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Illicit Antiquities |
The Modern Sack of Nineveh and NimrudJohn Malcolm RussellDepartment of History and Archaeology
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The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
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Figure 1: Nineveh, Southwest Palace, general view of site museum (Photo: author) Return to text |
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Figure 2: Nineveh, Southwest Palace, view of restored throne room (Photo: author) Return to text |
Because most of these reliefs have never been published, they needed to be documented in case the originals were lost or damaged and the guide future conservation efforts. As a member of the University of California, Berkeley, team at Nineveh in 1989 and 1990, I took roughly 900 photographs of the remains of the throne-room suite, with the objective of recording the surviving sculptures in detail. My book of these photographs, together with drawings, plans, and commentary, tentatively entitled The Excavation and Destruction of Sennacherib's Palace at Ninevah, Iraq, will be published by Yale University Press in late 1997.
An example will give some sense of what this project accomplished. In Nineveh and Its Remains (vol. 2, p. 469), A. H. Layard, who first excavated the palace, published an engraving of a unique representation in which two Assyrians make an offering before two standards, which have the form of horned dragons or serpents attached to poles (Fig. 3). This image is of considerable interest for the study of Assyrian cult practice. Layard did not indicate which room or slab this representation was from, nor did he give any indication of the scale, and the original drawing from which the engraving was made has not been located. My documentation work showed that this image is a detail from Slab 43 of Room V, the retiring room behind the throne-room (Fig. 4). As can now clearly be seen from the new photograph, the context of this scene is Sennacherib's military camp on one of his campaigns in a mountainous region. The heretofore unpublished slabs to either side show further events from this campaign, thereby placing this small detail within its larger visual narrative context.
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Figure 3: Nineveh, Layard drawing of unidentified scene (After Layard 1849, vol. 2, 469) Return to text |
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Figure 4: Nineveh, Southwest Palace, Room V, Slab 43, full slab, width 180 cm (Photo: author) Return to text |
The necessity of documenting the site became devastatingly clear in 1995, when I was shown a photograph of an Assyrian relief fragment for sale on the antiquities market (Fig. 5). There is no doubt that it cam from this same slab, which was intact in the Nineveh site museum in 1990, but which had since evidently been broken up by looters. Soon thereafter, I was shown photographs of two more fragments that had been in storage at Nineveh in 1990, but which were also on the market. One (Fig. 6) shows labourers towing a load toward the right, from Hall XLIX of Sennacherib's palace (Russell 1991, fig. 86). The other (Fig. 7), which is more unusual, shows two dead sheep and a dead man gloating in water. I know of no occurrence of domestic livestock shown in this way, other than a fragment that shows a dead buffalo in the water, which was found by George Smith (1875, 148) at the west end of the palace. Both of these fragments may have belonged to the campaign 'to the Persian Gulf' that Thompson & Hutchinson (1929, 61) said embellished the west façade of the palace.
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Figure 5: Looted fragment, Nineveh, Southwest Palace, Room V, Slab 43, cult scene (From a photocopy) Return to text |
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Figure 6: Looted fragment, Nineveh, Southwest Palace, Room XLIX, labourers hauling a heavy object (Photo: author) Return to text |
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Figure 7: Looted fragment, Nineveh, Southwest Palace, West Facade (?), two dead sheep and a dead human in the water (Photo: author) Return to text |
These fragments would be poor investments. Since they are documented as belonging to a museum in Iraq and have no export permits, Iraq would have clear legal grounds to reclaim them from any purchaser. Furthermore, possession of these fragments is a violation of the United Nations sanctions against Iraq, which means that they could be confiscated by customs authorities. It proved impossible to determine who was offering these three fragments for sale, or where they were being kept, so I published a note in International Fine Art Reports (IFAR) (May 1996) to alert prospective buyers that these sculptures had come from the site museum at Nineveh. The value of such publicity was confirmed when a London solicitor wrote to me, stating that his client, a London collector, had purchased the fragment showing labourers towing a ledge from an antiquities dealer in Belgium. He had then applied for a British export license, only to be informed that the piece was among the ones published in the IFAR article. Discussions about the disposition of this pieces are currently underway, but the solicitor assured me that if it proves to have been stolen, the client will return it to its true owner.
