A post-mortem examination of the cultural disaster in Iraq: Interview with Lawrence Rothfield
Six years ago this month, the National Museum of Iraq was extensively looted amid the chaos of the U.S. invasion of Baghdad. Among the stolen objects was the Mask of Warka, a 5,100-year-old Sumerian artifact that is believed to be one of the earliest surviving representations of a human face. The mask was found buried on an Iraqi farm five months later — but thousands of other precious objects were destroyed or disappeared into the black market.
"We do not know, and we may never know, a great many lessons about how human civilization first arose, because of this disaster," says Lawrence Rothfield, an associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Chicago and a former director of the university's Cultural Policy Center.
In his new book, The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum (University of Chicago Press), Rothfield examines the sacking of the museum and the "slow-motion disaster" of the looting of archaeological sites across Iraq since 2003.
Rothfield recently spoke with The Chronicle's David Glenn. An edited transcript of their conversation follows.
Q. Why should the world care about Iraqi antiquities? Doesn't this issue pale in comparison to the war's political struggles and tens of thousands of deaths?
I hear that question sometimes: Why should we care? Why should we worry that all of this material is being brought onto the black market? After all, isn't this making available to the rest of the world the beauty of all these objects that otherwise would not have been available for us to see?
One reason to worry is that this material is being ripped out of its context. The individual intact pieces that fall into the hands of collectors might be beautiful. But most of what we know about the origins of civilization has come from piecing together fragments and reconstructing contexts. The Epic of Gilgamesh was pieced together from fragments that looters today would have crushed underfoot....
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Ed
"We do not know, and we may never know, a great many lessons about how human civilization first arose, because of this disaster," says Lawrence Rothfield, an associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Chicago and a former director of the university's Cultural Policy Center.
In his new book, The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum (University of Chicago Press), Rothfield examines the sacking of the museum and the "slow-motion disaster" of the looting of archaeological sites across Iraq since 2003.
Rothfield recently spoke with The Chronicle's David Glenn. An edited transcript of their conversation follows.
Q. Why should the world care about Iraqi antiquities? Doesn't this issue pale in comparison to the war's political struggles and tens of thousands of deaths?
I hear that question sometimes: Why should we care? Why should we worry that all of this material is being brought onto the black market? After all, isn't this making available to the rest of the world the beauty of all these objects that otherwise would not have been available for us to see?
One reason to worry is that this material is being ripped out of its context. The individual intact pieces that fall into the hands of collectors might be beautiful. But most of what we know about the origins of civilization has come from piecing together fragments and reconstructing contexts. The Epic of Gilgamesh was pieced together from fragments that looters today would have crushed underfoot....