Cradle to grave
Volume 16 Number 1, Michaelmas 2003
'Meet Eleanor. She's a true scholar. She works on Mesopotamian mathematics!' This is how a colleague introduced me to guests at a college dinner a little while back. I had long grown used to dealing with the incredulous cries of 'Mesopo-what??' and blank stares in response to explaining what I do - but no longer. Since mid-April, whenever I have uttered the confession, 'I am a historian of ancient Iraq', people have nodded knowingly, asked penetrating questions and hung on my every word. It won't last (the effect is already beginning to fade) but this year I have been yanked out of my ivory tower to deal with politicians and diplomats, journalists and documentary-makers, civil servants, police officers and military personnel. Why? Certainly not because of my beloved Mesopotamian maths.
On Friday 11 April the radio alarm woke me with the headlines I had been dreading for weeks: the Iraq Museum in Baghdad had been looted. The following day there were short reports in the newspapers; by Monday the whole world wanted to know what had happened. In the following days and weeks, I found myself catapulted into the limelight as one of the few British experts on ancient Iraq who hadn't gone on holiday over Easter. Newspapers and radio stations from Brazil to Beijing were queuing up to talk to me, and I gave interviews with more varieties of the BBC than I had ever imagined existed. It was all very disorientating for someone whose previous media experience had amounted to little more than the occasional paragraph-long write-up in Science magazine and an interview for a Dutch university newspaper. But my students were marvellously supportive: Alexa became my personal assistant for the most frantic week, while Jon took over vital email and web chores. At first I was in direct contact with a member of the US Civil Affairs Brigade, who was to take responsibility for the museum and was at that time waiting in Kuwait for a convoy up to the Iraqi capital, but it often seemed that I knew more than he did. When he eventually reached Baghdad on 22 April, he was allocated to Baghdad Zoo instead.
Other officers took charge at the museum, and soon gave security clearance to the senior Iraqi staff. A US military investigation into the circumstances of the looting at the Iraq Museum was started. Its leader, Colonel Matthew Bogdanos, concluded on 8 July that there had been three types of theft. First, selective thefts from the public galleries: 40 objects were taken, of which 10 had been returned by 8 July. Second, random thefts from the ground floor storage and conservation areas: some 3,000 objects had been taken, about two-thirds of which had been recovered by 8 July, the majority from the Baghdad area. Dust patterns on the shelves showed that the looters were simply sweeping indiscriminate armfuls of objects into containers for removal - including confiscated fakes and forgeries.
The third type of theft was the most worrying, consisting of some sort of 'inside job'. In all, more than 10,000 objects were taken from the furthest corners of the basement storage area by someone with access to well-hidden keys and 'intimate knowledge of the museum's storage practices'. Burning packaging foam for light in the absence of electricity, the perpetrators made for unmarked storage cabinets containing more than 100,000 ancient coins and cylinder seals, ignoring other, more easily accessible material along the way. Fortunately, they dropped the keys to the cabinets (they were later found by museum staff and the investigative team), and instead emptied 100 less secure plastic boxes containing nearly 5,000 cylinder seals and small items of jewellery, as well as ancient bronze weapons from nearby shelves. Whatever wasn't taken was strewn about the room, forming an ankle-deep layer of debris. By 8 July just 671 items had been recovered in a single customs seizure in an unnamed other country.
At that time some 10,500 items were still missing from the museum, while about 3,000 objects had been recovered, half through local amnesties and half through raids and seizures. Many more objects had been located and checked in secret off-site storage locations and the Central Bank: nearly 40,000 manuscripts and other items from the national manuscripts library; 8,366 items from the public galleries of the Iraq Museum; 616 items of ancient Assyrian gold stored in the bank vaults; and hundreds of items belonging to the former royal family of Iraq.
The Iraq Museum does not just need its missing artefacts back. Many thousands more were wantonly smashed, and its meagre, outdated conservation labs pillaged. Every single one of its 120 offices was ransacked too. Its research library, though untouched in the looting, is woefully understocked: during the 13 years of sanctions it was impossible to acquire publications from the rest of the world. It is a similar story in the Mosul Museum and in the archaeology and ancient history departments of the universities: whatever equipment wasn't destroyed or stolen in the aftermath of war is mostly fit only for the rubbish dump.
Whereas the articulate pleas of the Iraq Museum's curators have attracted publicity, controversy and practical assistance from all over the world, it is the looting of archaeological sites that is most distressing and difficult to deal with. Museum artefacts have for the most part been catalogued, documented, conserved and security-marked. They stand at least some chance of surviving outside the museum, and of being identified and returned. Objects taken from the ground are at much greater risk.
Only the most complete, robust and attractive artefacts make it from the looter's pick to the middle-man's hands: somewhat less than 1 per cent of the assemblage an academic archaeologist might salvage. The other 99 per cent is destroyed in the process of excavation or discarded as unsaleably unattractive or unstable. Needless to say, all archaeological context is demolished in the looting process too, from the large-scale built environment (usually made of fragile mud-brick) to the microscopic food residues detectable on ancient floors and storage vessels.