I was concerned that more looted Assyrian sculptures would appear on the market, but saw no further examples for more than a year. In November 1996 I was contacted by a New York lawyer acting on behalf of a prospective purchaser who had photographs of ten more Assyrian sculptures that were said to be on the market. The lawyer wanted to know if the sculptures were being sold legitimately. They were not. One of the fragments was from a lion hunt relief sculpture of Assurnasirpal II. This fragment was found along with a number of others by Thompson in the vicinity of the Nabu temple at Nineveh, but according to its inscription it originally belonged to the Ishtar temple (Thompson & Hutchinson 1929, pl. 7) I had photographed it at Nineveh in 1989 (Fig. 8). The other nine were further fragments of wall relief from the Sennacherib Palace Site Museum (Fig. 9). At least three of the relief slabs from which these fragments were broken have been published in situ in the site museum, slab 1:7 by Russell (1991, gif. 28), and slabs 1:24 and V:1 (Figs. 10-12) by Madhloom (1976, pls. 32 & 33a), the excavator of the palace.
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Figure 8: Looted fragment, Nineveh, Ishtar temple (?), fragment of Assurnasirpal II lion hunt (Photo: author) Return to text |
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Figure 9: Nineveh, Southwest Palace, plan (Photo: author) Return to text |
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Figure 10: Nineveh, Southwest Palace, Room V, Slab 1, view of full slab before looting, width 121cm (Photo: author) Return to text |
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Figure 11: Nineveh, Southwest Palace, Room V, Slab 1, detail (Photo: author) Return to text |
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Figure 12: Looted fragment, Nineveh, Southwest Palace, Room V, Slab 1, Assyrian archer marching into battle, 26 x 16cm (From a photocopy) Return to text |
Each fragment came from a different slab, and most of them had been broken from the middle of a slab, suggesting that the looters destroyed whole slabs to extract the best-preserved bits. In cases where the surrounding surface was not well preserved, these parts were broken away to create a well-preserved fragment, as on slabs V:15 and V:39. A similar case is a fragment, IV:4 (Figs. 13-15), that shows small figures behind a city wall. The large figures directly above the city were completely broken away, evidently so that their large scale would not distract from the interest of the miniature scene below.
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Figure 13: Nineveh, Southwest Palace, Room IV, Slab 4, view of full slab before looting, width 78cm (Photo: author) Return to text |
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Figure 14: Nineveh, Southwest Palace, Room IV, Slab 4, detail (Photo: author) Return to text |
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Figure 15: Looted fragment, Nineveh, Southwest Palace, Room IV, Slab 4, archers in a walled city (From a photocopy) Return to text |
In several cases (1:24, V:1, V:39) fragments were squared off to give the impression that these are complete, self-contained compositions. All of the fragments were mounted vertically on bases, in some cases without respect to the sculpture's original orientation. Fragment V:1 was squared off diagonally and then mounted vertically, so that the figure now seems to be falling forward, quite unlike its original position on the slab. Whoever mounted the fragments knew so little about Assyrian art that they did not realise that a lozenge pattern in the background, which represents mountains, is always oriented vertically. Fragment V:17, which shows a cowering crouching figure, is mounted so that the man is oriented as if standing, with the result that the mountain pattern angles to the left. Fragments V:39 and T:16 are also titled. The most dramatic example of this is fragment V:16 (Figs. 16-18), which showed a pair of archers shooting toward a city on top of a mountain. The pieces was mounted so that the archers shoot horizontally, with the mountain pattern almost horizontal behind them.
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Figure 16: Nineveh, Southwest Palace, Room IV, Slab 16, view of full slab before looting, width 187cm (Photo: author) Return to text |
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Figure 17: Nineveh, Southwest Palace, Room V, Slab 16, detail (Photo: author) Return to text |
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Figure 18: Looted fragment, Nineveh, Southwest Palace, Room V, Slab 16, a pair of archers drawing their bows (From a photocopy) Return to text |
All of these examples of trimming and reorienting show how important context is in understanding the significance of each fragment, and how much crucial information is lost in the breaking up of a sculptured slab into fragments for the antiquities market. Not only is a unique cultural artefact destroyed, but even the fragments that remain are reduced to incomprehensible ciphers, the meaning of which is lost with the destruction of the full composition. I also published these fragments in IFAR (December 1996). All of these fragments are illustrated in Minerva (May/June 1997) as well as on the Archaeology magazine web site. In May 1997, I saw dealer photographs of two more Sennacherib fragments, which turned out to be two halves of Slab 8 from Room IV. The lower part of this corner slab was intact when I photographed it at Nineveh in 1990 (Fig. 19), but the pieces has since been broken in half, presumably to facilitate smuggling it out of Iraq. This continuing stream of dealer's photographs of documented Sennacherib reliefs suggests that by now the only place where Sennacherib reliefs are in short supply is in the palace museum itself.
