Lost To The Ages

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

As they so often do these days, reporters gave Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld the third degree during a press conference last week. The subject was still Iraq, but this time the inquiries were about a cultural disaster unfolding in Baghdad. After sacking government buildings, stores and the homes of Baath Party officials, looters had turned to the Iraq Museum. Within hours the building appeared to have been emptied of its archaeological treasures--and the press wanted to know why U.S. forces hadn't anticipated and prevented it. Didn't they care about Iraq's cultural heritage? Of course they did, answered a somewhat cranky Rumsfeld, pointing out that the coalition carefully avoided bombing the building: "Certainly the targeting people were well aware of where it was, and they certainly avoided targeting it ... Whatever damage was done was done from the ground."

But that was bad enough. Iraq's cultural history stretches back an astonishing 10,000 years, to the very dawn of civilization. The first cities, the earliest known legal system and the first written language all arose there--in the ancient Mesopotamian kingdoms of Sumer, Akkad, Assyria and Babylonia. And artifacts from that entire, mind-boggling sweep of time--hundreds of thousands of objects that had survived wars and successive invasions by Cyrus of Persia, Alexander the Great, the Mongols and other marauders long forgotten--might now be missing or destroyed.

It wasn't just the museum, either. Vandals also invaded three libraries, setting fire to thousands upon thousands of records, manuscripts and rare books--including irreplaceable copies of the Koran. Says Renata Holod, a professor of art history at the University of Pennsylvania: "The burning of the National Library and the National Archives is comparable to a collection of the size and importance of the Library of Congress being gutted and destroyed. It's such a tragedy, I could cry." Nor was the devastation limited to Baghdad. The University of Mosul's important rare book and manuscript collection also was sacked last week, and the University of Basra's museum and library reportedly suffered a similar fate, as did the museum in Kirkuk.

At first, authorities suspected that the crimes had been perpetrated by ordinary Iraqis desperate to sell whatever they could lay their hands on to feed their families. But while that probably accounted for part of the rampage, it quickly became clear that at least some of the looting had been planned well in advance. Whoever robbed the Iraq Museum took original artifacts while leaving behind near-perfect copies, and they evidently had keys to some of the museum's vaults. In addition, they trashed the institution's records, as if to ensure that it would be tough to alert art dealers to hot merchandise entering the black market. "I would be very surprised if it weren't professional looting," says John Malcolm Russell, an expert in Mesopotamian archaeology at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.

Indeed, before the week was out, rumors began to surface that suspicious items were already being offered for sale in Iran and Europe. One Iraqi antiques dealer recounted how he was awakened at dawn last week by an art smuggler saying he had Japanese clients who were very interested in buying anything from the plundered museums and wanting to know if the dealer had access to such booty. "I couldn't believe it," the dealer says. "The war was barely over, and this vulture was trying to profit from our defeat. I called him a pimp."

What makes the situation all the more tragic is that scholars had warned the Department of Defense (DOD) in January that something like this might happen. The organized looting of ancient artifacts has been rampant in Iraq ever since U.N. sanctions choked off the country's legal streams of revenue following the 1991 Gulf War. "We wanted to make them aware of the importance of Mesopotamia and familiarize them with important sites," says McGuire Gibson, an archaeologist at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, who participated in the talks. He says he gave DOD officials a list of critical sites to avoid bombing, and explicitly warned them about the possibility of looting at the Iraq Museum.

Still, while coalition forces took pains to safeguard Iraq's oil ministry in Baghdad, they left the nation's cultural heritage wide open. Raid Abdul Ridhar Muhammad, an Iraqi archaeologist, told the New York Times that at the height of the ransacking, he persuaded a U.S. Marine tank crew to come to the museum, where they fired over looters' heads, dispersing several thousand of them.

But the Marines refused to bring the tank inside the grounds, and soon after they left the looters returned. "You tell me what their priorities are," said Iraqi archaeologist Salma El Radi last week after an emergency UNESCO meeting in Paris. General Richard Myers explained at a press conference last week, "At the same time that museum was being looted, we had Americans being wounded and dying in Baghdad. So your priorities, of course, are to finish the combat task." That reasoning clearly wasn't persuasive to three members of the White House's Cultural Property Advisory Committee, who resigned to protest U.S. inaction.

Now that it's too late to prevent the looting, El Radi and dozens of other archaeologists, archivists and cultural preservationists from around the world are working up a damage-control plan. The first priority, everyone agrees, is to try to figure out exactly what is missing; and on that score the news is bad, though perhaps not quite as horrifying as the reports from Baghdad had first suggested. One reason is that the Iraqi antiquities authorities took steps to keep some artifacts safe. For starters, they had long since gathered some of the most precious items from regional museums, figuring they would be easier to protect in Baghdad. They had also moved many items from the Iraq Museum into vaults at Iraq's national bank. The bank was looted as well, but it's not clear yet whether thieves got into these particular vaults.

