The nature of archaeological research is shaped to a significant degree by the roles that particular nation states play, economically, politically, and culturally, as interdependent parts of the modern worldsystem.
—Bruce Trigger1
Over the three decades since UNESCO 1970, the organization has adopted four additional conventions that bear on cultural property, including antiquities. In 1972, UNESCO passed the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. This developed from the merging of two separate movements: the preservation of cultural sites and the conservation of nature. The event that caused particular international concern was the Egyptian government’s decision to build the Aswan Dam, which would have flooded a valley containing numerous self-declared treasures of “Egyptian civilization.” In 1959, following an appeal from the governments of Egypt and Sudan, UNESCO launched an international public awareness campaign, which ultimately resulted in accelerated archaeological research in the area and the dismantling and relocation of certain, important monuments. It also joined forces with the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) to prepare the Convention that was finalized more than a decade later.2
By signing this convention, “each country pledges to conserve not only the World Heritage sites situated on its territory, but also to protect its natural heritage.” the states Parties to the convention are “encouraged to integrate the protection of the cultural and natural heritage into regional planning programmes, set up staff and services at their sites, undertake scientific and technical conservation research and adopt measures which give this heritage a function in the day-today life of the community.” as with UNesco 1970, the convention concerning the Protection of the World cultural and Natural Heritage pays lip service to the international value of our cultural heritage—“considering that deterioration or disappearance of any item of the cultural or natural heritage constitutes a harmful impoverishment of the heritage of all nations of the world”—while acknowledging the importance of nations in interpreting and enforcing the convention: natural and cultural heritage is important to the world but belongs to specific peoples (i.e., nations).
The purpose of the Convention is to encourage the establishment of an inventory of endangered sites, galvanize financial support for the protection of designated sites, and establish a fund for said purpose, funded by individuals, private and public foundations, and nation-states. the convention has no means to prevent destruction of our cultural or natural heritage. it can only raise our awareness of what’s at risk. as i write, some 890 properties—689 cultural, 176 natural, and 25 mixed properties—have been designated World Heritage sites in 138 states Parties (the U.s. ratified the convention in 1973 and has twenty sites on the heritage list, thirteen of which are natural—national parks—and seven of which are cultural, including the statue of liberty). the convention was renewed in 2006, ratified by 182 states Parties. once again, it is only an awareness-raising convention: it cannot prevent destruction of either national or cultural properties.
In 2001, UNESCO adopted a convention on the Protection of the Underwater cultural Heritage, aimed at protecting “buried treasure” that can provide important information about “life on board of ships, boat construction and trade routes,” an example of which was the cache of rubies, sapphires, glass ornaments with arabic inscriptions, and hundreds of thousands of Chinese Yue and Northern white wares found by fishermen off Cirebon on the north Java coast in 2000. The cache had been part of the cargo of a ship traveling from the Hindu Sriwijaya kingdom in Sumatra to eastern Java, then an emerging Hindu-Buddhist kingdom. The objects with Arabic inscriptions suggested that area may have had contact with the Muslim lands, possibly Syria, two centuries earlier than previously thought. Historians and archaeologists were thrilled by the discovery and wanted the cache to be kept together. “A shipwreck is a snapshot in time,” a maritime historian at the University of Singapore said. “The precise nature of the cargo, the mix of commodities, would give us vital insights into the nature of commerce at this period.” And a maritime archaeologist noted that the ship itself (with still more objects) was still under water and may contain important information about why the Chinese supplied the cargoes for foreign ships but didn’t themselves engage in shipping. But the Indonesian government thought differently of the material’s value. They were willing to keep 10 percent of the cache, but planned to auction off the rest. “It has more economic value than historical value, there is no need to take it for our heritage museums,” declared Aji Sularso, a spokesman for the Indonesian Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Ministry in 2006. “The government’s strategy is to choose the auction house that offers the highest price.”3
In this instance, the government of Indonesia chose to exercise its soverign rights over the material found in its territorial waters. This is of course possible within the terms of UNESCO 2001, even if the Convention’s intentions are to protect such material together for further study. It acknowledges, for example, “the importance of underwater cultural heritage as an integral part of the cultural heritage of humanity and a particularly important element in the history of peoples, nations, and their relations with each other concerning their common heritage.” But it also recognizes, even asserts, the rights of individual nation-states: “Nothing in this Convention shall prejudice the rights, jurisdiction and duties of States under international law” (Article 3), and “State Parties, in the exercise of their sovereignty, have the exclusive right to regulate and authorize activities directed at underwater cultural heritage in their internal waters, archipelagic waters and territorial sea” (article 7). and, like other conventions, it allows for states Parties to denounce it by written notification addressed to the Director-General (article 32).4 Despite the best efforts of historians and archaeologists, in the end UNesco 2001 offers them no protection. to date, only thirty nation-states have ratified the convention: neither the United states, nor Greece, turkey, egypt, india, Japan, or china has signed or ratified it.