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Figure 19: Nineveh, Southwest Palace, Room IV, Slab 8, view of full slab before looting, width 76cm (Photo: author) Return to text |
Nineveh is not the only Assyrian site that has suffered. In fall 1996, a London antiquities dealer was circulating a photograph that showed an unusual unpublished sculpture from the palace of king Tiglath-pileser III at Nimrud, Iraq (Fig. 20). This large fragment shows two Assyrian courtiers facing left, and apparently joins to a smaller fragment in the Louvre that shows the king facing right toward them (Barnett & Falkner 1962, pl. 22). Further investigation revealed that the new piece had been excavated and photographed by the Polish archaeological expedition at Nimrud in 1975. The sculpture has not yet been published, due to the untimely death of the excavator in 1976, but a photograph of it was shown at a major scholarly meeting, the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, in Berlin in 1978. After its excavation, the sculpture was stored in the Iraq Antiquities Department house on the site of Nimrud, Iraq. There was not record that it had left Iraq legally, but here it was on the market.
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Figure 20: Looted fragment, Nimrud, Palace of Tiglath-pileser III, courtiers facing the king (From a photocopy) Return to text |
In May 1997, I saw a dealer's photograph of another Tiglath-pileser fragment, showing an Assyrian soldier in a chariot facing left (Fig. 21). The slab from which it came had been excavated, drawn, and reburied by Layard (Barnett & Falkner 1962, pl. 9), and then re-excavated and published by the Polish expedition (Fig. 22). Unfortunately, the piece on the market was only the left half of the slab - as with the Sennacherib examples, this large, well-preserved slab had been broken up, presumable for greater portability or to disguise its resemblance to the published photograph. Certainly anyone who desires to purchase a recently-smuggled piece of an Assyrian palace should have no difficulty in locating one. And such high-profile documented Assyrian sculptures are only the tip of the iceberg. Thousands of smaller antiquities, especially cuneiform clay tablets and stone cylinder seals, have left Iraq illegally in the years since the Gulf War. One collector observed that in the last few years there has been a tremendous increase in the quality, as well as quantity, of Iraqi antiquities on the market.
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Figure 21: Looted fragment, Nimrud, Palace of Tiglath-pileser III, Assyrian chariot facing left (From a photocopy) Return to text |
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Figure 22: Nimrud, Palace of Tiglath-pileser III, chariot followed by two soldiers, with a tree and archer at right (After Sobolewski 1982, fig 12.) Return to text |
Why is this happening now? Iraq has a rich and varied heritage, and this heritage has been coveted by the West since the nineteenth-century heyday of imperial acquisition. Then, 'like the wolf on the fold', representatives of European governments descended on the palaces of Mesopotamia and sacked them to fill the halls of the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Berlin Museum. Numerous sculptured slabs found their way into smaller collections in England and America as well. The most spectacular of these was a group of 26 Assyrian sculptures, including two human-headed lion and bull colossi, which were presented by Layard to his cousin, Lady Charlotte Guest, a distinguished scholar of Welsh literature, mother of ten, and wife of one of the wealthiest industrialists in England. She displayed them at her home, Canford Manor in Dorset, in the Nineveh Porch, a Gothic Revival garden pavilion built especially for them by Charles Barry, the architect of the Houses of Parliament. The bulk of this collection is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Their story is told in my new book, From Nineveh to New York: the Strange Story of the Assyrian Reliefs in the Metropolitan Museum and the Hidden Masterpiece at Canford School (Yale University Press, 1997).
