Burning Museum? Ho Hum
Burning Museum? Ho Hum
By Joe Bob Briggs
April 15, 2003
What were they gonna steal from the Oil Ministry? Pipeline distribution graphs? Tertiary recovery secrets? What kind of profiling of the Iraqi hooligan class went on for someone to decide, "These people are animals! Be sure to secure the Oil Ministry immediately or else they'll be in there making off with the drill bits. If we don't keep this under control, we could have rampant roughnecking and slant drilling. It could be like Spindletop all over again."
I mean, how much of a secret is it that Iraqis steal archeological artifacts whenever they can? It started in 1840, the year Paul Emile Botta, the French consular agent in Mosul, started digging and discovered the ancient city of Nineveh. So at least for the past 163 years--years in which every major museum and university in the world has sent excavation teams to Assyria- -armed security guards have been pretty much a fact of life. There have been movies about it, spectacular theft operations, organized criminal gangs. Anybody who's seen the first scene of "The Exorcist" knows about it. Since we're talking about the first civilization after the Flood, the oldest place on the planet, it's pretty much the Super Bowl of art theft, and every gangster in Iraq has either worked it or tried to work it.
I've always believed in cultural imperialism when it comes to archeology, for a simple reason: the stuff is safer in the British Museum, the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I think Britain should clamp their greedy imperialistic claws around the Elgin Marbles and never send them back to Greece, even for a week.
But the irony of this situation is that for 20 years now there's been a "return antiquities to their homeland" movement, which is why so many of them remained in Iraq to begin with. Saddam Hussein obviously appreciated their value. He didn't encourage people to use the museum, but he did keep it locked up and guarded like a medieval treasury.
The problem with cuneiform tablets is that they're fragile even under the best conditions. Archeology teams have watched them crumble to dust almost before they could be photographed and memorialized. So everyone always knew that the Baghdad museum was in a perilous position, but I think the feared scenario was that some petty tyrant would run off with them, or some fundamentalist ayatollah would have them destroyed as idols, or that they would be hit by a stray bomb. Nobody in their wildest dreams imagined that it would be the United States that essentially said, "Hey, yall, over here! You know those 7,000-year-old gewgaws you've been hankering after? Well, have at it!"
From the first moment that the Pentagon even considered war in Iraq, the scholars have been writing letters, requesting meetings, sending emails. There's no way the White House didn't know about the museum, or the other sensitive sites around Iraq. By January there were actual meetings at the Pentagon between antiquities scholars and military officials--but apparently the memo didn't make it up the chain to Rumsfeld or Franks. Rumsfeld was positively smug when asked about it this week, implying that the military had better things to do than guard museums.
Well let's put it this way, Donald. Let's say we were rolling troops into South Africa. I think the diamond mines would be on somebody's list, wouldn't they? There were fifty thousand artifacts in that place--artifacts from the earliest cities in the world, cities where all three of the world's major religions originated. If you had to put a street value on the stuff in that museum, it might be equal to our national budget, forget about Iraq's. Men have been killed for a single alabaster door handle from the seraglio of King Sargon. This was like winning the Powerball Middle East Lottery--except the only people who could buy tickets were homicidal thieves armed to the teeth.
Okay, that's bad enough. But there's more. The House of Wisdom library, containing the entire Arabian history of Iraq (that would be the seventh civilization, the first six having been housed in the other museum), burned down two days after the National Museum was sacked. Wouldn't the fact that one museum was essentially rubble lead someone to think, "Uh, maybe they'll hit this other one"?
What's annoying about the military reaction is that they seem to be implying that it's some kind of uniquely Iraqi phenomenon, that the people are taking out their frustrations and delighting in the ruination of Saddam Hussein. But Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with either of these places--except that he was a better custodian than we were. They existed long before Saddam Hussein. It's the same thing that would happen in New York City if there was a total breakdown of government and police. The Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Guggenheim--they all post hundreds of guards, all the time. They could all be stripped in three days if somebody . . . didn't care! If we made up a list of which buildings in Washington should have machine guns around them in a time of governmental chaos, why do I suspect the entire Smithsonian Institution would be on it?
The looting and destruction of these two buildings is already being compared to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, but unfortunately it's only half over. Obviously there were a lot of hurri
ed meetings at museums and universities and cultural institutions this week. Even as I write this, there's an emergency congress of archeologists being held by Unesco, the United Nations cultural arm, in Paris. And this is their principal idea for dealing with the situation:
A moratorium on purchasing Iraqi antiquities on the international market. Don't reward the robbers. Make it clear they can't sell artifacts anywhere.
Do they want to see everything smashed into bits? The only thing that protects the artifacts right now is that they're in the possession of someone who thinks he can get money for them. If some guy has a 6,000-year-old sculpture in his garage, and he suddenly finds out that it's not worth any money but it can get him sent to prison for five years, what's he likely to do?
Save us from the Pentagon, and please please, save us from curators. I thank you, the kings of Assyria thank you, and a sociopath named Samir thanks you. It wasn't his fault that we left the door to Fort Knox open.
Joe Bob Briggs writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at joebob@upi.com or through his website at www.joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, TX 75221.
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