“That is why time is of the essence,” Beaulieu warns. “Once these pieces leave Iraq, we won’t get them all back.”

Throughout the U.S., scholars of the ancient Near East are also working feverishly.

Kathryn Slanski, who earned her doctorate at Harvard in 1988, spearheaded a “Petition for the Safeguarding of Iraqi Cultural Heritage,” which was submitted to the UN last week with hundreds of signatures. John Malcolm Russell of the Massachusetts College of Art and McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago are organizing a database of missing objects that they say they hope will inhibit their sale on the art market. And American and European archeologists are planning an emergency trip to meet up with their Iraqi counterparts.

Above all, academics have taken the initiative to explain the scope of the loss.

The fate of the musuem’s artifacts will have great implications for the cultural heritage of “your average mid-western American,” Winter says. She points out that Iraq was home to the ancient city of Ur, the birthplace of the the Biblical patriarch Abraham.

But the significance of Iraq’s ancient civilizations—Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian—extends beyond the Judeo-Christian tradition.

“We are used to talking about the Middle East, but geographically, Iraq is part of western Asia,” Winter says. “Ancient Sumeria was the birthplace of mathematics and astronomy in both Asia and Europe. It was of profound importance to polytheistic cultures to the east, in India. That is why we are talking of a great loss to world culture. It’s not just about Abraham at Ur.”

One loss that Winter mentions is the Sippar library, a collection of Babylonian clay tablets that comprises one of the oldest libraries in the world. Unearthed in the 1980s, the library was still awaiting close study.

“Each one of those tablets is a piece of illumination lost to us,” says Winter.

While many of the museum’s artifacts had yet to be studied, others held canonical status in art history.

Though some of the most prized statues, vases and jewelry have been photographed, scholars lament that images and reproductions cannot compare to the value of the original items.

“Images are a very important avenue to research,” says Rubie Watson, who directs the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology. “But they can never replace the object itself, in terms of the information that is contained in the original, the tiny details that tell you how it was carved, constructed or molded.”

In other words, looking at a picture in a book cannot approximate confronting an object that was created thousands of years ago.

“The museum is a galvanizing place for experience,” she explains. “My Iraqi friends and colleagues consider those objects, including the pre-Islamic ones, as part of their cultural heritage.”

Aware of ancient objects’ national significance, Iraqi governments carefully maintained archeological sites and museums throughout the twentieth century. The National Museum was well supported by former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, who was fond of portraying himself in portraits alongside the ancient King Nebuchadnezzar.