Restoring a Treasured Past

The hundreds of looters who smashed ancient ceramics, stripped display cases and pocketed gold and other antiquities from the National Museum of Iraq pillaged nothing less than records of the first human society. Archeologists and art experts must strive for the best odds that some of the treasures will be recovered and preserved. An unusual meeting in Paris today is a start in that direction.

The looting, which began soon after American troops took control of Baghdad, is considered one of the greatest cultural disasters in recent Middle Eastern history. Mobs ransacked the museum’s 28 galleries along with vaults behind huge steel doors.

Gone are 80% of the museum’s 170,000 priceless objects, including 5,000-year-old tablets believed to bear some of the earliest writing, a 10,000-year-old calendar and a gold and ivory harp from Ur, the birthplace of Abraham.

Reports of Iraqis stuffing gold coins and bracelets into their pockets, smashing the heads off statues and piling ivory figurines and cuneiform tablets into carts were as sickening as the loss was incalculable.

Recriminations swirl through the empty, hot galleries. Before the war began, international researchers and art experts had beseeched U.S. officials to protect museums and archeological digs with the same vigilance they later directed toward Iraq’s oil fields. In hindsight, the Pentagon should have taken more care, expected more trouble. But the real blame lies with the looters themselves, some of them said to be part of well-organized gangs.

The museum staff locked many objects in underground vaults and bricked up the vaults. But thieves carrying rifles and axes broke through walls, smashed glass cases, popped open metal boxes and torched what they couldn’t pry away. Iraqi police who were supposed to guard the building simply fled.

The priority now is to determine what’s missing and recover as much as possible. The British Museum is sending a team of experts to Baghdad to literally help pick up the pieces, assess the damage and possibly lend the Iraqi museum items from its large Mesopotamian collection. Perhaps the ad hoc Baghdad citizen committees that are stopping cars and checking for loot will turn up museum items. Consistent with international conventions that obligate nations to stop the theft or pillage of “cultural property,” museums and auction houses have called for a moratorium on trading in Iraqi art items.

Today’s meeting of archeologists in Paris, sponsored by UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural arm, aims at forging consensus on steps to prevent black market profiteering. Proposals could include rewards, amnesty or both for those who return objects and tighter border and port patrols to stop objects from moving out of Iraq to millionaires’ curio cases.

It’s too late to prevent the cultural catastrophe that happened in Baghdad. But the world can make a concerted effort to remedy at least some of the damage.