This wholesale destruction is happening at many dozens of archaeological sites in southern Iraq, mostly at ancient Sumerian cities dating from the fourth to the second millennium bc which are now in remote desert. Armed gangs often prove too much for site guards or even the occasional military patrol to deal with - and will in any case return once the coast is clear again. The fledgling police force is too overstretched to deal with the informal antiquities markets that have sprung up on street corners. And there is effectively no judicial system by which to prosecute, try and sentence looters and dealers if and when they are arrested.
Mesopotamia is unique among ancient societies in providing modern scholars with vast quantities of textual evidence, written on robust clay tablets, found in situ. Much of my work in recent years, for instance, has been on the archaeological context of ancient schools and libraries. An individual cuneiform tablet - often undated, often unsigned - can yield useful information about what the ancient inhabitants of Iraq 'knew', but when those tablets are found and recorded en masse in a Sumerian schoolyard, an Assyrian scholar's house or a Babylonian temple library, then we can start to consider what named individuals in the ancient past thought and cared about: the breadth of their learning, their relationship to other individuals, their standing in society. We have the potential to know far more about the social and intellectual life of a Babylonian mathematician than we ever will about Euclid or Archimedes. Every looted archaeological site represents not just objects smashed and stolen, but also past biographies disintegrated.
Oxford's engagement in the history and archaeology of ancient Iraq goes back to the appointment of Archibald Sayce as Oxford's first professor of Assyriology (1891-1915). Like many of his contemporaries he was a clergyman, primarily interested in the light that the study of the Assyrian and Babylonian cultures of ancient Iraq could shed on the historicity of the Old Testament. In 1905 the Ashmolean Museum appointed the young Leonard Woolley as an assistant in the Department of Antiquities; later he became one of the greatest archaeologists of ancient Mesopotamia. Between 1922 and 1934 he painstakingly dug at the southern city of Ur, so-called home of the patriarch Abraham. Although Abraham was nowhere to be found, Woolley had the good fortune to discover almost immediately an extraordinary Sumerian royal cemetery dating to the middle of the third millennium bc - and the even greater good sense to leave it untouched for several years until he and his team had developed specialist excavation and recording techniques.
While the majority of the finds were divided between Baghdad and the excavation's sponsors at the British Museum and the University Museum, Philadelphia, some of the fabulous silver, gold and lapis lazuli jewellery and ornaments belonging to one of the royal attendants buried there were presented to the Ashmolean, where they are still on display today. Woolley's vivid and fast-paced account of his methods and results, Ur 'of the Chaldees', was updated by Roger Moorey, recently retired from the Ashmolean's keepership of antiquities.
In the 1920s Stephen Langdon led an archaeological expedition for the Ashmolean to two sites just south of Baghdad. Langdon's methods were nowhere near as exacting as Woolley's - especially frustrating as he came across two particularly important finds of tablets whose archaeological contexts we are now struggling to identify: a scholarly library from the seventh century bc; and an agricultural archive from the little village of Jamdat Nasr some 5,000 years ago at the very dawn of writing and history. The cuneiform tablets in that archive are amongst the oldest written records in the world.
Woolley's most successful protégé was Max Mallowan, also an Oxford man. The story goes that Mrs Woolley disliked other women accompanying their young men on excavation, so that when Mallowan fell for Agatha Christie he was obliged to look for another dig to run. He moved up into the north of Iraq, where his crowning glory was the excavation of Nimrud, capital of the Assyrian empire in the ninth and eighth centuries bc. There Mallowan uncovered the stone-built palaces of the Assyrian monarchs, covered in powerful low-relief sculptures of their military campaigns and still housing the remnants of exquisite ivory furniture captured from the Phoenicians. Christie's Murder in Mesopotamia and her autobiographical Come Tell Me How You Live paint two very different and lively accounts of excavation in the mid-20th century.
Oxford has had its share of philologists and historians too. Reginald Campbell Thompson translated the famous Epic of Gilgamesh into English and made extensive studies of Babylonian medicine. In true Oxford style, he died of a heart attack while out rowing in 1941. The great Oliver Gurney was equally at home in ancient Mesopotamia as he was in the world of the Hittites, the Assyrians' Anatolian neighbours. He did much to further the publication of the Ashmolean's cuneiform tablet collection, as too has Dr Stephanie Dalley of Somerville. Dr Jeremy Black (Wolfson), current University Lecturer in Akkadian, worked in Baghdad for the British School of Archaeology in Iraq for much of the 1980s, collaborating closely with Iraqi colleagues in the museums and universities in Mosul and Baghdad. He now runs the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature project, dedicated to publishing and analysing the oldest corpus of literary compositions in the world. A small but steady stream of students comes to Oxford to take the BA in Egyptology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies or for doctoral work.
Mesopotamia is the new Egypt - or so I was assured by a television researcher a few weeks ago. One of the unexpected benefits that war and devastation have brought to Iraq is the new public awareness of its rich and exciting ancient past. Opportunities exist that haven't been seen since Woolley's day to reach out to a wider audience eager to know more. For Iraq's cultural disaster has touched all sorts of people all over the world. The one source of hope and joy amongst the destruction and loss is a new-found sense that Iraq's heritage belongs to all of us and that we all have a commitment to celebrating and preserving that extra-ordinary country's rich and marvellous past.