Curtis—that the people who have beeninvolved at ground level belong to certain of the tribes native toDhi Qar and neighboring provinces. Though underreported in theWestern press, a system of tribes or khams has provided thebackbone of rural Iraqi society for centuries. Until the first GulfWar, tribal hierarchies in the south were suppressed by the state,but they were increasingly reconstituted during the UN embargo ofthe 1990s, and tribal leaders have become a central source ofauthority in the vacuum of power since 2003. The area where heavylooting has occurred, for example, is largely under the control ofa few tribes.
According to several archaeologists I spoke to, the support oftheir sheiks has been crucial to turning the plunder of artifactsfrom a criminal activity into what tribesmen now view as alegitimate form of income. A dealer in one of the market townsmight pay five or ten dollars for small inscribed objects andfragments; a cylinder seal of particular beauty, or an intactcuneiform tablet, might get as much as fifty dollars—abouthalf the monthly salary of an Iraqi civil servant. The dealerswould in turn sell the objects to smugglers for many times theiroriginal value; by the time they reach the international artmarket, such objects could be worth four, five, or even sixfigures. Stone sculptures, which are relatively rare, might beworth far more. [6]
Tribes in the south often regard the ancient sites as part of theirown land, and for some of them, these prices have made theharvesting of objects—from soil that is otherwise no longerarable —seemingly irresistible. "Most of the tribes approveof the looting," Donny George, the former director of the StateBoard of Antiquities, told me. (He was forced to leave Iraq in 2006and is now a visiting professor at Stony Brook.) "And they controlthe towns where the antiquities trade is run."
That al-Sistani has been moved to intervene, moreover, suggeststhat some of those involved have attempted to use religiousauthority to give legitimacy to their digging. Behind the tribalactivity in northwest Dhi Qar, then, is also a larger story aboutthe fate of the Shiites—and the ancient land theyinhabit—in the final years of Saddam's Iraq. [7] 2.
In a 1979 speech, Saddam Hussein declared that "antiquities are themost precious relics the Iraqis possess, showing the world that ourcountry...is the legitimate offspring of previous civilizationswhich offered a great contribution to humanity." Saddam'sheavy-handed efforts to turn Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar intoforebears for Baathist expansionism are well known. (A better modelmight have been the Assyrian tyrant Assurnasirpal II, whose reignof terror in the ninth century BC included mass incinerations ofthe civilian populations he conquered.) Still, the Iraqidictatorship maintained one of the more successful archaeologyadministrations in the Middle East. The State Board of Antiquitieswas well funded; several generations of Iraqi archaeologists workedclosely with their Western counterparts at sites across Iraq; alarge and flourishing museum establishment was developed; and sitelooting was virtually nonexistent. (Saddam would later decree thatlooting was punishable by death.)
In his informative recent book, Reclaiming a Plundered Past: Archaeology and Nation Building inModern Iraq , Magnus T. Bernhardsson, a historian at Williams College, suggeststhat this privileging of Mesopotamian history was owed in part tothe controversial legacy of the British Mandate in the 1920s. Animportant aim of British power in the region, he observes, wassecuring unfettered access to ancient sites, although GertrudeBell's farsighted policy of dividing the spoils with the Iraqistate made possible a remarkable era of archaeological discovery.It also helped bring the Mesopotamian heritage to the forefront ofIraqi politics, to the point that, by the 1970s, the Baathistregime could view the pre-Islamic past as a way to construct anArab nationalist ideology that transcended sectarian differencesthat the regime violently suppressed. Amply funded by the oil boom,Sumerian and Babylonian sites in the south were for the most partcarefully maintained, and, according to several archaeologists Ispoke to who worked in Iraq at the time, were often a source oflocal pride.
All of this changed, however, with Saddam Hussein's brutalcrackdown on Shiites after the first Gulf War. During the 1991uprisings that were encouraged by the US, Shiites (along with theirKurdish counterparts in the north) attacked and looted a number ofregional state museums, which were associated with the regime.While archaeological sites were not immediately targeted in thisway, Saddam's ensuing punishment of the south—which destroyedthe region's fragile agricultural economy—had devastatingeffects. "Saddam was telling the people of southern Iraq, 'it's notyour civilization,'" Hamdani recalled. "And if it's not yourcivilization, why protect it?"