But some priceless pieces are already known to be missing. Among them: a 3-ft. carved alabaster vase, circa 3200 B.C.; a black, headless statue of the Sumerian King Entemena, circa 2430 B.C.; a Sumerian sacred cup, circa 2600 B.C.; a copper head of an Akkadian ruler, circa 2350 B.C.; and a gold lyre from Ur, circa 2500 B.C. What else might be gone is anybody's guess.

Apart from the unknown number of items stolen, hundreds and perhaps thousands have been smashed beyond recognition. Says Donny George, research director at the Iraqi Board of Antiquities: "It may be weeks, months, before we know what's there and what isn't." Archaeologists are praying for the safety of what may be the world's oldest calendar, a 10,000-year-old pebble with 12 notches; of the Warka head, circa 3200 B.C., depicting a Sumerian woman in white marble; and of a group of 800 neo-Babylonian cuneiform clay tablets that form the world's oldest intact library, circa 550 B.C.

Figuring out what's gone and what remains won't be easy: duplicate records of the museum's holdings exist, but they're widely scattered; in any case, the museum's catalogs are probably outdated. Some experts also suspect that members of the museum staff have been stealing, both last week and possibly in previous years. Even those who doubt such involvement, such as Jeremy Black, an ancient Iraq specialist at the Oriental Institute at Oxford University, are hard-pressed to explain some of the thievery. "We've seen it stated that some of these looters got in with keys," he says. "How they got those keys, I don't know." Soldiers who have belatedly been assigned to guard the museum told TIME they had heard eyewitness reports of staff members' sneaking large packages out of the museum in the days before the looting. Perhaps they were simply taking the objects away for safeguarding, but, says Staff Sergeant David Richard of the 3rd Infantry Division, "there was some shady stuff going on."

The gutting of the national museum may be a blow to Iraq's historical heritage, but the looting and burning of the National Library and the Awqaf Library, which was the repository for material from private and mosque libraries throughout Iraq, are spiritual blows as well. Between them, the two libraries made Baghdad the largest, most valuable repository of Arabic books outside Cairo's al-Azhar Library. The National Library's prized collection included royal court records and thousands of documents from the earliest Islamic periods, along with thousands of books (many handwritten, some of them one of a kind) on Islamic law and practice. In the Awqaf Library, attached to the Ministry of Religious Endowments, was a priceless collection of handwritten Korans (some said to be over 1,000 years old), religious manuscripts and calligraphy. "People used to come to Baghdad from all over the world--even from al-Azhar--to read these works," says National Library director Ra'ad al-Bandar. "For religious scholars across the Muslim world, this is a time of mourning."

Like the museum, the libraries are belatedly under guard--in this case by Syed Munem El-Musawi, imam of the Imam Ul Huq Ali Mosque, and a group of Kalashnikov-toting volunteers from the impoverished Sadr City area of Baghdad, known until the city's liberation as Saddam City. It is from here that many of the looters came as well, and, says Ahmad Khalaf, 26, a software-engineering student, "we want to show the world that not everybody from our neighborhood is a thief and a looter."

When the situation stabilizes, experts from UNESCO and the British Museum will fly to Baghdad to help local authorities assess the losses in detail. UNESCO has also issued a set of recommendations, including a prohibition on the export of antiques, antiquities, works of art, books and archives from Iraq, and an immediate ban on the international trade in objects of Iraqi cultural heritage. Others have suggested amnesties and rewards for returned art, crackdowns at border checkpoints and websites identifying the missing objects. Meanwhile, the FBI has assigned 25 agents in the region to assist in the recovery effort and plans to send others who are experts in tracking stolen art. "We are firmly committed to doing whatever we can to secure the return of these treasures to the people of Iraq," asserted FBI Director Robert Mueller.

And the people of Iraq evidently care about them quite a bit. By the end of last week, some of the looters had repented and returned artifacts to the museum. Even in the middle of war, after decades of brutalization by Saddam Hussein's regime, ordinary Iraqis have a fierce pride in their nation's history. Mazen Ahmad, 64, who sells eggs a few blocks from the Iraq Museum, says he has never been inside, but he takes the loss very personally. "Our history was in that building. It was the soul of Iraq," he says. "If the museum doesn't recover the looted treasures, I will feel like a part of my own soul has been stolen." --Reported by Andrea Dorfman/New York, Aparisim Ghosh/Baghdad, Adam Smith/London, Grant Rosenberg/Paris and Elaine Shannon/Washington

With reporting by Andrea Dorfman/New York, Bobby Ghosh/Baghdad, Adam Smith/London, Grant Rosenberg/Paris and Elaine Shannon/Washington