Posted on Monday 14 April 2003

For Iraq's priceless heritage bombing was the least of it's troubles.

Our Heritage Is Finished At the National Museum of Antiquities, where priceless artifacts had been wrapped in foam and secured in windowless storage rooms to protect them against U.S. bombs, an army of looters perpetrated what war did not: They smashed hundreds of irreplaceable treasures, including Sumerian clay pots, Assyrian marble carvings, Babylonian statues and a massive stone tablet with intricate cuneiform writing.

As employees returned today to survey the damage at one of the world's greatest repositories of artifacts, they encountered devastation that defied their worst expectations. The floor was covered with shards of broken pottery. An extensive card catalog of every item the museum owns, some of which date back 5,000 years, was destroyed. A cavernous storeroom housing thousands of unclassified pieces was ransacked so badly that an archaeologist predicted it would be impossible to repair many of the items.

"Our heritage is finished," lamented Nabhal Amin, the museum's deputy director, as she surveyed a Sumerian tablet that had been cracked in two. "Why did they do this? Why? Why?" [More]

Deputy Director Nabhal Amin and her husband walk through the Baghdad museum. "If there were five American soldiers at the door, everything would have been fine," Amin said. Museum workers mourn plunder

The plundering that has descended upon this ancient city has invaded what amounts to the storehouse of civilization's cradle.

Gone from the National Museum of Iraq is an ornate animal-covered cosmetics container from Nimrud. Gone is a finely carved tusk decorated with Assyrian and Syro-Phoenician designs. Gone is the head of an Egyptian sphinx with traces of gold leaf.

All taken by the hordes of marauding thieves who in recent days swept through the museum after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime.

Gone as well, grieving museum workers said Saturday, is a delicate golden bull's head that fronts a harp dating to Sumerian rulers more than 4,000 years ago. The piece had been discovered at the Royal Cemetery at Ur, reputedly the birthplace of Abraham.

Leafing through an old catalog in the trashed storeroom, Mahsin Hassan, a museum official, toted up the losses. "They took gold pieces, small pieces, very important pieces," Hassan said. "They took from all subjects, from prehistory to Islamic history." [More]



Hey, "Stuff happens".

"The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, 'My goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?'"


Well, any way, at least the Ministry of Oil building is safe.

See also:
Looters steal Iraq's heritage
Plundered, relics from the dawn of civilisation