In 2003, UNESCO adopted the convention for the safeguarding of the intangible cultural Heritage, by which it means “the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills—as well as instruments, objects, artifacts and cultural spaces associated therewith— that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage” (article 2). central to the convention is the principle that important intangible cultural property is ultimately determined not by nations but by communities, groups and, in some cases, even individuals, and is said to provide them with a sense of identity and continuity with their (non-national) culture. Nevertheless, it recognizes that states Parties enforce conventions and therefore must have an authoritative role in its application. article 11 obliges states Parties to work with communities, groups, and relevant nongovernmental organizations to identify and define “the various elements of the intangible cultural heritage present in its territory” and regularly update them and submit them to the intergovernmental committee for the safeguarding of the intangible cultural Heritage (comprising representatives from eighteen states Parties to the convention, elected by the conventions General assembly) (article 12). states Parties are then obliged to adopt a general policy aimed at promoting the function of the intangible cultural heritage in society, establish ways of safeguarding it, and ensure access to it while respecting customary practices governing such access (article 13).5
This is all a tricky business and difficult for political bureaucracies to manage. there has to be agreement on what is and what is not legitimate intangible heritage and on what basis a national government might recognize and protect one or another community’s self-proclaimed cultural heritage. What happens when such communities are distributed across national borders? can one imagine turkey, iran, and iraq agreeing on a common policy with regard to the Kurdish populations in their countries? to date 118 nations have signed on to the convention; no influential european nation has signed, nor has the United states; iran and turkey have signed, but not iraq. tensions between communities and cultures and host nations are just too great to be resolved by such conventions, however well meaning they may be. No convention alone can resolve disputed claims of political rights for communities under the jurisdiction of national governments.
Finally, in 2005, UNesco adopted the convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of cultural expressions. it acknowledges that cultural diversity forms a common heritage of humanity and should be cherished and preserved for the benefit of everyone, that it is embodied in the uniqueness and plurality of the identities and cultural expressions of peoples and societies, and that it is nurtured by constant exchanges and interactions between cultures. it reaffirms “the sovereign rights of states to maintain, adopt and implement policies and measures that they deem appropriate for the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions on their territory” and encourages states Parties “to structure administrative ways to encourage and protect cultural diversity within their territories, promote international cooperation, and resolve disputes by negotiation.” this is no easier than resolving other kinds of disputed claims deriving from matters of non-national cultural identity. one hundred and eight nations have signed on the convention, but not the United states, china, Japan, or any european nation, nor turkey, iran, or iraq. and even those who signed, by terms of the convention, can denounce and withdraw from it.6
While UNesco was drafting and adopting these conventions, the international institute for the Unification of Private laws (UNiDroit)—an independent, intergovernmental organization for the study of “needs and methods for modernising, harmonising and coordinating private, and in particular, commercial law between states and groups of states”—offered up a new international convention aimed at strengthening efforts to protect cultural property by restricting its movement across national borders. The Convention on the International Return of Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects (UNIDROIT 1995), as it was called, was adopted at a Conference in Rome in June 1995.7 Seventy nations participated, including Italy, the People’s Republic of China, and the United States, with an additional eight nations observing. The Convention is in many respects similar to UNESCO 1970, but its emphasis is on the return of stolen or illegally exported cultural objects rather than the prevention of the “illicit import, export and transfer of ownership” of cultural property, and it extends its concerns beyond national interests to those of tribal, indigenous, or other communities. As with Hague 1954 and UNESCO 1970, the Convention may be denounced by any State Party by “the deposit of an instrument to that effect” (i.e., a letter). Or it can simply be ignored. UNIDROIT 1995 includes works of art of all kinds from all periods, from antiquities to the modern era and contemporary moment. Its brief was inclusive and pervasive, its reach personal, and its likely success minimal. To date, sixty nations have signed on as members of UNIDROIT, which allows them to participate in discussions about the scope and authority of its convention.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to see these many conventions as a bouillabaisse of good intentions and bureaucratic ambitions, all of which are, in the end, unenforceable, except insofar as the States Parties themselves have imposed internal laws and sanctions governing the activities addressed by the Conventions. But they are an important indication of the international climate of political opinion as it pertains to cultural property (including antiquities) and the extent to which such property should be considered the common heritage of humankind or the local heritage of a modern nation or a people who identify themselves independently of or in opposition to a particular, legal nationality. Clearly, the claims on cultural property are getting more and more expansively defined—more and more is claimed as heritage: tangible and intangible cultural heritage, cultural heritage buried in the ground or under water, and antiquities and ancient monuments and archaeological sites—and, despite all of the rhetoric of “the common inheritance of all peoples,” more and more of it is being governed by narrower and narrower jurisdictions. The purpose of these conventions is to authorize retention of cultural heritage by those who claim it and have the means of enforcing it. It is clear in the language of the three key conventions: Hague 1954 was concerned with protecting cultural property in times of war for the benefit of all the world; UNESCO 1970 with preventing the illicit transfer of cultural property between nations (for the benefit of individual nations and, thus, of all the world); and UNIDROIT 1995 was concerned with returning cultural property to nations for the benefit of those nations and in “the interest of all.” The trajectory of retention is tightening: from protection to prevention to return.
