2,000-year-old Sumerian cities
torn apart and plundered by robbers. The very walls
of the mighty Ur of the Chaldees cracking under the
strain of massive troop movements, the privatisation
of looting as landlords buy up the remaining sites
of ancient Mesopotamia to strip them of their
artefacts and wealth. The near total destruction of
Iraq's historic past – the very cradle of human
civilisation – has emerged as one of the most
shameful symbols of our disastrous occupation.
Evidence amassed by
archaeologists shows that even those Iraqis who
trained as archaeological workers in Saddam
Hussein's regime are now using their knowledge to
join the looters in digging through the ancient
cities, destroying thousands of priceless jars,
bottles and other artefacts in their search for gold
and other treasures.
In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf
War, armies of looters moved in on the desert cities
of southern Iraq and at least 13 Iraqi museums were
plundered. Today, almost every archaeological site
in southern Iraq is under the control of looters.
In a long and devastating
appraisal to be published in December, Lebanese
archaeologist Joanne Farchakh says that armies of
looters have not spared "one metre of these Sumerian
capitals that have been buried under the sand for
thousands of years.
"They systematically destroyed
the remains of this civilisation in their tireless
search for sellable artefacts: ancient cities,
covering an estimated surface area of 20 square
kilometres, which – if properly excavated – could
have provided extensive new information concerning
the development of the human race.
"Humankind is losing its past for
a cuneiform tablet or a sculpture or piece of
jewellery that the dealer buys and pays for in cash
in a country devastated by war. Humankind is losing
its history for the pleasure of private collectors
living safely in their luxurious houses and ordering
specific objects for their collection."
Ms Farchakh, who helped with the
original investigation into stolen treasures from
the Baghdad Archaeological Museum in the immediate
aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, says Iraq may
soon end up with no history.
"There are 10,000 archaeological
sites in the country. In the Nassariyah area alone,
there are about 840 Sumerian sites; they have all
been systematically looted. Even when Alexander the
Great destroyed a city, he would always build
another. But now the robbers are destroying
everything because they are going down to bedrock.
What's new is that the looters are becoming more and
more organised with, apparently, lots of money.
"Quite apart from this, military
operations are damaging these sites forever. There's
been a US base in Ur for five years and the walls
are cracking because of the weight of military
vehicles. It's like putting an archaeological site
under a continuous earthquake."
Of all the ancient cities of
present-day Iraq, Ur is regarded as the most
important in the history of man-kind. Mentioned in
the Old Testament – and believed by many to be the
home of the Prophet Abraham – it also features in
the works of Arab historians and geographers where
its name is Qamirnah, The City of the Moon.
Founded in about 4,000 BC, its
Sumerian people established the principles of
irrigation, developed agriculture and metal-working.
Fifteen hundred years later – in what has become
known as "the age of the deluge" – Ur produced some
of the first examples of writing, seal inscriptions
and construction. In neighbouring Larsa, baked clay
bricks were used as money orders – the world's first
cheques – the depth of finger indentations in the
clay marking the amount of money to be transferred.
The royal tombs of Ur contained jewellery, daggers,
gold, azurite cylindrical seals and sometimes the
remains of slaves.
US officers have repeatedly said
a large American base built at Babylon was to
protect the site but Iraqi archaeologist Zainab Bah-rani,
a professor of art history and archaeology at
Columbia University, says this "beggars belief". In
an analysis of the city, she says: "The damage done
to Babylon is both extensive and irreparable, and
even if US forces had wanted to protect it, placing
guards round the site would have been far more
sensible than bulldozing it and setting up the
largest coalition military headquarters in the
region."
Air strikes in 2003 left
historical monuments undamaged, but Professor
Bahrani, says: "The occupation has resulted in a
tremendous destruction of history well beyond the
museums and libraries looted and destroyed at the
fall of Baghdad. At least seven historical sites
have been used in this way by US and coalition
forces since April 2003, one of them being the
historical heart of Samarra, where the Askari shrine
built by Nasr al Din Shah was bombed in 2006."
The use of heritage sites as
military bases is a breach of the Hague Convention
and Protocol of 1954 (chapter 1, article 5) which
covers periods of occupation; although the US did
not ratify the Convention, Italy, Poland, Australia
and Holland, all of whom sent forces to Iraq, are
contracting parties.
Ms Farchakh notes that as
religious parties gain influence in all the Iraqi
pro-vinces, archaeological sites are also falling
under their control. She tells of Abdulamir Hamdani,
the director of antiquities for Di Qar province in
the south who desperately – but vainly – tried to
prevent the destruction of the buried cities during
the occupation. Dr Hamdani himself wrote that he can
do little to prevent "the disaster we are all
witnessing and observing".
