Iraq's cultural institutions--and the world's cultural heritage--suffered irreparable blows in the disorder that followed Operation Iraqi Freedom in March-April 2003. Libraries and museums in Baghdad and other cities, including Iraq's National Museum, were looted and/or burned.

The Iraq Museum was founded with the nation-state in the early 1920s. It housed a half million artifacts documenting Mesopotamia's past, from prehistoric to recent Islamic eras. The Museum closed with the first Gulf War (1991) and had only re-opened in April 2000. Then on April 11, 2003, initial news reports indicated that 170,000 artifacts had disappeared in forty-eight hours of looting. Photographs and video showed storerooms in shambles and galleries littered with broken vitrines and overturned statues.   The devastation appeared total.

Almost two years after the looting we know initial reports were exaggerated. Much of the Museum's collection had been moved to secure storage before hostilities began. Some of those pieces, including a gold battle helmet and a bull's head of a lyre from the Royal Cemetery of Ur (ca. 2500 BCE), were in the vaults of Iraq's central bank. More than 4,000 artifacts carried off from the Museum's galleries, laboratories and storerooms have now been returned, including a famous limestone vase found at the site of Warka (ancient Uruk), and dating to ca. 3300 BCE, when cities and states, as well as writing, first emerged in the "cradle of civilization."

Even so, 10,000-15,000 objects are still missing, including a diorite statue of Entemena, one of the Iraq Museum's first accessions, and almost 5,000 cylinder seals.   Other artifacts that were seemingly safe such as Neo-Assyrian ivories from the Nimrud (Calah) were severely damaged when the central bank's vault was flooded by sewage-contaminated water during the fighting. The ivories will need extensive conservation, and it will take years and millions of dollars to restore the Museum.

THE DESTRUCTION OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES

The destruction of archaeological sites in what is today Iraq is not a new problem. Mesopotamia's ancient inhabitants routinely dug in ruins for building materials, as well as for phosphate-rich soils for fertilizer. But the looting of sites for antiquities was a by-product of archaeological explorations in the mid-19 th century as local people learned that archaeologists would pay for seemingly worthless fragments. Looting was particularly severe in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, when the British Museum and the Louvre acquired the hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets that today constitute the core of their collections.

While looting of archaeological sites was contained under Iraq's strict antiquities laws, the situation changed after the first Gulf War. As Baghdad's control weakened and the economic impact of U.N. sanctions increased, local people began to loot sites wholesale. The State Organization of Antiquities and Heritage struggled to secure sites, in some cases by starting excavations at more isolated sites like Umm al-Akarib and Jokha in the southeast. But the situation deteriorated and the looting intensified in the chaos that followed Operation Iraqi Freedom. As recent fact-finding surveys have documented, few sites today remain untouched and the surfaces of some are pockmarked by looters' holes.

Antiquities ripped from archaeological sites will be dispersed around the world, valued by collectors as objects of art. But looting destroys any knowledge of where artifacts come from, as well as the association they had with other artifacts in the ground. Context and association are keys that archaeologists use in determining how artifacts functioned and in reconstructing past behavior. If an artifact is ripped from the ground, we will never know whether it was found in a house where it was originally used, or a trash dump where it was discarded, or a burial.   Each of those contexts would likely provide archaeologists with different kinds of information about ancient Mesopotamia.


ON THE RECOVERY OF ANTIQUITIES AND THE FUTURE

The illicit trade in art and cultural artifacts is a major, growing category of crime, not just from Iraq but internationally. In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has stepped up its efforts in a number of ways.

The FBI's Art Crime Team was recently established as a result of the specialized knowledge required for art theft investigation.   The team had training in Philadelphia, including with archaeologists and staff at this Museum in January 2005. Each team member is responsible for addressing art and cultural property crime investigations in an assigned geographic region.

The Philadelphia Connection
The Art Crime Team's senior investigator, Special Agent Robert Wittman, is assigned in Philadelphia. Art theft cases investigated by the Philadelphia Division have resulted in the recovery of more than $100 million in art and cultural property.

A Success to Build On: Recovery of Ancient Cylinder Seals
In 2003, the Federal Bureau of Investigation became a member of Interpol's Tracking Task Force to Fight the Illicit Trafficking in Cultural Property Stolen in Iraq and the Department of State Cultural Antiquities Task Force established to address the issue of looting.

In January 2005, eight cylinder seals were recovered in Philadelphia as a result of information that was shared between task force members.   A U.S. soldier, serving in Iraq, purchased the seals from a vendor selling trinkets.   When the soldier returned to the U.S., he had the seals evaluated by a university archaeologist, who verified their authenticity and that they are part of the ancient cultural heritage of the country of Iraq.   Upon being advised of this, the soldier immediately agreed to turn them in to the FBI for return to the proper authorities in Iraq.

This was the first recovery by the FBI in the United States of looted cultural property from Iraq.

What are cylinder seals?

Seals appeared in the ancient Near East in the late 7 th millennium BCE. Small pieces of stone, with geometric or naturalistic designs incised on one side, were pressed into clay used to secure doors, bags, baskets and boxes.    The seals identified the owner and restricted access to the contents.

By 3500 BCE, as new accounting technologies emerged in an increasingly complex economy, cylinder seals replaced stamp seals. Their designs, carved around the circumference, appeared as a seamless frieze rolled over a large area. Seals continued to be impressed on clay securing doors and containers.   They were also rolled on lumps of clay (bullae), with small clay tokens recording commodities distributed or received, and eventually on clay tablets with numbers and pictographs, the forerunners of cuneiform signs.   By the mid-3 rd millennium inscriptions carved on seals also provided specific details about the seal owner.

The choice of stones for making seals varied over time, as access to raw materials fluctuated; the designs also changed. For example, contest scenes featuring humans, animals and hybrids, as well as banquet scenes, were common in the Early Dynastic Royal Cemetery of Ur (ca. 2500 BCE).