Two years after UNIDROIT 1995, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights published a report on the Protection of the Heritage of Indigenous People.8 The Report’s language extends the purview of international conventions, with regard to the material covered, almost indefinitely: As stated in the preface: ‘Heritage’ is everything that belongs to the distinct identity of a people and which is theirs to share, if they wish, with other peoples. It includes all of those things which contemporary international law regards as the creative production of human thought and craftsmanship, such as songs, music, dances, literature, artworks, scientific research and knowledge. It also includes inheritance from the past and from nature, such as human remains, the natural features of the landscape, and naturally occurring species of plants and animals with which a people has long been connected.” And it is not just that “heritage” is virtually everything and anything a people claims it to be, but “all of the aspects of heritage are interrelated and cannot be separated from the traditional territory of the people concerned. What tangible and intangible items constitute the heritage of a particular indigenous people must be decided by the people themselves.”
Earlier, international Conventions assigned ownership of cultural property—however much they may have paid lip service to its international value—to national governments. The Protection of the Heritage of Indigenous People vests ownership of “their” heritage in “Indigenous peoples [who] are the true collective owners of their works, arts and ideas, and no alienation of these elements of their heritage should be recognized by national or international law, unless made in conformity with the indigenous peoples’ own traditional laws and customs and with the approval of their own local institutions.” Who defines the culture of indigenous peoples, which are now the equal of nations with regard to declared cultural property? Indigenous peoples do. It is what they say it is, and it is inevitably part and parcel of their territory (when alienated from their territory, it should be repatriated to their territory and to them). They are one with their cultural property and their territory: “Indigenous peoples regard all products of the human mind and heart as interrelated, and as flowing from the same source: the relationships between the people and their land, and with the spirit world . . . and can be considered as manifestations of the people as a whole.”
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as archaeologists and indigenous peoples increasingly disagreed over the purpose and value of archaeological material, archaeologists reflected on the politics and ideological underpinnings of their discipline. As one author put it: “Since the 1980s there has been a growing acknowledgment in the Western discipline of archaeology that what we do as archaeologists is ‘political,’ and has significance beyond the accumulation of abstract knowledge about the past.”9 This acknowledgment grew in great part out of the reality of archaeological work—or Cultural Resource Management, by which is meant the scientific, legal, and political apparatus that allows and manages the practice of archaeology in a given political context—and out of a reflection on the theoretical underpinnings of the academic discipline of archaeology, especially in the Anglophone world. It was informed also by the acknowledgment that archaeology, “as a privileged form of expertise, occupies a role in the governance and regulation of identity” (with regard to both indigenous peoples and nations, especially those carved out of former empires or given their independence during the twentieth century).10
This reevaluation of archaeology during the 1980s took the form of a critique of the processual theory of archaeology, which was dominant in the 1960s and 1970s. It embraced logical positivism as its guiding principle and positioned archaeology as a politically neutral, scientific enterprise. Where indigenous peoples (or nations) saw archaeological artifacts as cultural heritage of special relevance central to their identity, processual archaeologists saw such artifacts as scientific data of special relevance to a universalizing database for the understanding of human behavior generally. Coming along in the 1980s, postprocessual theory criticized processual theory for its failures to understand the construction and political applications of knowledge. Influenced in part by the writings of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, postprocessual theory argued that intellectual knowledge and thought (like archaeology) is necessarily incorporated into the act of governing populations and social problems by subjecting them to analysis and becoming tools in the processes of government and administration.11 On these terms, archaeology is practiced only through a regime of regulations and it seeks to influence that regime for its own purposes.
