A wave of looting followed the Gulf War in 1991 and the subsequent uprising in the south. The sanctions imposed after the war and the air strikes on Iraq seriously affected economic conditions in the country, already undermined by the crippling expense of Iraq's war against Iran in the 1980s. This drastically reduced the funding available for archaeology and the contacts between Iraqi scholars and their international colleagues. The overthrow of Saddam in 2003 has made it possible for Iraqi scholars to travel and catch up on new developments in the discipline, but this is a small gain in comparison with the devastating results of the breakdown of law and order in the country. The sacking of the National Museum immediately after the Coalition seizure of Baghdad made headline news: Many of the best-known pieces lost at that time, including the Warka Vase (see photo p. 69), seem to have been taken by ordinary Iraqis in the heat of the moment and have since been returned. Around eight thousand objects from the museum, including the treasures from the queens' tombs at Nimrud and from the Royal Cemetery at Ur, had been safely deposited in the vaults of the Central Bank and in secure storage facilities by museum staff before the war. But many of the smaller pieces from the museum, including thousands of seals, were looted, apparently to order by professional thieves: They have disappeared without a trace and have probably now found their way into private collections in the Western world. The accepted total of objects taken from the museum stands at around 15,000, of which around 8,000 had been recovered by November 2004. Other museums also suffered similar depredations: The museum at Babylon was heavily looted; important remains including thirty panels from the Balawat Gates were taken from the Mosul Museum; and others were also targeted or have been looted since then.
But the most desperate casualty of the conflict and its aftermath has been the archaeological sites. Private collectors' buying power and their interest in antiquities from civilizations around the world have grown exponentially over recent decades. While many ancient objects are legitimately bought and sold, their supply falls far short of demand, fueling a trade in illegally acquired pieces. These are often obtained by poor peasants in countries like Peru who take the frequently high risks involved in breaking the law by looting known archaeological sites in return for generally quite small sums of money; but the international market in illegally obtained artifacts is big business, often operated by criminal organizations. These criminal dealers and the private individuals (and, regrettably, sometimes also publicly owned institutions) who encourage their activities by buying antiquities that lack a legal pedigree are those truly responsible for the wanton destruction of our shared human heritage. In most countries, including the United States, it is against the law to trade in or possess antiquities that were not legally acquired, and those who do so risk penalties from confiscation to imprisonment (or worse— in some countries, notably in East and Southeast Asia, dealers in illegal antiquities can be executed). Illegal digging not only removes valuable antiquities from the public domain where they can be studied; far more seriously, in the process of tearing these objects from the ground their context is destroyed, wiping out all the information that can be learned from the association between the objects, their place of deposition, and other artifacts, and the latter, moreover, are often damaged or destroyed in the process of digging out the saleable pieces—a process analogous to cutting a book up into its individual words and throwing most of them away: The meaning is lost and can never be recovered.
Iraqis have always been proud of their heritage and of their unique position as guardians of the Cradle of Civilization. Until recently they zealously preserved their ancient sites and cherished their antiquities, and most still maintain this attitude. However, in the 1990s, when ordinary Iraqis were squeezed between the tyranny of Saddam and the terrible deprivations caused by the international sanctions, Iraq began to leak antiquities. In 1989-1990, Professor John Russell had documented the reliefs that had decorated the palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh; in 1995 he was horrified to recognize a fragment of one of the relief-decorated slabs offered for sale on the international antiquities
A guard at the ancient city of Kalhu (Nimrud) walks past an alabaster bas-relief. Thieves under orders from foreigners allegedly chipped the head away from this figure in an attempt to make money during the years of international sanctions in the 1990s, a crime repeated in a number of well-known Iraqi sites. This vandalism, however, is nothing compared to the scale of the destruction to ancient sites and illegal export of antiquities that has occurred since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. (Lynsey Addario/Corbis)
Market. Over the following two years he identified a number of others, fragments often smashed from the center of what had still been intact slabs in 1990. Photographs taken of the throne room by Muayad Said Damerji in 1997 confirmed that the reliefs had been reduced to rubble and the saleable fragments removed. This is but one well-documented example of the looting of Iraqi sites and smuggling of Mesopotamian antiquities that took place during the international sanctions that reduced many inhabitants of a once-prosperous nation to destitution. Saddam himself became concerned about the situation, executing looters and sponsoring heavily guarded archaeological rescue excavations by the Iraq Department of Antiquities in a number of southern sites, particularly Umma, to protect them from the attention of looters. Despite the attacks on a number of sites, the situation was kept relatively under control by a network of site guards who could call out support from the army and police force at any signs of trouble.