Today Assyria is in fashion again, and its sculptures are bringing unprecedented prices. In 1992, while doing research for the new book, I discovered an original sculpture still in place in the Nineveh Porch at Canford, now Canford School. In 1994 this sculpture was sold by the school at auction for £7.7 million, by far the highest price ever paid for an antiquity. To protect and promote its irreplaceable heritage in the face of such powerful market forces, modern Iraq has an excellent antiquities department, and the people of Iraq have a very high level of pride in their national heritage. This attitude is essential for a country that possesses hundreds of major archaeological sites and tens of thousands of smaller ones. Even in the best of times, it would be impossible to guard all these sites without the co-operation of the Iraqi people.
The United Nations sanctions against Iraq have caused unprecedented perils for Iraq's heritage while forbidding any form of outside assistance within the borders of Iraq in heritage matters. Because of the sanctions, little money is available in Iraq for the preservation of antiquities, at the same time that newly impoverished Iraqis, squeezed between ruinous inflation and critical shortages of basic necessities, have been forced to seek new sources of subsistence income. For antiquities and heritage, the combination of desperation and international demand is a recipe for disaster. Some Iraqis with nothing left to sell have evidently turned to selling off bits of Iraq's rich heritage. These relatively small fragments would be easy to conceal and smuggle out of Iraq, most likely through the Kurdish territory only a few miles to the north of Mosul, but also through Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, or Saudi Arabia. They are then apparently warehoused until a buyer can be located.
There is no evidence that Iraqi officials are involved in these thefts. Instead, this appears to be disorganised pilfering, probably carried out by impoverished locals, and the sculptural fragments are very likely sold for a pittance, since such well-known pieces have no value on the international market. 'Like the wolf on the fold', the United Nations sanctions against Iraq have finally destroyed Sennacherib's palace, finishing the work of the ancient Medes and Babylonians who sacked Nineveh in 612BC. To be sure, market and political forces are also at work here, but the fact remains that without the sanctions, this destruction would not have happened.
The Iraq Department of Antiquities and Heritage has responded by actively trying to staunch the flow of antiquities out of the country, but has been severely constrained by a limited budget, its inability to import photographic supplies (forbidden by the sanctions) or outside technical and scholarly expertise, and by the absence of international co-operation. Inside Iraq, the department is reportedly spending large sums - $500,000 in 1996 - in a successful campaign of paying rewards to Iraqis who turn in stolen antiquities. This diligence is paying off. Early this year, the head of a colossal sculpture at Khorsabad was hacked from its body. A few months later the head was recovered still in Iraq, cut into 11 pieces to facilitate smuggling. Some 40,000 artefacts have reportedly been recovered in Iraq, but thousands more have left the country.
The Iraq Antiquities Department has much less influence outside Iraq. This was highlighted by a recent case where British customs officials seized a number of boxes of antiquities apparently looted from archaeological sites in Iraq. Though British experts confirmed the Iraqi origin of the pieces, the court returned them to the shipper, despite the U. N. sanctions' prohibition on imports from Iraq, and regardless of the provisions of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property and the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects, both of which provide for the repatriation of looted cultural property. It appears that to avoid such reversals in future, Iraq will need to hire a lawyer who is a match for the ones working for the market.
Foreign specialists are anxious to collaborate with Iraqi colleagues in the protection and preservation of Iraq's heritage, but because of the sanctions, opportunities are limited. Before the Gulf War, the British School of Archaeology in Iraq maintained a beautiful expedition house in Baghdad. Many archaeologists, both British and foreign, enjoyed the warm hospitality, great food, and excellent library of this residential facility. Following the imposition of the U. N. sanctions in 1990, all foreign archaeological fieldwork in Iraq ceased. British School officers were allowed to make brief visits to Iraq to check on the house in 1992, but in 1993 the British Academy and Foreign Office issued a firm recommendation against further official visits by School member. In 1995, the library was moved out of the expedition house, which was deteriorating alarmingly due to termites, and in 1996 the house was permanently abandoned.
The Americans had a similarly discouraging experience. In early 1990, the newly-founded American Association for Research in Iraq was preparing to establish its own residential facility in Baghdad, which would have been the first long-term American research presence in Iraq. A residence and director had already been selected when these plans were terminated by the sanctions. Going well beyond the restrictions of the sanctions, the American government prohibits even private visits by its citizens to Iraq. The American and British organisations, prevented from working in Iraq, began publishing Lost Heritage, a continuing series of fascicles that publish photographs and descriptions of the 4,000 objects looted from Iraq's regional museums during the uprisings following the Gulf War. To date, three volumes have appeared in the series.
