'Who stole Iraq's pricelesss treasures?
Five years ago, as the tanks rolled in, history's most priceless treasures vanished from Iraq. What really happened still confounds world experts. Now, for the first time, Britain's leading authority on Iraq archeology and a witness to the devastation, delivers his verdict
John Curtis
Five years ago, as the tanks rolled in, history's most priceless treasures vanished from Iraq. What really happened still confounds world experts. Now, for the first time, Britain's leading authority on Iraq archeology and a witness to the devastation, delivers his verdict
John Curtis
Five years ago, the world stood by while the Iraq Museum in Baghdad was sacked and looted. And it still beggars belief. It was abundantly clear before the invasion that the cost of removing Saddam was going to be very high, but few people could have predicted how high the price would be in terms of deaths and the country’s cultural heritage.
I certainly wasn’t prepared for the newspaper headlines that screamed “Iraq Museum Looted” when Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, and I arrived back at Heathrow from a trip to Tehran on April 13, 2003. I had been a regular visitor to Iraq since 1970, and during the 1980s had directed archeological excavations at eight different sites in the north of the country. During this time, I had formed many close friendships and come to have a deep love for this fascinating, welcoming but troubled country. Like many people, I was bitterly opposed to the war, but this was chiefly on humanitarian grounds. It had not occurred to me that the coalition forces would be so careless with cultural heritage that they would not even bother to post a guard at the museum after their tanks had penetrated the heart of Baghdad. To hear that the museum had been looted, therefore, was deeply shocking.
The source of my dismay is evident: as an archeologist and historian, I’m aware of what is at stake. But why should anyone else care? Iraq is rightly referred to as the cradle of civilisation. It is where writing was invented, the first cities appeared, and Mesopotamia – the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates – was home to Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians. The Iraq Museum was one of the richest museums in the Middle East, if not the world, and housed a magnificent collection of treasures from ancient Mesopotamia. Others around the world shared my sense of outrage, so it was only natural that a press conference at the British Museum that had been arranged long before, to mark the museum’s 250th birthday on April 15, should be completely taken over by the Iraq Museum crisis. Tessa Jowell, then secretary of state for culture, struggled to answer the probing questions about why such a disaster could have been allowed to happen. But neither she nor anybody else had any answers. More significantly, as the conference was breaking up, Channel 4 News managed to set up a satellite phone link in Baghdad to my old friend Donny George, the director of research at the Iraq Department of Antiquities, and I was able to speak with him directly. I was the first person outside Iraq he had been able to speak to.'
I certainly wasn’t prepared for the newspaper headlines that screamed “Iraq Museum Looted” when Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, and I arrived back at Heathrow from a trip to Tehran on April 13, 2003. I had been a regular visitor to Iraq since 1970, and during the 1980s had directed archeological excavations at eight different sites in the north of the country. During this time, I had formed many close friendships and come to have a deep love for this fascinating, welcoming but troubled country. Like many people, I was bitterly opposed to the war, but this was chiefly on humanitarian grounds. It had not occurred to me that the coalition forces would be so careless with cultural heritage that they would not even bother to post a guard at the museum after their tanks had penetrated the heart of Baghdad. To hear that the museum had been looted, therefore, was deeply shocking.
The source of my dismay is evident: as an archeologist and historian, I’m aware of what is at stake. But why should anyone else care? Iraq is rightly referred to as the cradle of civilisation. It is where writing was invented, the first cities appeared, and Mesopotamia – the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates – was home to Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians. The Iraq Museum was one of the richest museums in the Middle East, if not the world, and housed a magnificent collection of treasures from ancient Mesopotamia. Others around the world shared my sense of outrage, so it was only natural that a press conference at the British Museum that had been arranged long before, to mark the museum’s 250th birthday on April 15, should be completely taken over by the Iraq Museum crisis. Tessa Jowell, then secretary of state for culture, struggled to answer the probing questions about why such a disaster could have been allowed to happen. But neither she nor anybody else had any answers. More significantly, as the conference was breaking up, Channel 4 News managed to set up a satellite phone link in Baghdad to my old friend Donny George, the director of research at the Iraq Department of Antiquities, and I was able to speak with him directly. I was the first person outside Iraq he had been able to speak to.'
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