Postprocessual theory saw the interests of archaeology as influential over government policy, guidelines, and laws governing material and cultural heritage. The result, as one author has written, was “that the archaeological discourse which stresses objectivity, rigour and politically neutral interpretations of the past was readily embedded into bureaucracies and state institutions, and helped to ‘de-politicize’ heritage issues. It also ensured the priority of archaeological access to sites over public and Indigenous peoples’ access through the authority invoked by the use of archaeological scientific discourse.” As another author has written, the U.S. heritage legislation at this time protected sites and places from everyone except archaeologists.12
National governments regulate archaeologists working within their jurisdiction. They grant excavation permits, which determine which archaeological sites—whose ancient past—are valued by governments as important to the nation. They sometimes contribute funding and management to approved archaeological sites. They set quotas for employing local people. And they mandate what, if anything, can be removed from archaeological sites and taken back to the host institutions of participating foreign archaeologists (typically foreign universities or museums). As these regulations are in the service of the state, they inevitably have a nationalist agenda.13
Take Iraq, for example. In response to Kuwait’s complaints that invading Iraqi forces had removed items from Kuwait museums to Baghdad, Iraqi authorities in 1990 insisted that they were storing the items to protect the totality of the cultural heritage of Iraq, “including that of its Province of Kuwait.” The U.N. Security Council replied by passing a resolution requesting Iraq to return to Kuwait items exported from that country. In September and October 1991, following the cessation of hostilities and the withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Kuwait, many of the objects were returned.
The Iraq Museum in Baghdad was closed during the First Iraq War, and remained so for another ten years. It reopened only in the summer of 2000. Some of the objects on display had been looted from archaeological sites (active and inactive, some at the time unknown to archaeologists) and dispersed during the chaos of the years of warfare with Kuwait, the U.S. forces, and Iran. As Archaeology magazine reported:
New to the museum are many pieces recovered from looted sites or recent excavations in Iraq. Following the Gulf War thousands of objects were stolen from provincial museums, particularly in the north and south of the country, and smuggled abroad. Iraqi officials have managed to regain at least some of the smuggled artifacts. In April, Rabi’ al-Qaisi, director of the museum’s Iraqi Antiquities Department, announced that he had retrieved statues and engraved jars from Switzerland.14
The magazine also reported that funds for archaeological research remained limited in Iraq. This had not always been the case, however. During much of the previous four decades, ever since the rise of the Ba’thist Party in 1968, archaeology had been richly supported by the Iraqi government. The first four budget years of the 1970s saw government support for archaeology in Iraq rise by 81 percent, while the cost of living rose only 35 percent. And with the boom in oil revenues beginning in 1974 and the rise to power of Saddam Hussein in 1979, support for archaeology and archaeological museums increased even more.15
Saddam’s interest in archaeology was overtly political. In a speech to a convention of Iraqi archaeologists in 1979, he declared that “Antiques are the most precious relics the Iraqis possess, showing the world that our country, which today is undergoing an extraordinary renaissance, is the [legitimate] offspring of previous civilizations which offered up a great contribution to humanity.”16 A local journalist at the time wrote that archaeology was valued for its role in “Uncovering . . . the civilizations of the ancient forefathers . . . which is the material aspect of the culture of our [Iraqi] people and homeland . . . raising the cultural level of our toiling masses by making them familiar with our forefathers’ culture which underlies our [modern] culture.”17 Such statements were common at the time and illustrate the extent to which archaeology was valued in Iraq for how it could be used by the ruling Ba’thist Party to support its claim for national greatness and ultimately, as we will see, for political primacy within the region.
