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Illicit Antiquities |
Short Notes |
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The problem of the illegal antiquities trade with respect to Iraq is two-fold. In the first instance there are items excavated prior to the Gulf War which were stored or displayed in the regional museums; some of these museums were looted in the aftermath of the was and objects from them occasionally appear on the antiquities market. In the second instance, there are items which have probably been illegally excavated since the Gulf War and which are now appearing on the market. There is unfortunately little we can do about this latter category of items, since proof of prior ownership by Iraq is elusive and would be based on art historical analysis (or internal textual evidence in the case of tablets) and on the absence of evidence for legitimate ownership, none of which are convincing in the context of legal proceedings. For those items for which there are Iraq Museum accession numbers and independent excavation records, the situation is theoretically simple. The three fascicles of Lost Heritage give lists, descriptions, and some illustrations of all the objects which were known to have been looted from Iraq's regional museums at the end of 1991; but recovery is regrettably hampered by admittedly poor-quality photographs and gaps in documentation. Only a few items have been successfully identified and recovered using those volumes, and there is disturbing evidence that the lists in those volumes are incomplete.
Confirmation of this problem comes from the sighting in London of a Neo-Assyrian cuneiform tablet excavated by Sir Max Mallowan in 1956 from the site of Balawat, in northern Iraq. This tablet (excavation number BT 125) had been in the possession of the Iraq Museum and was published by Barbara Parker in the journal Iraq 25 (1963), 97-8 and pl. XXV. Another tablet seen on the same occasion has been tentatively identified as coming from Tell al-Fakhar, a site in northeastern Iraq. It is also very likely to have been stolen from one of the regional museums in Iraq. In a separate incident, a basalt door- or gate-socket was offered to the Merrin Gallery in New York, which wisely made inquiries of the British Museum as to the legitimacy of the object's ownership. The door-socket dates to the Isin-Larsa Period and has a two-column inscription of Shuilishu, second king of the Isin dynasty; it is one of a pair excavated by Sir Leonard Woolley at Ur in the 1922-23 season (excavation number U. 421 and Iraq Museum accession number IM 373) and was published by C. J. Gadd and L. Legrain in Ur Excavation Texts, vol. I (1928, British Museum & The University Museum of Pennsylvania), no. 100, pl. N. The size and weight of this piece, which is approximately half a metre across by 22cm thick, indicate that it must have been shipped to the US as freight, rather than hand-carried, and moved undetected through customs. There has also been a report from Dr Muayad Damerji, the Director General of Antiquities and Heritage in Iraq, that the head of a recently-excavated human-headed bull (Fig. 1) from the palace at Khorsabad, which had been left in situ, was broken off and stolen. Its size and easy recognisability would make it difficult to sell of the open market and it is likely that it was stolen 'to order'. Fortunately, it has been found (in a garden in Mosul); but in the course of its removal it had apparently cracked into two pieces, and then it was further sawn and chiseled into a total of eleven pieces for easier transport and concealment. It is now in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad awaiting restoration. An unknown number of relief heads from the site of Hatra have also been stolen, with the result that many of the sculptures remaining in situ have been plastered over or hidden behind temporary walls in the effort to preserve them. The Department of Antiquities and Heritage in Iraq is gradually achieving increased success in encouraging individuals who find antiquities to bring them to the Iraq Museum rather than selling or exporting them. A system of rewards has been put in place by the government; and the site of Tell an-Namil, where the Antiquities Department is currently conducting excavations, was brought to their attention by an individual bringing in pottery uncovered in the course of agricultural work. It should be noted that one of the effects of the economic embargo on Iraq has been a necessary increase in the area of land brought under cultivation, with the inevitable result that more sites are being encountered and damaged by ploughing and irrigation, and more undocumented artefacts are being uncovered. The so-called 'Third River', a deep drainage channel between the Tigris and Euphrates, which was engineered to remove brackish water resulting from irrigation in northern Babylonia and to expel it into marshes near the Gulf, is apparently now being used, contra its original intention, for irrigation of new fields which have expanded into the formerly dune-covered centre of the country. When the channel was dug in 1989 and 1990, it revealed a number of completely buried and hitherto unknown single-period sites, and these and other already-registered sites in this area are now under severe threat of destruction as more farmers move into the area. First posted October 1998; Page design updated September 2006 |