Neglected sites in areas populated by impoverished farmers providedan opportunity for the international antiquities market. Togetherwith small sculptures and Mesopotamian jewelry, cuneiform tabletsor fragments containing mathematical or literary texts wereattaining prices in the tens of thousands of dollars. Of evengreater interest were cylinder seals, which had been activelypursued since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,when J.P. Morgan had been a major buyer; in the 1990s, there wereseveral international collectors acquiring them in largequantities. An auction of Near Eastern cylinder seals at Christie'sin 2001 netted close to $1.5 million, with top lots—such as agreen serpentine seal, from the late third millennium, containing aremarkable depiction of bejeweled Akkadian deities; or an obsidianseal, from the thirteenth century BC, showing a Kassite aristocratleading two restive horses—selling for well over $100,000.
By the mid-1990s, archaeologists were frequently identifying Iraqimaterial in auction catalogs and private galleries in London andNew York, including clay tablets that, they said, clearly came fromrecent excavations at sites in Dhi Qar, such as Umma. [8] "It will forever be considered a marvel," the archaeologist JohnRussell writes in the catalog to "Catastrophe!," "that at the sametime the United States was enforcing against Iraq the most rigoroussanctions regime in history...tens of thousands of previouslyundocumented Iraqi antiquities were sold openly on the US market."
The UN sanctions regime also made it possible for looters andsmugglers to operate with impunity. "The no fly zone in the southof Iraq was essential to the trade," the archaeologist McGuireGibson writes in The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Iraq , a new volume of essays by different authors who have followed thecrisis. "Without [Iraqi] helicopter surveillance, it was verydifficult for the Iraqi authorities to control the countryside."Objects were leaving the country through Jordan, Syria, andKurdistan, as well as the Gulf; most of the material was headed forthe West.
In fact, this activity had begun to be brought under control in theyears preceding the Iraq war. In 1999, with new funds from the UNOil-for-Food Program, Iraq's State Board of Antiquities beganhiring local people to do year-round excavations at Umma andseveral other of the most vulnerable sites. The idea was that thoseformerly involved in looting could be trained to work asarchaeologists—and given an alternative source of income.Donny George, who directed several of these excavations, told methat the looting did stop, and important recovery work was done.But as the Iraqi regime began to prepare for invasion in late 2002,the rescue excavations were shut down. Worse, there were nowwell-trained teams of local diggers who knew what to look for andwhere. 3.
In the weeks following the US-led invasion and the sacking of theIraq Museum in April 2003, the international press began to reportlarge-scale looting at several archaeological sites in southernIraq. In late May, a front-page story in The New York Times described how the remains of the Sumerian city of Isin, northwestof Nasiriya, were being destroyed by "mobs of treasure hunters."The plunder was attributed to the general "anarchy and lawlessness"that followed the collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime —afurther instance of the looting that had occurred in Baghdad a fewweeks earlier.
In fact, what appears to have been taking place at Isin was lessanarchic rampage than an organized enterprise involving entiretribes and their communities. In another essay in The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Iraq , Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly, a Lebanese journalist and archaeologist,describes her visit to a number of sites in the south in May 2003."Dhi Qar," she writes, was under the total control of the looters and antiquities dealers.Heavily armed, they controlled the main roads leading to thebiggest archaeological sites thereby providing security for their"employees." These were hundreds of farmers who had left behindtheir families to actually live on the sites and search forantiquities.... Their days started before sunrise for a few hours,and then the heat would force them to stop until late afternoonwhen a second shift would begin, continuing until late into thenight. They were well equipped: they carried shovels and hammers,and they had made their own lamps run off car batteries.
Largely ignored by Coalition troops stationed in the south, thismass mobilization had created a new looting economy controlled bythe tribal hierarchies and the dealers they worked with.Archaeologists who witnessed the looting in 2003 and 2004 havepointed out that they had to have the authorization of the localsheik even to gain access to a site. But there also was anotherimportant source of legitimacy for this former capital offense: thereligious and sectarian parties the invasion had brought intopower.
As was the case in the 1991 uprising, the looting of Baghdad inApril 2003 was partly motivated by animosity toward the Saddamregime. Targets included ministries, office buildings, the housesof Baathist leaders, and official cars, as well as institutionslike the Iraq Museum and, tragically, the National Library, whichwas looted and burned; and many of those involved were angry youngShiites from Sadr City. In his informative new account of theSadrist movement, Patrick Cockburn, a veteran Iraq correspondent,describes Muqtada al-Sadr's startling response to the mass lootingof state property: The looters became universally known in Iraq as al-Hawasim , meaning "the finalists." The term was a derisive reference toSaddam Hussein's claim that an American invasion of Iraq wouldprovoke "a final battle." In May, Muqtada issued what became knownas the al-Hawasim fatwa , saying that looters could hold on to what they had expropriatedso long as they made a donation ( khums ) of one-fifth of its value to their local Sadrist office.
