Nimrud gold safe?

Good news via National Geographic:

Gold jewelry and other precious items recovered from royal tombs excavated at the ancient Assyrian capital of Nimrud are believed to have been found where they were stashed for safety—in a vault below the Central Bank in Baghdad—before the onset of the Gulf War in 1990.

The 2,800-year-old treasures—which were characterized by one British archaeologist authority as the most significant discovery since Tutankhamun's treasures in 1923—are thought to be in three cases that had been sealed and secured in the underground vault. They were not found until last week because the basement of the bank was flooded, possibly deliberately by bank officials as a way to protect them from looters.

Emergency draining of the vault levels to gain access to Iraq's currency reserves, needed to pay salaries throughout the country, led to confirmation that the cases containing the Nimrud treasures were still intact. . .

Cash was recovered, wet but intact. The "water was impregnated with soot and not as we feared with sewage, so it's just like they've been through the washing machine and the money is clean."

Even clean water will be none too good for artifacts of ivory, however. An article about efforts to drain the bank vaults appeared in Newsday last week. Some passages of interest:

Steve Mocsary, a U.S. Customs special agent overseeing the investigation to recover the missing art, said yesterday that museum inventories indicate such items [as the Nimrud treasures] have been in the vault more than a decade, despite claims they were stolen last month in the chaos that followed Baghdad's fall to U.S. forces. . .

Mocsary said artifacts already recovered by his team include ancient manuscripts and books, once thought stolen but really housed safely in a bomb shelter northwest of Baghdad. The team was pointed there by the museum inventory, which was recovered in bits from the museum and re-created by investigators. The process took two weeks, because each museum department kept its own inventory, and all were hand-written in Arabic. . .

According to the inventory, top treasures were removed for safekeeping as far back as the late 1980s, when Iraq was at war with Iran. Most were never returned to the public eye, apparently because the political instability in Iraq and the first war with the United States made museum officials edgy. . .

One mystery surrounding the search for the antiquities is why museum officials have not said earlier that the most prized items were hidden, not stolen. The museum's director, Donny George, ducked the question at a news conference May 15, when a preliminary report on the investigation was presented. That report, by the U.S. team at the museum, called original looting claims "grossly exaggerated." George said it was more important to focus on finding what was missing than to question anyone's past actions.

Not much of a mystery -- but everyone's still bending over backwards not to accuse high priests of culture of anything unseemly, Ba'athists though they may be. As for Donny George, his remarks, translated into German, could have come right out of the Nuremberg transcripts.

Another mystery is how the bank was so badly damaged. Many believe looters started a fire that gutted the building. As for the flooding, various theories have been floated by soldiers, U.S. officials and investigators, including that Saddam Hussein's foes flooded it to prevent him or his sons from reaching the vault and fleeing with its contents.

Posted by David on June 3, 2003 1:33 PM