One of the first pieces to talk about what war would mean for Iraq’s cultural heritage.

The Spoils of War (Story)
U.S. News & World Report, 02/10/2003

Highlight: An Iraq conflict threatens archaeological treasures
Section: Culture & Ideas

Full Text: Sennacherib was King of the Universe, King of the Four Corners of the World, and King of Assyria. From his lofty perspective on a throne in Nineveh, just outside the modern Iraqi city of Mosul, those titles all meant the same thing: unparalleled power. Nineveh was the largest city in the known world in Sennacherib's day, about 700 B.C., and his palace one of the grandest, its walls decorated with reliefs depicting his feats in war and engineering.

Art historian John Russell knows those walls well. Just before the last Gulf War, he photographed thousands of feet of carved reliefs covering Sennacherib's 90-foot-long throne room. So he was shocked when, in 1995, he saw them for sale, chopped into pieces and chipped down to look like separate finds. Sennacherib's magnificent palace had been reduced to piles of rubble by looters intent on selling off the art--a sadly common symptom of more than a decade of chaos that has devastated Iraq and some of the world's richest cultural resources. The destruction is documented in Russell's book The Final Sack of Nineveh. Says the Massachusetts College of Art historian: "Tens of thousands of pieces have come out, mostly looted from places that have never been excavated properly. This is just a tiny part of a huge problem."

Rocking the cradle. The problem may get even worse as new conflict looms. Known as the cradle of civilization, Iraq's river valleys house some of the world's oldest cities. Sites like Ur, Nineveh, and Nimrud are powerful draws for archaeologists seeking clues to the origins of civilization and biblical scholars looking for the historical foundation of Old Testament stories. The region also has been home to the center of the Islamic world with majestic mosques and shrines like those of Samarra, as well as Persian-influenced sites like Ctesiphon.

As troops gather in the region once again, archaeologists are mobilizing along with them. "These sites, standing monuments, and museums must be protected," says Ashton Hawkins, president of the American Council for Cultural Policy, a group of preservationists, art historians, and archaeologists that has met with State Department and Department of Defense officials in recent weeks to express its concerns. "Iraq's cultural patrimony is the world's."

In an area continuously inhabited for over 5,000 years, the concentration of ruins is remarkable. Ancient cities were built of mud brick, and as they collapsed later buildings were layered on top. After centuries of rebuilding, the mounds formed by these ancient settlements--known as tells--sometimes rise eight or nine stories above the otherwise flat, featureless desert.

That very prominence, however, has put the tells in a dangerous position. The man-made hills are natural sites for radar installations or antiaircraft guns--and hence natural targets for bombing raids. That presents a quandary for military planners balancing tactical decisions against preservation needs, because resources like tells are protected by the 1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, a treaty the United States has not signed but respects.

That respect was sorely tested during the Gulf War, when two Iraqi jets were parked next to the ziggurat of Ur, reputed to be the birthplace of the biblical patriarch Abraham. "You can target those jets if you want to, knowing full well there would be collateral damage," says Scott Silliman, a Duke University law professor who served as an Air Force lawyer during the Gulf War. "When you move a military objective right next to what is otherwise protected under international law," the military has a right to fire. But, Silliman adds, "the commander must also weigh the consequences. If the damage far outweighs the military value of the target, it's not worth it."

The ziggurat was spared, though bombs did fall nearby. "We spend more money than anyone in the world trying to avoid collateral damage," says Department of Defense spokesman Dan Hetlage. "It's important that Iraq's monuments be protected, and our forces will be instructed to act accordingly."
Many researchers, however, are less concerned about battle than about its aftermath. "During the last Gulf War, people who were concerned at all were worried about bomb damage," says Boston University archaeologist Paul Zimansky. But it's what happens after the bombing stops that really causes trouble, he says.

Market forces. After the war, rebels looted government institutions in the Iraqi countryside--including provincial museums, where many of the nation's treasures had been stored temporarily to protect them from bombing in Baghdad. Priceless artifacts began trickling onto the international art market almost immediately.

The trickle became a flood when sanctions took effect in the early 1990s. As the Iraqi economy disintegrated, funding for protecting old ruins disappeared. Unguarded artifacts were one of the few things that could be easily smuggled and readily traded for hard currency. "It's a question of people digging up anything they can convert to cash," says Zimansky.

Today this market is more accessible than ever. Type "Sumerian," "cuneiform," or "cylinder seal" into eBay.com, the auction Web site, and you'll find dozens of genuine artifacts for sale at bargain prices. "It's gotten so depressing I don't even look at [the site] anymore," says archaeologist Elizabeth Stone of the State University of New York-Stony Brook.

What hurts most is the knowledge that is lost at looted sites, even if an artifact is recovered. For archaeologists, an artifact's provenance--the carefully documented story of where and how it was found--is as important as the object itself. Without the specific information a carefully supervised archaeological dig provides, there's no way to know for sure if an object is authentic or how it fits into a larger picture. "If you looked at a piece and wanted to know the stories it can tell us about a person, a family, a town, you have to be able to tell it came from a specific place and know everything that was found around it," says Russell. "An isolated object represents the destruction of that story."