The history of archaeology in Iraq has always been closely linked to the cultural and political ambitions of its governing authorities. During the late Ottoman period, Iraqi archaeology was dominated by teams of Europeans and North American excavators working on pre-Islamic sites at Babylon, Khorsabad, and Nippur.18 They had been drawn to the area intent on confirming the historical existence of Biblical events and places and with the view that the ancient history of what they called Mesopotamia was in fact part of the West’s subsequent Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian history. The term Mesopotamia itself was a classical Greek term used by Westerners to mark the lands known locally since the advent of Islam as al-‘Iraq in the north and al-Jazira in the south. Its use by early Orientalists has been interpreted politically as a “reconstructive act severing ‘Mesopotamia’ from any geographical terrain in order to weave it into the Western historical narrative”: Mesopotamia as a pre-Islamic source for Western culture; Iraq as an Islamic, geographically determined— and thus limited—construction.19
Under the British Mandate, from 1921 to 1932, archaeology in Iraq was dominated by British teams—including the British Museum working with the University of Pennsylvania at Ur, the fabled home not only of Sumerian kings but of the Biblical Abraham—and regulated by British authorities.20 The Oxford-educated, English woman Gertrude Bell, who had worked for British Intelligence in the Arab Bureau in Cairo, was appointed honorary Director of Antiquities in Iraq by the British-installed King Faysal in 1922.21 A most able administrator, having served as the Oriental secretary to the High Commission in Iraq after the war, Bell was responsible for approving applications for archaeologists, and thus for determining where in Iraq excavators would work. She was also a major force behind the wording and passage of the 1924 law regulating excavations in Iraq, a result of which was the founding of the Iraq Museum and the legitimatization of partage:
Article 22: At the close of excavations, the Director shall choose such objects from among those found as are in his opinion needed for scientific completeness of the Iraq Museum. After separating these objects, the Director will assign [to the excavator] . . . such objects as will reward him adequately aiming as far as possible at giving such a person a representative share of the whole result of excavations made by him.
Article 24: Any antiquities received by a person as his share of the proceeds of excavations under the preceding article may be exported by him and he shall be given an export permit free of charge in respect thereof.22
The Department of Antiquities was placed within the Ministry of Public Works, as it had been under the Ottomans. One of Bell’s key opponents, the nationalist Sat’i al-Husri, argued that the Department should instead be within the Ministry of Education. Born and educated in Constantinople, a son of an Ottoman official, al-Husri taught natural science in a town in the Macedonian region of Kosova near the Bulgarian border.23 In 1908, he returned to Constantinople to direct a teacher’s college. In 1919, he was appointed Director-General of Education in Syria, and then soon Minister of Education. He grew close to King Faysal, who was elected King of Syria in 1920 but was soon ousted by the French. Over the course of the next year, he traveled with Faysal in Europe before settling in Cairo. When the British established a constitutional monarchy in Iraq with Faysal as king, al-Husri joined his patron in Baghdad. By then he had become a committed Arab nationalist and, as Director-General of Education, he worked to establish a school curriculum emphasizing the Islamic, Arab—post-Mesopotamian—history of the region. It was in this respect that he opposed the work of Gertrude Bell and argued to gain control of the Department of Antiquities and the Iraq Museum.
Gertrude Bell died in 1926, the year in which the Iraq Museum was founded, and was succeeded as Director of Antiquities by a number of British (and one German) administrators. Al-Husri resigned his director-generalship in the Ministry of Education that same year and taught in the Teacher’s College until he was appointed Inspector General of Education in 1931, a position he kept for only a few months before becoming dean of the Law School. Finally, in 1934, eight years after Bell’s death, he was appointed Director of Antiquities. In this capacity, he tightened local control over archaeological excavations. A new law was drafted allowing only those objects that are “duplicate; i.e., objects of the same kind and type and of the same historic value” to be allocated to the excavator “only by special permit.”24 Foreign archaeologists objected and the British embassy in Baghdad wrote to the Iraqi Minister of Foreign Affairs, pointing out that the new laws would discourage foreign archaeologists and cause them to pull out of Iraq—“foreign archaeological expeditions besides drawing attention to Iraq and thus adding to her prestige, bring a considerable amount of money into the country.”25 Leonard Woolley, leader of the British Museum/University of Pennsylvania excavations at Ur, wrote a letter to the editor of the London Times: “Twelve years of foreign excavations have given to Baghdad one of the most important museums in the world for the study of Near Eastern antiquities and that because of, not in spite of, permission given to excavators to remove objects which were sometimes unique as well as precious.”26
