Musuem Theft Done by Experts

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Musuem Theft Done by Experts


By Robert Cooke
Staff Writer


Experts now see clear evidence that looters who stormed into Iraq's national museum during the siege of Baghdad knew what they wanted, and got it.

Missing are famed artifacts such as the Golden Harp from Ur, the Uruk Lady and the Akkadian Head, among many other extremely valuable and famous objects, researchers said.

"We know that the break-in at the museum was done by professionals. They came in with tools and glass cutters, and they walked right by a replica of the Code of Hammurabi, which they knew was not real," said Stony Brook University archaeologist Elizabeth Stone. "They started with the best pieces, and worked their way down."

The real example of the Code of Hammurabi is in The Louvre in Paris. Stone said it had been stolen from the Mesopotamians by the Elamites millennia ago, and the French found it a century ago in Iran.

There are indications, she added, that the thieves who hit the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad either knew where the museum's vault keys were or came in with the keys already in their possession. Stolen were "these big, priceless pieces that are seen on the front page of any book on world art."

Archaeologist McGuire Gibson, at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, said some of the looters "were probably the same gang, or gangs, who've been paying to have people dig up sites over the past 12 years" in various parts of Iraq. Other looters, he added, may have been amateurs grabbing whatever they could find.

Archaeologist Tony Wilkinson, also at the University of Chicago, said word has already come that a load of antiquities, apparently about 20 objects from the museum, was intercepted at the Jordanian border.

Unfortunately, rumors are rife and facts are few. Gibson said, "I was told of 40 objects, or 40 crates of objects," arriving at the Jordanian border, "but it's not clear. The State Department has said things began showing up in Europe just three days later," after the museum in Baghdad was sacked.

At least one suspected piece was seized at an unidentified U.S. airport, the FBI said.

Wilkinson said most of the information -- and rumors -- about what happened to Iraq's prized antiquities was shared during an emergency meeting of archaelogists held recently in Paris. The experts agreed to collaborate in efforts to intercept and recover what stolen antiquities they can.

"The main thing now is that people are trying to coordinate efforts around the world to go in and help with the museums and libraries" that were looted in Iraq, Gibson said. "The people who work in archives and paper conservation want to go in."

The lost goods, many of which are priceless, Stone said, included famed objects such as the Uruk Vase, the Uruk Lady, the Akkadian Head and the Golden Harp from Ur, decorated with the head of a bull. "All of them are gone," he said.

Also missing was a huge collection of cuneiform clay tablets, written bits of ancient history. She worried that many of these tablets, in delicate condition, may now be broken and scattered.

"Rumor has it that there are no cuneiform tablets left; all 80,000 were taken" from the Baghdad museum, Stone said.

About 2,000 of the tablets that had been discovered most recently came from an ancient library at a site called Sippar, excavated just before the 1991 Gulf War. Archaeologists exploring the site had found the tablets still sitting in wall niches "all around the room, on the original kind of shelving," Stone said.

"Some of them had been read, but many hadn't even been looked at," she added. The tablets are considered very important as "one of the earliest real pieces of literature in the world," dating back several thousand years.

Indeed, some of the writing "seems to fill in gaps in the Gilgamesh Epic," the ancient flood story of Babylonian origin. Worse, the information hasn't been studied and fully published, and "if that's gone, it's gone," Stone said.

Some important items may have survived, however. Curators at the museum had taken care so that some ancient objects made of gold had been taken to Baghdad's central bank for safekeeping before the war reached Baghdad. Unfortunately, she added, "the bank was attacked by looters, so we don't know if it [the gold] is still there."

Gibson also lamented that the national archives and the Ministry of Religious Affairs in Iraq had been looted. Particularly precious objects include manuscripts, especially the illustrated ones, he explained.

"The losses out of the national archives are just unbelievable," Gibson said. "That erases the past 400 years [of history] of the country."
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