Today the Sennacherib Palace site museum at Nineveh represents a world heritage disaster of the first magnitude. Immediate emergency conservation measures are required to preserve what remains of its sculptures. One might think that international support for such a crucial undertaking could be readily obtained, but the obstacles appear insurmountable. The same United Nations sanctions that have contributed to the destruction of the palace museum also prohibit any form of outside cultural assistance to Iraq. Though the U. N. Sanctions Committee treats humanitarian assistance as an exception to the sanctions, no such exception has been allowed for the preservation of heritage. International teams from cultural organisations such as UNESCO have repeatedly been denied permission by the Sanctions Committee to assess damage and threats to the cultural heritage of Iraq in the wake of the Gulf War, despite the urgent need for documentation and conservation of Iraqi heritage due to wartime damage, post-war looting and emergency agricultural development. This hostility reflects a widespread perception in the West that modern Iraq has no significant heritage, even though the West claims ancient Iraq, the 'Cradle of Civilisation', as the foundation of its own heritage. This heritage disaster also highlights the role of the West as a myopic consumer of heritage, rather than cherishing it as a vanishing irreplaceable shared resource.
A giant step forward would be for the US government and the U. N. Sanctions Committee to treat threats to cultural heritage as a humanitarian issue. Only with their permission can outside specialists participate in on-site assessments of damage, or collaborate in necessary conservation and preservation matters. The1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, and the 1970 UNESCO and 1995 Unidroit conventions are a good beginning, but the existing conventions make no provision for the protection of heritage against the effects of economic warfare, even though in the case of Iraq, the isolation and impoverishment wrought by prolonged trade sanctions and travel restrictions has lead to far greater devastation of heritage than the armed conflict did. Today, the sanctions hold heritage hostage to a political agenda, facilitating its exploitation by outside market forces.
The present location of most of the looted Assyrian fragments is unknown. Anyone who is offered them for purchase is requested to notify the seller that the sculptures were removed illegally from Iraq, and to ask the seller to turn them over to an Iraqi embassy or interests section, Interpol, or to a customs agency, so that they may be returned to Iraq. Potential buyers of Assyrian sculptures should be aware that very few such pieces appear legitimately on the market, and that many more fragments may have been smuggled out of Iraq. Any Assyrian relief fragment should be treated with great caution.
References
Barnett, R. D. & M. Falkner, 1962. The Sculptures of Assurnasir-apli II (883-859 BC), Tiglath-pileser III (745-727 BC), Esarhaddon (681-669 BC) from the Central and South-west Palaces at Nimrud. London: British Museum
Jones, C. E., 1996. Stolen Iraqi antiquities, Oriental Institute ANEnews web site, 31 December 1996, archived at www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/ANE/ANENEWS-DIGEST/1996/v1996.n015.
Layard, A. H., 1849. Nineveh and its Remains. London: John Murray
Madhloom, T., 1976. Nineveh. (Historical Monuments in Iraq 4.) Baghdad: Directorate General of Antiquities.
Paley, S. M., 1997. Nimrud and Nineveh again: documented bas-reliefs from Iraq offered in the West. International Fine Art Reports18/6, 4-6.
Russell, J. M., 1991. Sennacherib's Palace Without Rival at Nineveh. Chicago (IL): University of Chicago Press.
Russell, J. M., 1996. Loss of wall reliefs from Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh, Iraq. International Fine Art Reports 17/5, 6-7
Russell, J. M., 1997. From Nineveh to New York. London: Yale University Press
Smith, G., 1875. Assyrian Discoveries. London: S. Low, Marston, Low, & Searle
Sobolewski, R., 1982. The Polish work at Nimrud: ten years of excavation and study. Zeitschrift für Assuriologie 71, 248-73
Thompson, R. C. & R. W. Hutchinson, 1929. A Century of Exploration at Nineveh. London: Luzac & Co
Watson, P., 1997. Stolen biblical gems touted in London. The Observer 18 May, 8
Watson, P., 1997. Nineveh 'Palace without Rival' looted. International Fine Art Reports 18/5, 6-7
First posted October 1998; Page design updated September 2006