It remains unclear whether there were explicit edicts along theselines in reference to archaeological sites. But Iraqi officials Ispoke to say that local religious leaders affiliated with theSadrist movement have condoned the antiquities trade insofar as itproduces funds and does not—in theory—involve Islamicmaterial. "Some of the followers of Sadr were writing on banners atsome of the archaeological sites that [Muqtada] does not stopanyone from looting if they would sell [the looted objects] to getweapons or build a mosque," Donny George told me. For Hamdani, itbecame clear that to change the local plunder economy, he wouldneed the tribal and religious authorities on his side. Hecultivated ties to the sheiks; he began visiting mosques in theprincipal black market towns, to try to get the message out inFriday sermons; and then he decided to call on the Ayatollahal-Sistani himself.
Since many poor Shiites in the south are not followers ofal-Sistani, his fatwa against looting did not solve the problem.But it did result in a remarkable breakthrough: a looter who hadbeen moved by al-Sistani's order contacted the museum in Nasiriya,where Hamdani was stationed. "He told me he had a lot ofinformation about the smugglers and the black market," Hamdanisaid. Hamdani gave him a digital camera and a Global PositioningSystem device that looked like a cell phone and sent him back towork. He became a key informant for the State Board of Antiquities,providing photographs and locations about diggers and the peoplewho hired them. With the help of Italian forces then stationed inthe south, dozens of arrests were made, and hundreds of antiquitieswere recovered. But the Italians left in 2006, leaving unanswered amore perplexing question: Where was all the looted material going? 4.
In late January, I was taken to a large warehouse in East Amman,the working-class part of the Jordanian capital that has absorbedtens of thousands of Iraqi refugees since the war began. Thewarehouse was owned by the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, andit was full of Iraqi materials: Aramaic incantation bowls, Akkadianseals, Old Babylonian agricultural records, stone sculptures,Sassanian glass, Parthian jewelry, Roman and Islamic coins, andother antiquities— some of them marked with labels from theIraq Museum in Baghdad. [9]
Along with other neighboring states, Jordan is frequently mentionedas one of the principal gateways for illicit archaeologicalmaterial from Iraq, and these objects, confiscated by Jordanianofficials in only a handful of seizures, give some idea of theextent of the cross-border trade in looted cultural property. (SaadEskander, the director of the Iraq National Library and Archive,who has spent the last five years rebuilding this institution inwar-torn Baghdad, told me that he had been contacted by a person inAmman who claimed to have some important documents stolen from itsholdings. He wanted to sell them back to the library for $50,000.)
Yet perhaps most interesting about the artifacts in the warehousewas their variable quality. Among some important pieces, there wasa lot of junk, and the Jordanian archaeologist who accompanied mesuggested that a number of the artifacts were modern fakes. Mosthad been confiscated in the months immediately following theinvasion, and some of them appear to have been in possession ofeveryday refugees who had little sense of their value. Fawwazal-Khraysheh, the director of the Jordanian Department ofAntiquities, told me that no major seizures of looted artifactshave occurred since 2004.
Several people who are familiar with the antiquities market in theregion suggest that larger smugglers are not working throughJordan, which is relatively far from the principal area of lootingand which, together with Syria, has cooperated with Iraq onpolicing antiquities theft. (In late April, Syria returned to Iraqsome seven hundred antiquities confiscated since 2003; in June,Jordan returned more than two thousand objects, including those Ihad seen in Amman.) Rather, the principal smuggling routes appearto be across the Iranian and other southern borders, to the PersianGulf, where the material might be "warehoused" for a number ofyears, or privately sold with few questions asked.
As the Persian Gulf states, funded by the oil boom, have becomeMiddle East trade hubs, they have also quickly developed intocenters of art and antiquities collecting. According to a cuneiformscholar I spoke to with extensive contacts in the Middle East, aprominent Kuwaiti sheik has amassed a large collection ofMesopotamian artifacts, including much recently looted materialfrom Iraq. Another destination may be Israel. The country is knownfor its liberal approach to the antiquities trade; one Americancurator told me it is possible to buy "virtually anything" inJerusalem's old markets. In September 2005, Israeli officialsseized a container full of looted Iraqi artifacts at the airport inTel Aviv. The Israeli press reported that it had passed throughDubai and London, and was the largest such seizure in Israelihistory.
