Baghdad museum update

Just in from Boston.com:

U.S. authorities said Friday they are scaling back the estimates of how much treasure was looted from Iraq's National Museum after discovering that museum officials have been stashing items in secret vaults for at least 13 years.

Museum officials have squirreled away gold, manuscripts and other treasures in the vaults since at least 1990, before the start of the 1991 Gulf War, to protect them from looters, said U.S. Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos. . .

Bogdanos said early estimates of 170,000 stolen artifacts were far too high, adding that ''something in the range of thousands'' of items taken from the museum remain missing. Those include the Sacred Vase of Warca from 3000 B.C. [note that this contradicts recent reports of its recovery -- D.]

The missing head from the damaged Golden Harp of Ur, from 2450 B.C., is believed to be safe, he said. Other items expected to be recovered include the Treasure of Nimrud and some gold jewelry.

The museum's records were not well kept and an accurate estimate of missing items will take months, he said. He added that some offsite vaults are still sealed. ''According to museum staff, they removed 15 to 20 boxes of gold and jewelry including the famed Treasure of Nimrud to vaults of the Central Bank of Iraq over the past 13 years,'' Bogdanos said.

One still-secret storage location has been used since 1990. Bogdanos said museum officials promised an inventory of that vault within a week but they won't tell the Americans where it is. They say they will tell a new Iraqi government once it is sworn in.

This is most peculiar. The desire to make off with Iraq's cultural treasures is the one charge no one has levied against the American occupation forces -- and enough top Baghdad museum officials are familiar with the world of archeology outside of Iraq that they should have no doubt that the Americans will not act like the Iraqis themselves did in Kuwait. Of course, that raises the issue of what might be in the hidden vaults that the museum officials don't want found. Or, what might not be in those vaults:

Bogdanos blamed most of the looting on former museum officials. ''The first- and second- level storage rooms were looted but show no signs of forced entry,'' he said. ''The keys to this floor were last seen in a director's safe and are now missing.''

Meanwhile, this Chicago Tribune article (also reprinted with changes and additions here) suggests that some academics still do not seem to be thinking sufficiently critically, as they hail the museum staff's heroism without asking the harder questions:

The preliminary report on the looting of the National Museum of Iraq is scheduled to be released by the Pentagon today, but after spending several days inspecting the damage, McGuire Gibson, professor of Mesopotamian archaeology at the University of Chicago, has reached his own verdict. "We have dodged a bullet," he said yesterday. . . "through some luck and some real preparations by the museum staff, we have saved a lot". . .

The preparations included moving hundred of boxes of museum treasure to safe storage in an air raid shelter several miles from the museum. Luck spared several priceless pieces that were there for the taking but were overlooked by looters.

An example of the latter is the Basalt Stella, a carved frieze that dates to the third millennium B.C. The thieves ignored it. "This chunk of rock is extremely important. We were very worried about it," said Gibson, patting the black stone fondly.

Again raising the question why it would have been bypassed by the mysterious gangs of international master criminals, claimed by museum officials to have carefully prepared their moves well in advance.

"The museum authorities didn't have much time, but they got some very important stuff in storage and they completely trusted that the U.S. would secure the museum. They were inside waiting to surrender it, but the U.S. never came," said Gibson, who is also head of the American Association for Research in Baghdad.

If ready to turn over the vaults then, why the reticence now? Gibson, you may recall, was the one who the Guardian reported as stating, convincedly if not convincingly:

"I have a suspicion it was organized outside the country, in fact I'm pretty sure it was,'' Gibson said. He added that if a good police team was put together, "I think it could be cracked in no time.''

Finally, virtually everyone concerned still seems to be thinking in terms of artifacts as objects, worrying about the loss of "treasures" rather than the potential loss of knowledge:

An additional 1,000 to 1,200 pieces are missing from the museum's storage areas, but these are described as "excavation site pieces" that are mainly valuable for research purposes [emphasis added - D.]. "The struggle we have here is that numbers simply cannot tell the whole story. Ten thousand pottery shards don't equal one vase of Warka," Bogdanos said.

Posted by David on May 16, 2003 9:01 PM