In 2006, he says: "We recruited
200 police officers because we were trying to stop
the looting by patrolling the sites as often as
possible. Our equipment was not enough for this
mission because we only had eight cars, some guns
and other weapons and a few radio transmitters for
the entire province where 800 archaeological sites
have been inventoried.
"Of course, this is not enough
but we were trying to establish some order until
money restrictions within the government meant that
we could no longer pay for the fuel to patrol the
sites. So we ended up in our offices trying to fight
the looting, but that was also before the religious
parties took over southern Iraq."
Last year, Dr Hamdani's
antiquities department received notice from the
local authorities, approving the creation of
mud-brick factories in areas surrounding Sumerian
archaeological sites. But it quickly became apparent
that the factory owners intended to buy the land
from the Iraqi government because it covered several
Sumerian capitals and other archaeological sites.
The new landlord would "dig" the archaeological
site, dissolve the "old mud brick" to form the new
one for the market and sell the unearthed finds to
antiquity traders.
Dr Hamdani bravely refused to
sign the dossier. Ms Farchakh says: "His rejection
had rapid consequences. The religious parties
controlling Nassariyah sent the police to see him
with orders to jail him on corruption charges. He
was imprisoned for three months, awaiting trial. The
State Board of Antiquities and Heritage defended him
during his trial, as did his powerful tribe. He was
released and regained his position. The mud-brick
factories are 'frozen projects', but reports have
surfaced of a similar strategy being employed in
other cities and in nearby archaeological sites such
as the Aqarakouf Ziggarat near Baghdad. For how long
can Iraqi archaeologists maintain order? This is a
question only Iraqi politicians affiliated to the
different religious parties can answer, since they
approve these projects."
Police efforts to break the power
of the looters, now with a well-organised support
structure helped by tribal leaders, have proved
lethal. In 2005, the Iraqi customs arrested – with
the help of Western troops – several antiquities
dealers in the town of Al Fajr, near Nasseriyah.
They seized hundreds of artefacts and decided to
take them to the museum in Baghdad. It was a fatal
mistake.
The convoy was stopped a few
miles from Baghdad, eight of the customs agents were
murdered, and their bodies burnt and left to rot in
the desert. The artefacts disappeared. "It was a
clear message from the antiquities dealers to the
world," Ms Farchakh says.
The legions of antiquities
looters work within a smooth mass-smuggling
organisation. Trucks, cars, planes and boats take
Iraq's historical plunder to Europe, the US, to the
United Arab Emirates and to Japan. The
archaeologists say an ever-growing number of
internet websites offer Mesopotamian artefacts,
objects anywhere up to 7,000 years old.
The farmers of southern Iraq are
now professional looters, knowing how to outline the
walls of buried buildings and able to break directly
into rooms and tombs. The archaeologists' report
says: "They have been trained in how to rob the
world of its past and they have been making
significant profit from it. They know the value of
each object and it is difficult to see why they
would stop looting."
After the 1991 Gulf War,
archaeologists hired the previous looters as workers
and promised them government salaries. This system
worked as long as the archaeologists remained on the
sites, but it was one of the main reasons for the
later destruction; people now knew how to excavate
and what they could find.
Ms Farchakh adds: "The longer
Iraq finds itself in a state of war, the more the
cradle of civilisation is threatened. It may not
even last for our grandchildren to learn from."
A land with fields of ancient pottery
By Joanne Farchakh, archaeologist
Iraq's rural societies are very
different to our own. Their concept of ancient
civilisations and heritage does not match the
standards set by our own scholars. History is
limited to the stories and glories of your direct
ancestors and your tribe. So for them, the "cradle
of civilisation" is nothing more than desert land
with "fields" of pottery that they have the right to
take advantage of because, after all, they are the
lords of the land and, as a result, the owners of
its possessions. In the same way, if they had been
able, these people would not have hesitated to take
control of the oil fields, because this is "their
land". Because life in the desert is hard and
because they have been "forgotten" by all the
governments, their "revenge" for this reality is to
monitor, and take, every single money-making
opportunity. A cylinder seal, a sculpture or a
cuneiform tablet earns $50 (£25) and that's half the
monthly salary of an average government employee in
Iraq. The looters have been told by the traders that
if an object is worth anything at all, it must have
an inscription on it. In Iraq, the farmers consider
their "looting" activities to be part of a normal
working day.
