Baghdad's Treasure: Lost To The Ages

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Indeed, before the week was out, rumors began to surface that suspicious items were already being offered for sale in Iran and Europe. One Iraqi antiques dealer recounted how he was awakened at dawn last week by an art smuggler saying he had Japanese clients who were very interested in buying anything from the plundered museums and wanting to know if the dealer had access to such booty. "I couldn't believe it," the dealer says. "The war was barely over, and this vulture was trying to profit from our defeat. I called him a pimp."

What makes the situation all the more tragic is that scholars had warned the Department of Defense (DOD) in January that something like this might happen. The organized looting of ancient artifacts has been rampant in Iraq ever since U.N. sanctions choked off the country's legal streams of revenue following the 1991 Gulf War. "We wanted to make them aware of the importance of Mesopotamia and familiarize them with important sites," says McGuire Gibson, an archaeologist at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, who participated in the talks. He says he gave DOD officials a list of critical sites to avoid bombing, and explicitly warned them about the possibility of looting at the Iraq Museum.

Still, while coalition forces took pains to safeguard Iraq's oil ministry in Baghdad, they left the nation's cultural heritage wide open. Raid Abdul Ridhar Muhammad, an Iraqi archaeologist, told the New York Times that at the height of the ransacking, he persuaded a U.S. Marine tank crew to come to the museum, where they fired over looters' heads, dispersing several thousand of them.

But the Marines refused to bring the tank inside the grounds, and soon after they left the looters returned. "You tell me what their priorities are," said Iraqi archaeologist Salma El Radi last week after an emergency UNESCO meeting in Paris. General Richard Myers explained at a press conference last week, "At the same time that museum was being looted, we had Americans being wounded and dying in Baghdad. So your priorities, of course, are to finish the combat task." That reasoning clearly wasn't persuasive to three members of the White House's Cultural Property Advisory Committee, who resigned to protest U.S. inaction.

Now that it's too late to prevent the looting, El Radi and dozens of other archaeologists, archivists and cultural preservationists from around the world are working up a damage-control plan. The first priority, everyone agrees, is to try to figure out exactly what is missing; and on that score the news is bad, though perhaps not quite as horrifying as the reports from Baghdad had first suggested. One reason is that the Iraqi antiquities authorities took steps to keep some artifacts safe. For starters, they had long since gathered some of the most precious items from regional museums, figuring they would be easier to protect in Baghdad. They had also moved many items from the Iraq Museum into vaults at Iraq's national bank. The bank was looted as well, but it's not clear yet whether thieves got into these particular vaults.