At his desk in the Semitic Museum, Professor of Assyriology Piotr Steinkeller shuffles papers as he describes how it felt to hear that the National Museum in Baghdad had been looted. He says that at first, he couldn’t believe that such a collection had been lost.

“I cried when I heard about the museum,” he says.

Without access to inventory lists, it has been difficult to calculate the damage to the vast treasury of the Iraqi National Museum, which contained the discoveries of a century of intensive archeology in the lands of ancient Mesopotamia. But news reports suggest that looters nearly completely ransacked the museum, taking advantage of the chaos attending the American occupation of Baghdad earlier this month.

Among the missing objects is a solid gold harp from the ancient city of Ur, a carved bird dating from 8000 B.C.E., and priceless Arabic texts and cuneiform tablets. For scholars with interests ranging from the earliest signs of civilization to the art and literature of the medieval Muslim world, the loss of such a collection is a disaster.

Since news of the lootings came out last week, scholars at Harvard, along with their colleagues throughout the United States and the world, say they’ve experienced distress, despair and anger.

“It felt like losing someone in the family,” says Steinkeller, who recently published a study of some of the museum’s cuneiform tablets.

But the scholars say there is little time to linger over emotions.

Working from her office at the Sackler Museum, Boardman Professor of Fine Arts Irene J. Winter is part of an international effort to retrieve the missing artifacts.

Winter usually spends her days immersed in the study of art theory, archeology and the history of the ancient Near East.

But since last week, she has spent “twenty-two hours a day” on her phone and e-mail, talking with anyone—reporters, FBI agents, senators and colleagues—who might help.

“We are all passionately anguished over what happened,” Winter says. “And so each of us has found a pathway, a way to do something about it.”

And it is not an easy task. Winter and her colleagues say the artifacts—including renowned pieces such as the Warka Vase and the so-called “Mona Lisa of Nimrud”—are likely to become hot items on the black market.

But since art and antiquites trafficking makes up one of the world’s most sophisticated and powerful crime networks, there is little hope of recovering objects once they leave Iraq, says Associate Professor of Assyriology Paul-Alain Beaulieu.

“A lot of these fragile pieces are bound to be destroyed in transit, and libraries of tablets will be fragmented into smaller lots to be sold,” he says. “Once that happens, it will be very difficult to decipher the meaning of many of these texts, if they are ever recovered.”

The National Museum housed between 150,000 and 200,000 objects, a vast collection that scholars say will be impossible to reassemble if it becomes dispersed among private collections.