[MSN] Destroying history. Archeology in Iraq these days is less about making new discoveries than finding out what has already been stolen.

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Destroying history 

Friday, 16th March, 2007

Archeology in Iraq these days is less about making new discoveries than
finding out what has already been stolen. That's according to the man
charged with caretaking the country's 5,000-year-old heritage, "We need a
government that takes responsibility for protecting the monuments of all
Iraqis," antiquities director Abbas Ali al-Hussainy said. 
"Right now we need to take measures to figure out where the sites are and
know the extent of the damage and looting at each one," added the slight,
bespectacled man. The pillaging of the Iraqi National Museum in the
immediate aftermath of Baghdad's fall in April 2003 shocked the world. But
while many of those antiquities have since been recovered, the looting has
taken off in the archaeological sites scattered around the perilous
countryside.
At a November conference in London on archaeology in conflict zones,
Hussainy appealed to all foreigners who had worked in Iraq to send him
details of their excavations since the meticulous records kept by the
previous regime had all been looted. "At the archaeological sites of ancient
Sumer (in the south), we have lost entire cities from one of the most
important periods of human history," he said, listing the cities that had
been pillaged.
"There are sites where the looters have made excavations down five metres
(16 feet)." US archaeologists studying satellite photos of Iraqi sites have
compared the excavation craters left by looters to the surface of the moon.
Now Hussainy and his badly underfunded and understaffed State Board of
Antiquities and Heritage is conducting surveys and inventories of provincial
museums to establish exactly what remains in the country.
"The catastrophe is that many of the artefacts that were smuggled out are
not registered," said Hussainy, explaining that when they are recovered,
mainly in Europe, the government cannot produce documents proving their
identity. Widely recognised as the cradle of human civilisation, Iraq once
had a strict policy banning antiquities from leaving the country and most
sites were well looked after in the early days of Saddam Hussein's regime.
One notable exception was the former president's disastrous restoration of
Babylon, where he rebuilt the ancient palace using bricks stamped with his
name. But the 1990s saw a systematic assault on sites in the south,
particular on the unimaginably ancient cities of Sumer that in some cases
pre-date Egypt's pyramids. The looting further picked up with the decline of
security across Iraq in 2005 with the main target being easy-to-transport
cuneiform tablets and coins.
"With the occupation and the collapse of security, the heritage was exposed
to even bigger disasters," said Hussainy. One of the more egregious side
effects of Iraq's worsening spiral of violence has been the targeting of
academics and professionals. Many archaeologists are now dead or have fled
the country.
"In places like Samawa (in southern Iraq) where there are hundreds of sites,
we have a single archaeologist with a bachelors degree," said Hussainy.
Coalition forces have been faulted not only for not protecting the sites,
but in some cases damaging them with parking lots built near the ancient
halls of Babylon, an air base surrounding the Ziggurat of Ur - a Sumerian
temple in southern Iraq - and sniper posts on the massive spiral minaret of
Samarra.
Last week, Hussainy was in Cairo for a meeting of Arab antiquities
departments over Israeli excavations near Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque, but he
also took the opportunity to request help from his Egyptian counterpart Zahi
Hawass. "He asked for many things. We can ask people to come for training
and help in the documentation, but inside Iraq, the situation is very
difficult," said Mohammed Abdel Maqsud, number two at Egypt's Supreme
Council of Antiquities.
Hussainy's predecessor, the high-profile Donny George who publicised the
pillaging of the museum in 2003, fled the country in August citing
harassment by militiamen linked to radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. But
Hussainy said that religious leaders have actually helped convince people to
start returning looted antiquities.
"Thanks to a religious fatwa and efforts to raise awareness among the people
about the importance of their heritage, people are starting to come to us
and return many pieces," he said. Nearly half of the 15,000 pieces looted
from the museum have been recovered. For archaeologists, though, the loss is
still incalculable.
"We will get some of the objects back, but we will never be able to
reconstruct how they looked, the relationship in which they lie with other
objects around them," said Assyriologist Kathryn Slanski.

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