Missing: A Vase, a Book, a Bird and
10,000 Years of History
By Adam Goodheart
28 April, 2003
Carved across smooth alabaster, a row of leafy plants wave above a stylized river. Above that, rams and ewes march two by two, male and female, followed by men in procession. A goddess rules over the scene, accepting tribute with a gracefully raised hand.
These are some images on the Warka Vase, sculpted in ancient Sumer more than 5,000 years ago, excavated in the 1930's and missing last week after the looting of the National Museum of Iraq.
"It is one of the great treasures of world art," said Irene J. Winter, an art history professor at Harvard. "It sings its period of history as a Gothic cathedral sings the history of France in the Middle Ages."
Last week, as archaeologists and art historians struggled to interpret conflicting reports from Baghdad about the fate of Iraq's national treasures, many spoke of particular pieces with regret, anger and even tears. Collectively, they said, the hundreds of thousands of artifacts and texts add up to a repository of world culture that can never be replaced. But it is by considering the objects individually, they noted, that the loss can best be understood.
The Warka Vase, for example, is not only the earliest known depiction of religious worship, it also portrays how the fertility of Mesopotamia gave rise to the first sophisticated cultures. "The vase shows almost a hierarchy from water to plants to animals to people to the goddess," Dr. Winter said.
The few Western scholars who had visited the national museum in recent decades said its holdings were unparalleled. "It contained the full archive of 10,000 years of human history," said John Malcolm Russell, a specialist in Mesopotamian archaeology at the Massachusetts College of Art who visited several times shortly before the 1991 gulf war. "If you wanted to see everything from the first villages in 8,000 B.C. to the Mongol invasion in 1258 A.D., the only place in the world you could get it all, and in incredible depth, was Baghdad."
The ancient civilizations that rose and fell in the region - Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian - each left its mark. But in contrast to Egypt, with its tombs and pyramids, Mesopotamia has seen its architectural monuments, which were built of mud bricks, largely vanish, noted Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "What's left of those cultures is essentially their portable objects: jewelry, sculpture, tablets," he said. "So if a great deal of those are lost, then the proportionate loss is much more."
While some reports indicated that a few of the museum's treasures, like gold and silver jewelry from the royal tombs at Ur, may have been removed for safekeeping in recent months, foreign scholars said that less grandiose objects, which were apparently not safeguarded, were of equal historical importance. For instance, in the tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets reportedly pillaged or destroyed is the Sippar Library, a collection of Babylonian clay tablets unearthed in the 1980's that was the oldest library ever found on its original shelves.
Elizabeth Stone, an archaeologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook who saw the Sippar tablets in the 1980's, said they included previously missing portions of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the world's first major literary work, from the culture that invented writing. Much of that material had still not been deciphered or published, she said.
Other tablets in the museum - letters, inventories, legal documents - spoke of the lives of ordinary people who lived 4,000 years ago. "They give remarkably intimate details, like a letter from a boy to his parents complaining that they don't love him because they have not given him nice enough clothing," Dr. Stone said.
Thousands of paper texts were also destroyed, in the burning of the National Library and other repositories. Jaroslav Stetkevych, an emeritus professor of Arabic at the University of Chicago, said these collections included manuscripts of medieval poems, from courtly odes to lyrical descriptions of the desert. "From the 9th to the 13th centuries, Baghdad was the center of a literary culture that stretched as far as Cordoba," he said. "This was a world that lived in its literature, and of which almost all the physical remains are lost."
Several scholars noted ruefully that the lost artifacts also might have played a role in rebuilding Iraq. Saddam Hussein's regime used archaeological images on banknotes, stamps and propaganda, sometimes depicting the Iraqi president next to the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. But Dr. Stone said that the artifacts could have easily promoted a modern democratic society. "If I were thinking of how to bring together the disparate ethnic and religious groups in Iraq today, ancient Mesopotamia would be the model I'd use," she said. "It had a culture that ranged across many regions from the south to the north, but they all used the same writing system and worshiped the same gods."
Above all, scholars reacted as mourners struggling with an overwhelming loss. In Boston, Dr. Russell fought back tears as he described a sculpture from the museum he had seen in the 1980's: a small carving of a bird, one of the earliest stone sculptures in existence, from around 8,000 B.C. "The archaeologists had found it literally in the hand of its ancient owner, who had been crushed to death when the roof of his burning house fell on him, evidently as he tried to save this piece," he said. "In light of what's happened in the past week, that's very hard to think about right now."
Adam Goodheart writes frequently about history. He is a fellow at Washington College in Chestertown, Md.