Two years later, in response to these protests, new legislation was passed:
All antiquities found by excavators shall be the property of the government. Nevertheless, as a reward for his labors the excavator shall be given (firstly) the right to make castings of antiquities found by him, (secondly) half of the duplicate antiquities, and (thirdly) certain antiquities already in the possession of the Iraq Government or included among the articles discovered by an archaeological expedition which the Iraq government can dispense with in view of the existence in the Iraq Museum of other articles sufficiently similar in respect to kind, type, material, workmanship, historical significance and artistic value.27
At the same time, with al-Husri’s encouragement, the Museum of Arab Antiquities was founded, the Iraq Museum was limited to pre-Islamic antiquities, excavations of Ummayad and Abbasid sites were sponsored, and the government sought the repatriation of antiquities from the Islamic site of Samarra taken to British and German museums by earlier, foreign archaeologists.28
Al-Husri was forced to leave Iraq when he sided with the pro-German al-Gaylani coup d’etat at the outbreak of World War II. For the next six years, he worked in Aleppo, Beirut, and Damascus in various advisory positions before settling in Cairo, where he served as advisor to the Cultural Committee of the Arab League, lectured at Cairo University, and in 1953 was appointed the first director of the Institute of Higher Arab Studies. There al-Husri refined and promoted his secular, pan-Arab nationalism. He emphasized the importance of a common language among the Arabs of the modern nations: anyone who speaks Arabic was an Arab; Arabic preceded the advent of Islam; and the evidence for a pre-Islamic, sophisticated Arab civilization resides in its language, which allowed for the intricate, abstract thought in the Koran and is an indication of the high level of intellectual sophistication in the area even before Islam. He saw a common language as the basis for a noble and powerful cultural and political unity among the modern Arab nations, and the differences between them were the result of the manipulation by foreign powers:
There is left no room to doubt that the division of the Arab provinces into several states took place because of the bargaining and ambitions of the foreign states, and not according to the views and interests of the peoples of the countries. So, too, were the borders of these states determined by the wishes and agreements of the foreign powers, and not according to the natural demands of the situation or the requirements of the indigenous interests. . . . All that I have explained indicates clearly that the differences we now see between the people of these states are temporary and superficial.”29
Al-Husri died in 1967. Nine years earlier, the postwar Hashemite Kingdom in Iraq was overthrown. A subsequent military-supported republic met with mixed results, especially with regard to Arab-Kurdish relations and to a lesser extent Sunni-Shiite relations (the secular, Sunni elite were in power). Years of armed conflict and insurrection ensued and in 1963, with the help of powerful members of the military, the Ba’th party overthrew the government in a bloody coup d’etat. But their rule lasted only a few months. Many of their leaders were rounded up and jailed, and the party remained out of power for five years. During that time, a young, ambitious Saddam Hussein made his presence known among the Party leaders.
The Ba’th Party returned to power in 1968 and moved quickly to control the Kurds and the Shiites. The former demanded independence and fought and lost in various uprisings over the 1970s, while the latter were rounded up by the tens of thousands, imprisoned, and deported to Iran. In the meantime, the Ba’thists worked to forge a strong, nationalist political ideology. Their intention was to create “a national-territorial consciousness resting upon the particular history of Iraq and, equally significantly, of what the regime, or a powerful circle within it, presented as the history of the Iraqi people.”30 Central to this effort was an official drive to foster archaeology as a way of making people aware and proud of “their ancient past,” including that of the pre-Islamic era. At the same time, the Party encouraged local folklore for the purpose of inspiring communities with a sense of internal Iraqi unity, and emphasizing Iraq’s uniqueness among the nations of the world at large.
Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq in 1979. Along with providing generous support for archaeological research, his regime began calling for the repatriation to Iraq of antiquities transferred to European museums decades earlier by French and British archaeologists: “In previous periods [in Iraq, governments] did not grasp the importance of these antiquities, taking no interest whatsoever in these stolen treasures . . . the Iraqis and their nationalist-socialist revolution are determined to restore the treasures which are the symbol of the first and greatest civilizations in human history.”31 The government even threatened to cancel projects with foreign teams whose governments refused to return archaeological finds taken under previous regimes.32 It also announced a program of building archaeological museums in every province and at every site of archaeological importance: new museums were built at Basra, Kirkuk, Nineveh, and at Baghdad University; and the Iraq Museum was renovated and expanded.
