Fewer than 30 missing items?

Just got back home late last night, so catching up on the news will take some time. A number of readers have inquired about reports that the Baghdad museum authorities have only listed some 29 items as missing. Alas, this is not the revelation some think it to be; the stolen artifacts are still certain to number in the thousands, and the low initial count is surely the result of the scattering (and likely, attempted destruction) of the Baghdad museum's inventory records.

The fact is, recording and publishing objects receives low priority in any museum; money is always short, and it inevitably goes first to acquisition, preservation, and display. Few museums in the entire world have a significant portion of their records digitized, facilitating off-site backup. Museums in poor but archeologically rich locations often have skimpy records indeed -- all on paper, often without photographs, with the most minimal of descriptions.

This article in the NY Times touches on some of these problems:

. . . Iraqi and American officials concede that it will be almost impossible to prevent the continued illegal export of treasures from ancient Mesopotamian sites.

The immediate focus is on trying to recover what was stolen from the museum, but in the rare roadblocks still operated by American and British troops here, the search is for weapons, not for antiquities. The only success to date came when a unit of the Iraq National Congress stopped a truck and found a steel case containing 453 small objects taken from the museum.

Among Iraq's neighbors, only the customs authorities in Jordan, traditionally the first destination of looted Mesopotamian art objects, have displayed fresh vigilance for possible smuggled antiquities. The National Museum, which remains in a state of disorder and disorganization, has in turn been slow to draw up a detailed list of looted treasures, partly because it lacks a computerized inventory. . .

"What happened to the Iraq museum is only the tip of the iceberg," said Jean-Marie Durand, a French archaeologist. "For years, the whole country has been looted. At Larsa, the site was turned over by a bulldozer. It looked like the moon."

The article concludes with a crude attempt at downplaying the recent losses while tarring earlier generations of archeologists:

Yet in contrast to what happened in the 19th century and a good part of the 20th century, the current transfer abroad of Iraqi treasures is modest. Before Iraq's Ottoman rulers issued an edict in the late 1870's, everything found by foreign archaeologists ended up in European museums, notably the British Museum, the Louvre in Paris and the State Museums of Berlin (the legendary Ishtar Gate from Babylon is at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin).

Even under the new Ottoman law, foreigners could claim half their finds, while the other half went to the Oriental Museum in Istanbul. Then, with Iraq under British control from 1917, half again went to foreigners, but with half staying in Iraq. This led in 1921 to the creation of the National Museum by Gertrude Bell, an English archaeologist, whose four successors as director of the museum were also foreigners. Only in 1974 was all export of Iraqi treasures banned.

As we have noted before, the greater issue is not so much who owns the artifacts, but that they -- and most importantly, the information that they may provide -- not be lost. Carrying artifacts off for display in foreign museums may now be seen as unacceptable, but at least the objects were generally properly preserved, recorded, and published -- certainly not the case with what the Times writer euphemistically calls "the current transfer abroad".

UPDATE: Looks like the Baghdad museum records were indeed systematically destroyed, if this is accurate:

Dr. John Curtis of the British Museum. . . who visited the museum after the fall of Baghdad, said experts would only know the full extent of the damage once an audit was completed -- a process that could take years. . . the offices of the Baghdad museum were "systematically crushed." Doors were broken down and "every single scrap of paper, every negative, every computer disc, every file had been pulled off the shelves (and) ripped up."

BUT THEN we get conflicting reports, such as this:

While the catalog at Baghdad's National Museum has been kept for the most part intact, the status of inventories at museums in other parts of Iraq is unknown.

Posted by David on May 5, 2003 11:37 AM