Antiquities Theft in Iraq Threatens Legacy to World

The robbers struck at midafternoon, using hammers to smash the unguarded wooden door of the small museum near the Ishtar Gate into Babylon, once the most magnificent city in the ancient world and now among archeology’s most famous sites.

They worked undetected. The vast site, circled by 11 miles of walls rebuilt in “the time of Saddam Hussein”--the bricks are stamped with a reminder--has been practically unvisited in the six years since Iraq became an international outcast.

The thieves selected rare and beautiful pieces of antiquity: five large seals and 37 seal rings from the time of Nebuchadnezzar, the biblical despot who destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem and took the Jewish people into captivity when he ruled Mesopotamia in the 6th century BC.

The theft in April was the last straw for Iraqi officials struggling to conserve this country’s rich cultural heritage.

Every remaining antiquities museum in the country was ordered closed, and all pieces were taken to Baghdad for safekeeping. They now lie under guard in a darkened storage area of the Iraq Museum in the capital, shut away from scholars and tourists alike.

It is, according to state Antiquities Director Muayed Said Damerji, the only way to keep them safe.

“You’ve heard of gold fever? We have something like antiquities fever,” said Said, who believes that thousands of priceless pieces already have been stolen from Iraq, pieces whose value to art and antique dealers would be in the millions of dollars.

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Because what is now Iraq was once the stage for some of the globe’s first civilizations, the pilfering is obliterating a legacy that belongs to the whole civilized world, says McGuire Gibson, professor of Mesopotamian archeology at the University of Chicago Oriental Institute, who has studied the problem extensively.

“It’s as if the Liberty Bell was stolen and then sold and then was going to end up locked away in Germany or someplace else. What would your reaction be?” he asked.

The breakdown of order that followed Iraq’s defeat in the 1991 Persian Gulf War has left museum officials nearly helpless to staunch the hemorrhage of treasures from ancient Sumer, Babylonia and Assyria. The artifacts that have left Iraq sometimes were taken literally by the truckload.

Experts say the pieces wind up with antiques dealers in London, say, or Zurich, Switzerland--in some cases accompanied by phony documents showing legal provenance--or in the homes of wealthy collectors around the world.

Not only have museums such as Babylon’s been plundered, but also well-known archeological sites such as the palace of Assyrian King Sennacherib at Nineveh, in northern Iraq.

In 1990, John Russell, a Columbia University archeologist and art historian, took 900 photographs to document a series of translucent alabaster reliefs hanging in the throne-room suite at Nineveh. They afforded a rare glimpse of religious practices and military campaigns from 27 centuries ago.

Last summer, Russell was alarmed when a representative for a European museum asked him to evaluate a photocopied picture of an Assyrian relief that it was considering buying. He recognized immediately that it was from the slabs he had photographed. The museum turned down the purchase, the seller vanished in a maze of middlemen, and Russell can only guess at the destruction going on.

Recently, a representative for another potential buyer asked him to evaluate photographs of 10 Assyrian pieces, all of which also turned out to have been taken illegally from Nineveh.

“Sadly, with the dispersal of the original reliefs . . . my photographs may be the only available record of what was once there,” Russell wrote in an article for the International Foundation for Art Research.

He advises anyone considering buying ancient art from Iraq to consult experts, because chances are good the sale would be unlawful.

Said, the Iraqi antiquities director, says old tombs and previously unexcavated archeological sites are being set upon--sometimes by entire villages that, he suspects, are filling orders placed by foreign buyers.

There are at least 10,000 such sites in Iraq, and Said’s Department of Antiquities can afford to guard only a few. Robbers and smugglers are highly motivated, because even a 1- or 2-inch-square tablet fragment with ancient cuneiform writing can fetch $1,000 to $2,000 abroad, Said notes.

Recently, the looting has assumed the size and appearance of organized crime, with gun battles erupting when thieves stormed sites at Nasiriya. In Erech, guards killed one would-be robber; two others got away.

To dramatize the problem, two years ago the Department of Antiquities invited scholars from around the world to view a large room filled entirely with items confiscated at border crossings. Now “we’d have enough to fill three big halls,” Said said.

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The bandits are often farmers and Bedouin herders, he says. Previously, they earned money by working on archeological digs; up to 200 local laborers were hired at each site. But because of U.N. policies to isolate Iraq, foreign archeologists no longer come.

“The real tragedy is that the people in Iraq digging this up are just people trying to stay alive,” Gibson, the University of Chicago professor, said. “Five dollars to them is a lot of money. Even a dollar is a good deal of money.”

Since most imports into the country and the sale of its oil on the international market were banned in 1990, the Iraqi economy has been in a downward spiral, and Iraqis are selling whatever they own just to survive. (Earlier this month, the United Nations allowed Baghdad to resume limited oil sales in order to buy food and medicine.) Jewelry, rugs and furniture, along with antiquities and artwork, have flooded bazaars and been taken out of the country in huge quantities.

Not surprisingly, crime and violence have exploded. There are broad swaths in the north, south and west of the country where the government’s authority is barely felt.

Gibson became aware of the extent of the problem in the early 1990s, when he found himself being offered bagfuls of cylinder seals and fragments of clay cuneiform tablets when he dropped in on antiques dealers on Portobello Road in London.

“This has never happened before,” he said.

Cylinder seals such as those stolen from Babylon are small, exquisitely carved columns of stone or metal that, when rolled over moist clay, left the reverse image as a message or signature--like a very small printing drum.

Used to mark documents or property, they were often worn by their owners on a bracelet or necklace and buried with them when they died.

The London dealers claimed that they had come by the items legally, but Gibson was skeptical.

“When you are being shown a bag of 100 to 150 seals, that’s not coming out legally,” he said.

The trade is a worldwide problem. Gibson says Persian antiquities cascaded onto the market after Iran’s 1978-79 Islamic Revolution and that the problems in Iraq began on a large scale after the Gulf War. Today, a flood of loot is coming out of Afghanistan, he says.

The value is calculable only in terms of what buyers will pay. But in the boastful world of big-league collecting, that can be a lot.

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“The bottom dropped out of a lot of things, but it didn’t drop out of the antiquities market,” Gibson said. “The value of antiquities has only grown. . . . An awful lot of this stuff is being bought by people who really love these objects.”

The main road for smugglers runs from Baghdad through the three Kurdish-controlled provinces of northern Iraq, and from there usually to Iran or sometimes to Turkey. Another route is across the Jordanian or Saudi desert, to Gulf countries such as Qatar.

On the Iraqi border station at Trebil, near Jordan, a gift of cigarettes or alcohol is sufficient to allow one’s baggage through without close inspection, according to a driver familiar with the terrain.

The driver recalled one passenger with a Dutch passport who told him to pay whatever price was asked just to make sure a bag of “stones” passed through unhindered.

The flood of Iraqi antiquities coming onto the market has helped stimulate interest in Near Eastern objects, Gibson says, so that formerly safe countries such as Jordan and Turkey are under pressure. But counterfeiters are also getting in on the act--producing knockoffs that could take some of the steam out of demand.