Desperate as this situation was, matters have become infinitely worse since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The Iraqi army and police force were disbanded, and the Coalition forces and the nascent new Iraqi police force have been unable to establish law and order in the country; in this situation the preservation of antiquities is very low on the list of priorities. Whereas in the 1990s looters operated on a small scale and risked serious legal penalties if caught, since spring 2003 looters have been operating with impunity and on a vast scale, in well-armed bodies of two to three hundred men. When challenged by military personnel or police they generally run away but return as soon as the threat has passed. By May 2003 senior archaeologists of the Coalition nations were reporting numerous holes in the important Sumerian cities of Larsa, Umma, Adab, Isin, Bad-Tibira, Nippur, Zabalam, and a number of smaller settlements including Ubaid: At least thirty sites had suffered. From the air Umm al-Hafriyat "looked like a waffle" (Gibson 2004a). Some sites had not sustained damage: Uruk survived because it was strongly protected by the local tribe which has been involved with the meticulous German excavations conducted there since the 1920s; Ur, Babylon, Kish, Nimrud, Nineveh, and Khorsabad were largely unaffected because they were either military camps or had been given military protection, although Nimrud and Nineveh had suffered recent looting and the U. S. forces in Babylon had themselves inflicted an unacceptable and unnecessary amount of damage by constructing security fences, driving heavy military vehicles over ground within the city, thereby causing the destruction of buried material, and bulldozing areas to create helicopter landing sites. Some attempted looting of the glazed bricks by American soldiers is also reported to have taken place. In addition, the American presence here has drawn insurgent attacks upon the city. In May 2003 the region around Nasiriyyah was being well protected by the Italian forces responsible for Dhi Qar province. Eight months later when John Russell overflew southern Iraq in a helicopter, the Italians were still managing to protect Nasiriyyah, despite the brutal murder of a number of them in November 2003; but the destruction on sites including Maskan Shapir, Nippur, Drehem, and particularly Isin was continuing unabated. In the spring of 2004 Dutch forces were helping local guards to protect Uruk and had captured some looters; Italian carahinieri had captured others. But by September of 2004, reports put the number of sites that had suffered serious damage at around one hundred, showing that the problem has been escalating.
Some of the material taken from these sites and from museums has been offered for sale in the bazaar in Baghdad and elsewhere; but much of it has been smuggled across the border into neighboring countries and thence into the international antiquities market where most material has now disappeared. To the best of their ability under the difficult circumstances, international agencies operating in Iraq, and in particular the Italians, have been active in policing the routes by which the smuggling takes place and have seized a quantity of looted material. Coalition forces and Iraqi police are also actively combatting smuggling, and there has been cooperation from the neighboring countries, particularly Jordan, in monitoring border crossings, seizing antiquities, and arresting the smugglers; customs officials in a number of countries, including the United States, France, and Switzerland, have also seized a considerable number of items and returned them to the Iraqi authorities; but despite the successes, only a small fraction of the looted material is being retrieved. The lack of security presents a major obstacle: For example, a collection of antiquities seized in October 2004 was lost again when the party of guards responsible for it were ambushed by bandits and murdered. Some of those managing the looting operations are thought to be members of the old regime, but very many foreigners are also involved: probably the majority of those financing the operations, supplying equipment and weapons, and handling the smuggling and sale of the looted antiquities; and it is likely that many are members of international criminal organizations. In October 2004 John Russell estimated the number of tablets being smuggled out of Iraq at 3,000 per week and reported that the sites from which they had been looted had been totally destroyed.
Although some measures are being taken to bring the situation under control (1,272 guards are supposed to be in place to watch over 3,232 sites by the end of 2004—that is about one guard for every three sites), as of December 2004 the situation shows no signs of improving. Security is still a problem throughout the country, with kidnappings, murders, and suicide bombings in Baghdad and other cities, bandits in the desert regions, and a number of areas where the Iraqi Authority and Coalition forces have no control. In this climate the bands of looters flourish and their destruction goes unchecked in many sites. The security situation must (God willing) eventually settle down and Iraq must once more become a stable, safe, and prosperous country. But for the Mesopotamian cities that have survived the vicissitudes of the past 5,000 years this will probably come too late. As John Russell said (1998: 51) we are looking at "the destruction of a fundamental part of our common heritage and once it is gone, it is gone forever."
World History
