“The modern Iraqi nation springs out of the Mesopotamian past,” Beaulieu says. “That heritage is permanent, part of the national fabric. It could also be an aspect of a modern, democratic nation.”
Besides working to identify what objects are missing, academics have proposed policy measures to combat their illegal circulation. These include a temporary moratorium on the trade of Near Eastern antiquities, tight controls at Iraq’s borders and airports, including the right to search and seizure, amnesty for those who return stolen objects and rapid reconstruction of Iraq’s museums and archeological facilities.
Contemplating the challenges that lie ahead, scholars look back with anger at what all agree was a preventable disaster.
Professor of Greek and Latin Richard Thomas was among many who bristled at defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s initial dismissive response to the looting.
“If our leaders are as ignorant of and unconcerned about protecting the cultural heritage of the countries we invade as they seem to be, [judging] from Rumsfeld’s contemptuous and brutish response, then it is precisely the duty of academics to try and point out to them what they have done,” Thomas wrote in an e-mail.
“The artifacts at the museum marked the beginning of what we conventionally call ‘civilization,’” wrote Professor of History of Art and Architecture Jeffrey Hamburger, a specialist in medieval manuscripts. “The bitter irony, of course, is that the war itself was fought in the name of supposedly civilized values.”
Steinkeller, who spent years excavating in Iraq before the first Gulf War, says he is as concerned for the fate of Iraq’s thousands of archeological sites as for the collection of the National Museum.
“It’s a terrible blemish on the United States,” he says. “What happened to the museum presents Americans as barbarians—Atilla the Hun, or the Nazis. Our European colleagues see us as co-conspirators. That’s why we have to do something, and not be silent.”
Steinkeller says he wants a Congressional hearing to assign blame for the looting of Baghdad’s museums and hospitals. He cites numerous treaties that place the responsibility for law and order on the nation’s occupying power. But after a recent meeting with Representative Barney Frank, D-Mass., Steinkeller says he’s pessimistic that such a hearing could take place in the near future.
Still, Winter says she remains confident that relations between people will be able to transcend relations between states.
“They have a saying in Persian: ‘From heart to heart there is a road,’” she says. “You can always find ways to be humane and courteous.”
While scholars anxiously await the outcome of their recovery efforts, students at Harvard have a chance to see artifacts similar to what was lost at the museum. The second floor of the Semitic Museum on Divinity Ave. displays tablets and jewelry from the ancient city of Nuzi. Excavated in a series of Harvard-sponsored expeditions in the late 1920s, the artifacts (which include a set of civil lawsuits inscribed in cuneiform) record the culture of the Nuzi civilization, which fell to its Assyrian and Babylonian neighbors in the thirteenth century B.C.E.
Part of the Nuzi collection legally belongs to the Iraqi government, and that part was mostly repatriated in the 1980’s.
—Staff writer Lindsey McCormack can be reached at lmccorm@fas.harvard.edu.