Iraqis themselves suggest that the most plausible smuggling routeshave been through Iran and Kurdistan. Donny George observes thatthe governments of Iran and Turkey have until now demonstratedlittle interest in policing their borders for antiquitiessmugglers, and Kurdish and Iranian dealers are believed to beinvolved in the trade. Since the 2003 invasion, moreover, largenumbers of Iranians have been making pilgrimages to Najaf, Karbala,and other Shiite holy sites, creating cross-border traffic thatfacilitates smuggling.
Some of this material has already reached Western shores. Since2003, Britain and the United States have had bans in force againsttrading in recently surfaced Iraqi antiquities, and unlike duringthe 1990s there have not been large auctions featuring cuneiformtablets and other Mesopotamian material. Even eBay has takenmeasures to prevent trading in looted artifacts. [10] Yet newly surfaced Iraqi material—in particular objects oflower and middle value—has been traded on the Internet,through smaller on-line auction and gallery sites. In recent Googlesearches, I found several Web sites that sell foundationcones—small cone-shaped objects covered with dedicatoryinscriptions that were embedded in the walls of important buildingsin the third and early second millennia—and other cuneiformartifacts for prices ranging from a few hundred to a few thousanddollars. Some are identified as coming from particular sites in"Southern Mesopotamia." 5.
For several years now, archaeologists and cultural propertyspecialists, as well as nongovernment groups such as UNESCO and theWorld Monuments Fund (which in 2006 took the unprecedented step ofputting Iraq as an entire country on its list of most endangeredsites), have been voicing alarm about the rapid destruction ofIraq's ancient past. These efforts, many of which are documented ina new collection of policy-minded essays, Antiquities Under Siege , have done much to keep this neglected aspect of the Iraq crisisin view. They have also underlined the failures of US and Britishforces to plan for—and, after the invasion, toprovide—even basic protection of archaeological sites.
Yet in reading these essays, one often senses a detachment from thereality of what has been happening in Iraq. Since the bombing ofthe Samarra mosque in early 2006—itself a terrifyingindication of the degree to which cultural monuments have becomepart of the war—foreign cultural officials have largelyavoided travel outside of the main cities and military bases.UNESCO's Iraq office, for example, has for some time occupied atemporary facility in Amman; when I visited officials there earlythis year, I was told that travel to Iraq had been strictly limitedfor security reasons.
In Baghdad, meanwhile, the cultural administration has sufferedfrom larger power struggles within the Iraqi government. In 2006,the State Board of Antiquities was subsumed into a new Ministry ofTourism and Antiquities, which has been controlled by the Sadristbloc in parliament. The ministry has shown little interest inproviding resources for site protection, and "tourism" appears torefer mainly to pilgrimages to Islamic shrines. By late 2007, therewas very little fuel available to gas up the trucks that had beensupplied by a private American foundation and by UNESCO for Iraqipatrols of archaeological sites.
Today, there are signs that the worst looting may be over. To theextent that the excavations have produced the quantity of materialestimated by Elizabeth Stone, the underground market has surelybeen saturated by now, bringing down prices. Stone and John Curtisalso found that none of the eight sites they visited with Britishforces in June had been looted since the immediate aftermath of theinvasion. Indeed, some of the damage discovered by the Britishexpedition was a result not of looting, but of defensive positionsthat appear to have been dug by the Iraqi army shortly before theUS-led invasion. In the case of Ur, the site has been protectedfrom looting by an adjacent military air base, but has suffereddegradation from the thousands of Coalition troops who untilrecently had open access to it. (A more shocking case of sitedamage by Coalition forces occurred in 2004 at Babylon, asdocumented by Zainab Bahrani, a scholar of Near Eastern art andarchaeology at Columbia University. [11] )
Of course, these findings provide scant consolation for whatappears to have been one of the most concentrated and devastatingepisodes of archaeological destruction in modern history. In The Buried Book , his recent account of the rediscovery of The Epic of Gilgamesh , David Damrosch observes that the poem portrays Gilgamesh as oneof the great kings of Sumer by emphasizing his accomplishments as"custodian of ancient cities and monuments that have to bemaintained and repaired." Indeed, in the prologue of the epic, thepoet describes the story he is about to tell as an artifact of thepast, to be discovered—as in fact it was by archaeologists inthe nineteenth century—and carefully preserved: [See] the tablet-box of cedar
[release] its clasp of bronze.

