Baghdad's Treasure: Lost To The Ages

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But some priceless pieces are already known to be missing. Among them: a 3-ft. carved alabaster vase, circa 3200 B.C.; a black, headless statue of the Sumerian King Entemena, circa 2430 B.C.; a Sumerian sacred cup, circa 2600 B.C.; a copper head of an Akkadian ruler, circa 2350 B.C.; and a gold lyre from Ur, circa 2500 B.C. What else might be gone is anybody's guess.

Apart from the unknown number of items stolen, hundreds and perhaps thousands have been smashed beyond recognition. Says Donny George, research director at the Iraqi Board of Antiquities: "It may be weeks, months, before we know what's there and what isn't." Archaeologists are praying for the safety of what may be the world's oldest calendar, a 10,000-year-old pebble with 12 notches; of the Warka head, circa 3200 B.C., depicting a Sumerian woman in white marble; and of a group of 800 neo-Babylonian cuneiform clay tablets that form the world's oldest intact library, circa 550 B.C.

Figuring out what's gone and what remains won't be easy: duplicate records of the museum's holdings exist, but they're widely scattered; in any case, the museum's catalogs are probably outdated. Some experts also suspect that members of the museum staff have been stealing, both last week and possibly in previous years. Even those who doubt such involvement, such as Jeremy Black, an ancient Iraq specialist at the Oriental Institute at Oxford University, are hard-pressed to explain some of the thievery. "We've seen it stated that some of these looters got in with keys," he says. "How they got those keys, I don't know." Soldiers who have belatedly been assigned to guard the museum told TIME they had heard eyewitness reports of staff members' sneaking large packages out of the museum in the days before the looting. Perhaps they were simply taking the objects away for safeguarding, but, says Staff Sergeant David Richard of the 3rd Infantry Division, "there was some shady stuff going on."

The gutting of the national museum may be a blow to Iraq's historical heritage, but the looting and burning of the National Library and the Awqaf Library, which was the repository for material from private and mosque libraries throughout Iraq, are spiritual blows as well. Between them, the two libraries made Baghdad the largest, most valuable repository of Arabic books outside Cairo's al-Azhar Library. The National Library's prized collection included royal court records and thousands of documents from the earliest Islamic periods, along with thousands of books (many handwritten, some of them one of a kind) on Islamic law and practice. In the Awqaf Library, attached to the Ministry of Religious Endowments, was a priceless collection of handwritten Korans (some said to be over 1,000 years old), religious manuscripts and calligraphy. "People used to come to Baghdad from all over the world--even from al-Azhar--to read these works," says National Library director Ra'ad al-Bandar. "For religious scholars across the Muslim world, this is a time of mourning."