The most ambitious project was the reconstruction and cultural revitalization of the ancient city of Babylon. Plans were announced for the construction of three museums on the site, to be named after Nebuchadnezzar (for the finds of the later Babylonian period), Hammurabi (the earlier Babylonian period), and Alexander the Great (Hellenistic period). By 1981, on the first anniversary of Iraq’s war with Iran, throngs of Iraqis marked the occasion with a festival amidst the ruins of Babylon under the slogan, “Yesterday Nebuchadnezzar, today Saddam Hussein.” Speaking on behalf of the president, a minister spoke to the crowd:
O the masses of our great nation, O victorious sons of Iraq, O grandsons of Nebuchadnezzar and al-Qa’qa’. . . . O sons of the middle Euphrates, and O masses of al-Hilla, your salute to the battle of Saddam’s Qadisiyya [the war with Iran] under the slogan Yesterday Nebuchadnezzar, today Saddam Hussein establishes the link between the historical contributions of this country . . . and the heights of today and the flags of victory fluttering under the leadership of the fearless and inspired leader Saddam Hussein.33
Similar themes were struck in speeches by the country’s vice president (“When the mighty kingdom of Akkad and Sumer was founded, as an expression of the first Iraqi internal patriotic unity in history”) and by the region’s governor (“The festival’s celebration in this muhafazah expressed the faithfulness of this city, which witnessed the civilizational genius of the Arab man, and an illustrious role in building up the unity of the Arab nation and liberation of its lands”).34 In 1988, the Babylon International Music Festival took place under the slogan “From Nebuchadnezzar to Saddam Hussein, Babylon Arises Anew!” and plays and pageants were performed, making ever clearer the regime’s association with its ancient “predecessor.” All of this was accompanied by the proliferation of images throughout Iraq showing the profiles of Nebuchadnezzar and Saddam. At the same time, Iraqi provinces and other administrative units were renamed to reference the ancient past: the province of al-Hilla was renamed Babylon, for example; even the Parliament building was renamed the “Hammurabi Building.”35
A key impediment to linking modern Iraq with ancient Mesopotamia, however, was the skepticism of important parts of the Iraqi intellectual community, who did not see ancient Babylonians as Arabs. They tended instead to locate the source of Iraqi nationalist pride in the land, itself: “Our beloved homeland, Iraq, the cradle of many civilizations and cultures . . . where many nations . . . and religions lived from the time of the Sumerian and Akkadian civilization.”36 Saddam, however, saw it differently. In an address to the Bureau of Information in 1978, he laid the framework for the Arabization of Mesopotamia: “The history of the Arab nation does not start with Islam. Rather, it reaches back into ages of remote antiquity. . . . All basic civilizations that emerged in the Arab homeland were expressions of the personality of the sons of the [Arab] nation, who emerged from a single source.”37
In Saddam’s view—and as he would become president of the Republic the following year he had an important view—it was not only the land that the historical and modern peoples of the region of Iraq had in common, it was also the character of the people themselves, those who had occupied that land for millennia and who shared an Arab personality. Attempts were made to locate this personality in a shared racial source: Arabs were said to derive from the ancient Semites who emigrated from the Arab peninsula northward to Egypt and the Biblical lands. Other attempts argued for clear, unbroken cultural ties from the ancient peoples to modern Iraqis. All of these efforts were difficult to justify, but some intellectuals took refuge in a final, circular argument: because modern Arab Iraqis absorbed all earlier “branches” of the region’s culture, all earlier peoples of the area were Arabs.38 It was left only to claim a unique—even senior—role for Iraq among other Arab countries.
