Susan Breitkopf: Lost ... The Looting of Iraq’s Antiquities

The only real comparison is to the surface of the moon. Craters as deep as 16 feet cover multi-acre sites that are remnants of what is widely considered the cradle of civilization. The craggy, arid earth, all but barren of vegetation, lies in mounds alongside the deep pits where thousands of Iraqi antiquities—cuneiform tablets, ancient scrolls and kings commemorated in stone that might give clues to how civilization began—have been ripped from their resting places and sold to nefarious (or unsuspecting) dealers and collectors. Some sites have been so ravaged that the top 10 feet of earth and all of the irreplaceable artifacts buried there for centuries are gone.

Amid the catastrophe of the war in Iraq—the violence, bloodshed and loss of human life—is the loss of the world’s cultural heritage in the form of hoards of antiquities. It is an ongoing, silent tragedy for which there seems to be no viable solution. Sources say this is not the work of renegades with shovels. It is planned and executed by organized bands—200 to 300 per site— with heavy machinery at many of the 12,000 sites. And the payout is big. The average Iraqi makes the equivalent of $1,000 per year, yet a cache of looted antiquities can sell for $20,000. And looters can sell two or three such caches every week. Such looting is not new to Iraq. It has been happening for decades if not centuries, according to Matthew Bogdanos, a Marine Reserves colonel and assistant district attorney in Manhattan who investigated the 2003 looting of the Iraq Museum (an article on his findings appeared in the March/April 2006 issue of Museum News). “The looting is a cottage industry. That is clear,” he says, adding that it is like a trade passed down from one generation to the next. “They say, ‘My father did it, my grandfather did it. What else do you want me to do?’”

What’s changed since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003? The pace of looting and the penalties. “Under Saddam [Hussein] the penalty for looting was death—obviously that deterred looting,” said Bogdanos. “When they realized we [U.S. Armed Forces] wouldn’t shoot looters, instead of scattering they would wave to us in the helicopter.” Sources say it is unclear what the current penalty for looting is....

In the absence of any short-term solution, the museum and cultural heritage communities are looking at how to prevent future disasters. “We need to establish closer connections between the cultural heritage community and the military so when we’re doing war planning, cultural heritage concerns get incorporated from the very beginning,” says Gerstenblith. To this end, Wegener has established the Blue Shield, the U.S. branch of an international committee set up in 1996 to respond to armed conflicts that may threaten cultural property (for more on this, see page 11). “We are offering training for [Army] Civil Affairs units on how to give first aid to cultural property—how to recognize what is art and how to deal with it in an emergency situation and do the best to stabilize the situation until they can get a professional,” she says. The hope is that in the future, it will also be easier to deploy cultural heritage professionals in areas where sites are threatened.

Despite the progress she is making with the Blue Shield, Wegener is not very optimistic about the current situation. “There’s never no hope,” she says. “[However,] people are dying, and it’s really difficult to try and save cultural property in that atmosphere.” Francis Deblauwe is director of the Iraq War & Archaeology project, a joint documentation project of Archaeos, Inc. and the Institute of Oriental Studies at the University of Vienna. He also keeps a running list on his blog, IW&A, of sites that have been looted and damaged in the course of the war. The tally was 43 in November.

Deblauwe said that the archaeological community is at a loss as to how to help, not wanting to push its professional agenda over the value of human life. “We have no illusions that we have a lot of clout in this area,” he tells Museum News. “We lobby, we try, but in the end there’s a big, nasty, bloody war going on. How do you compete with that?” he asks. “You want to worry about artifacts, but you worry about the people more. You feel kind of callous talking about artifacts when you see people getting killed every day.”

The answer may be that there is no answer. Until one becomes apparent and put to the test, those close to the situation watch and wait. Says Sullivan, “We can only hope that at some point, hopefully soon, the ancient heritage of Mesopotamia will be sufficiently respected.”

Meanwhile, with every passing day, thousands of ancient objects leave the ground, their context vanishing with the thefts.