This editorial first appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Tuesday, June 17, 2003. Previous editorials have been archived with links listed on the right, in the blue box.

Thieves of History
Looting of Iraq's Cultural Heritage is a Real Calamity
By Richard L. Zettler

More than two months ago, news of the looting of Iraq's National Museum first broke. We now know that initial reports of the losses were dramatically exaggerated.

Also exaggerated, however, have been the counterclaims that, in fact, only minor losses occurred. True, the story continues to evolve. But this much is clear: The looting of the museum was real, and the losses to Iraq's cultural heritage, if not total, were nevertheless staggering.

Let's look back briefly at the news on the looting as it unfolded. Donny George of Iraq's State Board of Antiquities, angry at what had happened to the museum, may have said that 170,000 artifacts had been stolen (or, as he now claims, that the Museum had 170,000 registered artifacts). Seeing the apparent disorder and destruction in storerooms and offices, reporters had little reason to doubt that the museum had nearly been emptied over three days in mid-April.

When stories first appeared, archaeologists, historians and language specialists reacted viscerally, some blaming the U.S. military for failing to secure the museum (and other cultural institutions). Some compared the damage to the burning of the library in Alexandria or the destruction the Mongols inflicted on Baghdad in 1258. Others embellished reports based largely on rumors.

By the time he arrived in London for a British Museum/UNESCO roundtable discussion on April 29, George gave a more temperate picture of the losses. Since then, Iraqi authorities, working with American officials such as Col. Matthew Bogdanos, have been trying to tally the number of missing artifacts. American, British and European specialists have provided independent accounts of what happened in the museum.

Unfortunately, recent news articles, commentaries, and television documentaries have seized on erroneous initial reports and downplayed the damage to the Iraq National Museum. Some have accused Iraqi antiquities officials of propagating disinformation, and attacked "gullible" supposedly overreacting academics by name. In truth, we all deserve the criticism.

But such articles swing too far in the opposite direction. The destruction should not be understated or trivialized. We now know much of the museum's collection had been moved to off-site storage before the war. Unique treasures like gold artifacts from the tombs of Assyrian queens at Nimrud, discovered in the late 1980s, were in the basement vaults of the central bank and were found safe earlier this month.

Thirty or 40 of the larger and heavier objects left in the museum's galleries or work spaces were stolen and others damaged. (Visit Interpol's website for a list of these artifacts.) Some have now been returned, including the Warka vase, a relief-carved monument dating to around 3300 B.C., when Mesopotamia's first cities appeared. It was brought back to the museum in the trunk of a car last week.

But other equally important artifacts remain missing. The theft of any one of these is comparable, as one colleague aptly noted, to the disappearance of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre.

Besides roaming the galleries and work spaces, the looters entered the museum's storerooms and took thousands more artifacts. Nawala Mutawalli, director of the Iraq Museum, recently estimated the number at 12,000. The simple fact is that we will not know what was taken or the exact number of artifacts missing until a systematic inventory can be completed. It may take months, if not years. By good fortune, the museum's records - initially assumed destroyed in the ransacking of its offices - are apparently intact.

All of us in the field will be happy if all the missing artifacts are returned safely, and the museum reopened. But the dispersal of even a fraction of the museum's collections represents an incalculable loss to Iraq's cultural heritage and the world's.

Nor can we breathe a sigh of relief. As I write, large-scale, illicit excavations are destroying precious archaeological sites throughout Iraq (see endnote). The losses suffered by the museum may pale by comparison to the damage the diggers are wreaking. But that story is for the next chapter.

ENDNOTE: For more information on the looting of Iraqi archaeological sites, visit National Geographic's website.