Stolen Iraqi Artefacts
Looting of artifacts from countries at war and under colonial rule isn’t anything new but the sheer number of things removed from Iraq, especially during the Iraq War is not to be believed. Who let this happen and where are the artifacts now?
Iraqi Museums and Cultural Sites
Full disclosure I had to look into the history of this so that I could give the proper context. When Saddam Hussein became president in 1979 he actually poured a lot of money into protecting national artefacts, culturally significant sites, and objects. He doubled the budget for archaeology and heritage creating new museums and sites across the country. In the 1990s when he was facing increased pressure looting became a big problem again (the first time was from the mid-1920s to the 1970s when Hussein cracked down). By 2000 looting was so rampant that some employees at museums and heritage locations were even looting their own workplaces and selling their takings on the black market.
Before the start of the Iraq War, in 2003, the US decided on a fast invasion with few troops which meant leaving the museums and cultural sites open and vulnerable to looting. They knew this was going to happen and didn’t prevent it. Since peacekeeping was not prioritised as highly as physically fighting in combat there was no security provided to these sites around Iraq.
During the pre-war planning period, there was no consideration given to the preservation of culture whatsoever. Arthur Houghton who worked in the State Department as a Foreign Service officer, as an international policy analyst for the White House and also served as an acting curator for the Getty Museum wondered what was being done to plan for cultural preservation and protection in Iraq. He ended up poking around and found that no one had been designated the task. There had even been a secret project called Future of Iraq since 2001 that had clearance from the Pentagon but even under that no one had taken up or been assigned the responsibility of culture. Not only was it not prioritized but to add insult to injury after the Gulf War in the 1990s UNESCO tried to go into Iraq to assess the damage and provide help but they weren’t allowed to come in so they just had to focus on reconstruction as opposed to prevention.
It’s estimated that over the course of the Iraq war over 20,000 artefacts were looted and smuggled out of the country to be sold to collectors or museums around the world.
So What Now?
Well for a long time, until this year to be exact, nothing was really done. No one official was looking for any of these stolen and precious artifacts and even museums that had them on display weren’t really being pressured to give them back. Since 2003 experts have noticed a sharp uptick of Mesopotamian artifacts on online stores like eBay or Live Auctioneers (a similar site). Not all of the items for sale on these websites are necessarily authentic stolen goods but it’s likely that a lot of them are. “On the website Live Auctioneers, you can find a stone bull for $50, a clay cylinder seal for $150, a terracotta fragment bearing a god on a chariot for $225, and a large terracotta female idol for $400. On another auction site, Trocadero, a lion-shaped stone amulet is on offer for $250” (Samuel, 2018). It was easy and honestly relatively cheap to get your hands on a potential antiquity. Alarmingly archaeologists say that the cheap price doesn’t necessarily mean that these items are fake, more likely they’re stolen and the owners want to get rid of them because they don’t have the proper documentation.
That hasn’t really changed but in July 2021 the Iraqi prime minister made a visit to the US and on his way back the plane was full of crates containing 17,000 stolen Iraqi artifacts. They were returned by The Museum of the Bible founded by the same people who founded Hobby Lobby, fun fact, and Cornell University. It was the “largest ever repatriation of looted Iraqi antiquities” (Arraf, 2021).
““This is not just about thousands of tablets coming back to Iraq again — it is about the Iraqi people,” Hassan Nadhem, the Iraqi minister of culture, tourism and antiquities, said in a telephone interview. “It restores not just the tablets, but the confidence of the Iraqi people by enhancing and supporting the Iraqi identity in these difficult times”” (Arraf, 2021). This is a huge step and a victory definitely but there are still artifacts out there that people are looking for.
In terms of the two institutions that were holding these artifacts the first is The Museum of the Bible. It’s only four years old and founded by the Hobby Lobby family, as mentioned, who are Evangelical Christians. They wanted to add a lot of ancient Mesopotamian artifacts to their museum to provide context for the Old Testament. What’s interesting is four years ago, when the museum opened the US Department of Justice fined Hobby Lobby $3 million for not exercising its due diligence when acquiring more than 5,000 artifacts. Some of those same artifacts were returned to Iraq this year.
The other institution that returned over 5,000 artifacts is Cornell University. In 2000 an unnamed American collector donated those artifacts to the university claiming them to be from the previously unknown Sumerian city of Garsana. Partly because the city was unknown it had long been suspected that these donated artifacts had come from a looted archaeological site in southern Iraq.
What is Being Returned?
Mostly what is being returned are clay tablets and seals. Many of these are from Irisagrig, a lost ancient city. In fact, the city’s existence didn’t even become widely known until some ancient tablets which mention it were seized at the Jordanian border in 2003. It took a smuggling attempt to even draw attention to all of these other things that were in the States or online already and identify them as Iraqi.
There is still at least one very significant piece, that we know of, that still hasn’t been returned to Iraq. It is a clay tablet that is roughly 3,500 years old inscribed with a fragment of the Gilgamesh, an ancient saga, which predates the Old Testament by centuries. It was purchased by Hobby Lobby to display in The Museum of the Bible but US federal prosecutors are demanding its return to Iraq. The company bought it for $1.2 million in 2014 from an unnamed auction house which allegedly obscured its providence. The government is now saying that it is stolen Iraqi property and must be returned. In 2019 the Justice Department seized the tablet and it has been sitting in a warehouse in Brooklyn ever since, waiting to be sent back home. Why it didn’t go with all these other artifacts I don’t know.
This is definitely a step in the right direction but you can still go online and find tons of ancient Mesopotamian artifacts for sale and you have no real way of knowing if you’re buying something legit, something real but stolen, or a fake. “Some archaeologists estimate up to 80% of antiquities for sale on Facebook or eBay lack documentation and are likely fake or stolen” (Arraf, 2020). Maybe don’t buy ancient artefacts from Facebook, that’s your first clue. Hopefully this will start some positive change and we will see a lot more repatriation in the near future. Probably best to stick to enjoying artefacts in museums in the countries that they come from.
Works Cited
Arraf, Jane. “In Iraq Authorities Continue to Fight Uphill Battle Against Antiquities Plunder”. NPR. 2020. https://www.npr.org/2020/08/20/886540260/in-iraq-authorities-continue-to-fight-uphill-battle-against-antiquities-plunder
Arraf, Jane. “Iraq Reclaims 17,000 Looted Artifacts, Its Biggest-Ever Repatriation”. The New York Times. 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/03/world/middleeast/iraq-looted-artifacts-return.html
Samuel, Sigal. “It’s Disturbingly Easy to Buy Iraq’s Archaeological Treasures”. The Atlantic. 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/03/iraq-war-archeology-invasion/555200/