Buffing Iraq’s treasure chest

Footsteps echo in the quiet of the Iraqi National Museum, where ghosts of some of the world’s great civilizations stand at silent attention.

Sections of ancient walls and statues from the Assyrian and Babylonian periods of what is now Iraq, irreplaceable treasures that catalog civilization’s earliest times, were too heavy to steal. But the cavernous exhibit rooms are still littered with empty display cases, many smashed in the looting binge that occurred when American troops entered Baghdad last year. An estimated 14,000 pieces are missing from the museum’s vast collection.

Even as the hunt continues for these artifacts -- many of them surely smuggled out of the country -- the museum is taking on a fresh look as walls are repainted and furniture and computers are installed in offices devastated by thieves.

“The furniture can be replaced, and the lights can be replaced, but the antiquities cannot,” museum director Donnie George said. “I have talked with so many people, and they were all hit in the heart by what happened.”

The looting may be an inadvertent blessing for one of the greatest, and least seen, museums in the world. Although it is widely viewed as an unparalleled treasure that documents the earliest civilizations, only an elite archeological club has been able to view it in the last two decades.

Because of war upon war and the vagaries of Saddam Hussein’s rule, the museum has been closed for 20 of the last 24 years. But the rebuilding could result in a museum that reflects a city on the path to reassuming its role as a cultural center rather than a Middle East backwater.

Millions in restoration funds, much provided by the U.S., is available after years of neglect. Through the diligence of an eclectic cast, including American investigators and a small cadre of self-effacing Italian archeologists, a cache of about 4,000 antiquities has been retrieved, most from Iraqis who have turned over artifacts under a no-questions-asked policy. One widely circulated story is that Iraqi clerics admonished wives not to sleep with husbands who had stolen from the museum until the goods were returned.

The museum grounds are hardly inspiring, with their overgrown gardens, cluttered sidewalks and dusty hallways. But there is a positive hum, with workers installing wiring and computer connections. Certainly it’s a far cry from the early days of the U.S.-led invasion, when reports painted grim scenes of destruction at the building.

When the fog of war had lifted, it turned out that the staff had removed many pieces and stored them in secret underground rooms at the museum, a vault at the country’s central bank and a bomb shelter in a neighborhood where the residents became vigilante guardians when they learned of the treasures in their midst.

Figuring out what was missing also was stymied by the hundreds of pieces from archeological digs around the country that were brought to Baghdad for safekeeping just before the war.

On April 16, a U.S. tank platoon was stationed on the museum grounds, finally ending the looting. But the damage had been done. As museum officials took inventory, they discovered that as many as 5,000 cylinder seals, ancient means of applying signatures to objects, were missing. The small, valuable seals would have been easy to smuggle out of the country, and their theft suggested an inside job because just getting to them required knowledge and access a looter would not have had.

Larger and more valuable pieces were missing as well, including a copper statue dating from 2300 BC and an ancient wheeled brazier that Assyrian kings once used to warm themselves in the winter.

By May, several Americans had embarked on the recovery chase, including a Manhattan prosecutor with a degree in the classics and an Army police unit that distinguished itself through its ability to collaborate on investigations with the Iraqi police.

The prosecutor was a tough-talking assistant district attorney named Matthew F. Bogdanos who had specialized in homicides before he was called back to active duty as a Marine colonel after Sept. 11, 2001.

When the museum looting began making headlines, Bogdanos, then in Qatar, put together a team of 14 military investigators who set up shop in Baghdad and began trying to recover the stolen items. It was a daunting undertaking, not the least part of which was deciding how to approach the Iraqis, who, after years of ruthless repression, were not inclined to volunteer that they harbored stolen goods. The team opted for recovery over prosecution.

The next step was getting the word out. He and his team fanned out, visiting mosques and neighborhoods, spreading the news that there would be no consequences for anyone who returned museum property.

“A lot of people thought it was a trap and that we would shoot them,” he said.

When the message went out, the results were astonishing, he said, especially when it became clear that there was a “no questions asked” policy. Suddenly, information came pouring in from people who knew where antiquities were hidden and who had taken them. There was, he said, a strong feeling that any recoveries represented property that belonged to the Iraqi people.

Bogdanos also participated in one of the most dramatic postwar recoveries, which turned up the fabled Treasure of Nimrud and the original golden bull’s head from the Golden Harp of Ur. Years earlier, these and other venerated items had been removed from the museum to the Iraqi Central Bank, whose vaults had been flooded before the American entry into Baghdad. Aided by a team from the National Geographic Society, the vault was pumped out over three weeks, and 6,700 pieces of gold and jewelry were found intact.

On another front, 337 boxes of ancient manuscripts had been moved to a bomb shelter in west Baghdad.

John Malcolm Russell, an archeologist on leave from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, gives a great deal of credit to an Army unit from Orangeburg, N.Y., that worked closely with Iraqis to have some of the most valuable objects returned.

Russell, who has been overseeing the State Department-funded restoration of the museum’s infrastructure, said the 812th Military Police Company followed tips that led to the famed limestone Mask of Warka, recovered from the backyard of a home just north of Baghdad.

Another treasure, the 4,300-year-old Basetki Statue, was covered with heavy grease when it was found immersed in a cesspool. Only the bottom half of the 300-pound copper statue was discovered by archeologists, but it is believed to have decorated the door of the Akkadian King Naram-Sin in southern Iraq. They also recovered the Nimrud brazier, so called because it was discovered by Italian archeologists in the mid-1990s at the neo-Assyrian capital of Nimrud, just south of Mosul.

George, the museum director, gives much credit to members of the Iraqi Italian Institute of Archeological Sciences, who now occupy sterile-looking laboratories in the museum where they are working on hundreds of restoration projects. Their once-handsome villa was looted of all its furniture and narrowly avoided being torched in the anarchy that ruled Baghdad.

But because the Italian archeologists have a long history in Iraq, they were seen by many as safer caretakers of art objects than the Americans. In all, about 1,000 artifacts were returned to the Italians, who made a point, as one put it, “of not even looking at the faces” of the returners.