[Lift] the lid of its secret
[pick] up the tablet of lapis lazuli and read out
the travails of Gilgamesh, all that he went through...
The example of Gilgamesh was forgotten in 2003, and we may neverknow how many other such "secrets" have been lost as a result.
—July 15, 2008
Email to a friend Notes
[1] Citing the June survey, recent reports in The Art Newspaper and The Wall Street Journal have somewhat breathlessly suggested that little or no looting insouthern Iraq actually occurred. To the contrary, the findingsprovide further evidence that organized plunder was both extensiveand selective, bearing out earlier indications that some largesites were not affected. For a formal report on the eight sitesinspected in the survey, see www.britishmuseum.org/iraq .
[2] Elizabeth C. Stone, "Patterns of Looting in Southern Iraq," Antiquity , Vol. 82 (Spring 2008), pp. 125–138. A less technicalaccount of her findings is contained in her essay in the catalog to"Catastrophe!"
[3] It should be stressed that until further information comes tolight, any attempt to quantify the number of objects removed is bynature conjectural. The number of cuneiform texts that havesurfaced in the West remains small, although anecdotal evidenceindicates that far larger quantities may be in the Middle East orelsewhere. Thousands of cylinder seals remain at large from theIraq Museum alone, and the extent of the looting holes and thenumber of sites involved give some weight to a number well into thetens of thousands, if not higher.
[4] It has been observed that archaeological "context" may matter lessfor inscribed objects, whose own texts contain important historicalinformation and often identify where they are from. Mesopotamiantexts have frequently been found together, however, in buriedlibraries or collections of tablets, the existence of which hasmade it possible to use texts to draw broad conclusions aboutpolitics, culture, and daily life. Once texts from such a group aredispersed it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to reconstructthat group and its significance. I am grateful to Piotr Michalowskifor this point.
[5] For a study of the damage at Isin and its surrounding area usingsimilar techniques as Professor Stone's, see Carrie Hritz, "RemoteSensing of Cultural Heritage in Iraq: A Case Study of Isin," in TAARII Newsletter , The American Academic Research Institute in Iraq, Spring 2008,available at www.taarii.org/newsletters/ .
[6] In December 2007 a three-and-a-half- inch limestone StandingLioness Demon, dating from the beginning of the third millenniumand said to be found near Baghdad in the early twentieth century,sold at Sotheby's for $57 million, an auction record for anantiquity or piece of sculpture.
[7] Notwithstanding claims made in the press, a direct connectionbetween the plunder and Sunni insurgent groups appears unlikely,according to Iraqi officials I spoke to and to archaeologists whohave studied the satellite evidence.
[8] The attraction of Umma, a city of great importance in the latethird millennium, can be attributed to environmental factors aswell. Covered by dunes for many decades, it had been inaccessibleto archaeologists; but the shifting sands exposed it again by the1990s, and it quickly became known among looters, as it had beenearly in the twentieth century, for its cuneiform tablets from theUr III period. Around 20,000 tablets have been published from thesite. I am grateful to Robert K. Englund for this point.
[9] Many of these works were helpfully catalogued by a research teamfrom the Center for Archaeological Research and Excavations inTurin. See A n Endangered Cultural Heritage: Iraqi Antiquities Recovered inJordan , edited by Roberta Menegazzi (Florence: Le Lettere, 2005).
[10] In August 1990, following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the UNmandated general sanctions on goods from Iraq. It was not until thesecond Iraq War, however, that legislation specific to Iraqicultural property was enacted in the United States. In May 2003 theUN Security Council passed a resolution calling for the return ofcultural goods to Iraq and the prohibition of trade in such items.In 2004, the US Congress passed the Emergency Protection for IraqiCultural Antiquities Act, which allows the president to imposerestrictions on the import of any artifacts illegally removed fromIraq after August 1990.
[11] Professor Bahrani, at the time an adviser to the Iraq Ministry ofCulture stationed at Babylon, published her findings in "Days ofPlunder," The Guardian , August 31, 2004. See also the British Museum report on Babylon byJohn Curtis, who concludes that the site suffered "substantialdamage" as a result of its occupation by Coalition forces, www.britishmuseum.org/the_museum/news_and_press_releases/statements/iraq_war/summary_of_activity_2003-4.aspx .