Iraqi historians viewed the temporary ruptures in Iraq’s long, continuous history as but temporary challenges which their predecessors had always overcome to advance Arab/Iraqi culture over all others. Ahmad Susa saw this as distinguishing Iraqi from Egyptian culture, the one other Arab nation which claimed a glorious ancient past: “This gave it continuity and purity of origin, as different from Egyptian civilization which . . . ended with the end of its ancient era. [The fate of the Egyptian] was similar to what befell the Sumerian civilization, which perished as a result of the Semites . . . in Mesopotamia.”39 And this, together with the “unique,” harsh, and challenging physical conditions of Iraq—cold winters, hot summers— forged Iraq’s “sharpness of perception and great intellectual capacity” and convinced Susa and others that “the civilization of the Arab nation, the mother of ancient civilizations . . . necessarily will flourish again as happened in the past” and would do so at the expense of Egypt.40
Ba’thist ideology held Iraq to be first among all Arab nations and Arab history to be continuous with the origins of civilization itself. This encouraged a sense of Iraqi supremacy among Arab nations and emboldened Iraq in its attack on Kuwait and war against Iran. Archaeology—governmental sponsorship of excavations, reconstructions (more often than not, recreations) of ancient sites, founding of new museums and renovation and expansion of existing ones, and reforming of university and school curricula—and the political manipulation of its finds was crucial to this. It served the ends of the Ba’thist Party in the latter’s efforts to hold and strengthen its power at home (against the always troublesome Kurds and Shiites) and advance the cause of Iraq abroad. Thus it was with great pride that the Iraq Museum reopened in 2000 after a decade of war, celebrating not only its well-known holdings gathered from a century of excavations but also looted and stolen antiquities reclaimed from abroad as well as new finds by the Iraqi Antiquities Services. The archaeological community at home and abroad was optimistic. Foreign archaeologists were beginning to work in the country again. Archaeology magazine trumpeted the day with the headline, “Good News from Iraq.”41
A short three years later, Iraq was again at war—this time with the United States and Coalition Forces—and in April the Iraq Museum was attacked, partially destroyed, and thousands of its objects damaged and/or stolen. It was a chaotic situation. The international community condemned the attack. The accuracy of news reports was questioned. The number of objects lost varied by the tens of thousands. Some reported that it was an inside job: the thieves knew what they wanted; it wasn’t merely wanton violence by poor, angry mobs but the work of professional thieves. Even the museum’s director was accused of misconduct. UNESCO asked all countries to prohibit the importation of cultural, archaeological, and bibliographic objects that had recently been in Iraq (the National Library had also been looted). At a UNESCO-sponsored meeting, agreement was reached on six measures for immediate action:
The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago began to build a Web site documenting the museum’s collections as an aid in the identification of stolen objects. The U.S. State Department Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs provided the International Council of Museums with funding to establish a “red list” of Iraqi artifacts that were likely to be on the market illicitly. Objects were reportedly being returned, many by local Iraqis as a sign of respect for the importance of the museum. Rumors surfaced claiming that perhaps only a small proportion of the 170,000 objects in the museum’s vaults were in fact looted. Very little about the state of the museum and its collection was certain. But then again, in the first few months of the war very little was certain except that things would get worse.
And yet, despite the chaos on the ground, the U.N. Security Council passed resolution 1483, Section 7 of which reads:
[The Council] decides that all Member States shall take appropriate steps to facilitate the safe return to Iraqi institutions, of Iraqi cultural property and other items of archaeological, historical, cultural, rare scientific, religious importance illegally removed from the Iraq National Museum, the National Library, and other locations in Iraq since the adoption of resolution 661 (1990) of 2 August 1990, including by establishing a prohibition on trade in or transfer of such items and items with respect to which reasonable suspicion exists that they have been illegally removed, and calls upon the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, Interpol, and other international organizations, as appropriate, to assist in the implementation of this paragraph.43
Things have only gotten worse in Iraq. Four years on, the Coalition war has become a full-fledged civil war, and the destruction of archaeological sites and illicit trafficking in antiquities is said to have increased exponentially. Some blame the lack of protection at the sites: the Marine officer/U.S. prosecutor/self-styled-antiquities policeman, Matthew Bogdanos, is on record claiming that it would take 50,000–75,000 security and support staff and supplies, vehicles, weapons, radios, fuel, training, and living quarters for the staff to protect the sites.44 Is this likely to happen? Fighting against this is the economic and political circumstances that incite people to loot and take part in illicit trafficking of activities in times of war.
In 2006, three years after the passage of U.N. Security Council resolution 1483, the director of the Iraq Museum, Donny George, fled Iraq for Syria and then the United States, where he is teaching in the Department of Anthropology, Stony Brook University. The museum had been reassigned to the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities (under Gertrude Bell in the 1920s, it had been under the Ministry of Public Works; under Sat’i al-Husri in the 1930s, it had been under the Ministry of Education). The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities was under the control of the “radical Shiite cleric” Moktada al-Sadr, whose followers have been linked by some journalists to looting and illicit trafficking (they did lead the two uprisings against the Americans in 2004; al-Sadr’s party holds at least thirty seats in Parliament, making him one of the most powerful political forces in Iraq). On August 28, 2006, George was reported to have said that it was no longer possible to work at the museum: “I can no longer work with these people who have come in with the new ministry. They have no knowledge of archaeology, no knowledge of antiquities, nothing.”45 A group of international archaeologists wrote in protest to the Iraqi authorities, asking that the museum’s collections be kept together and not split up and distributed around the country, that “Antiquities Guards” at archaeological sites be increased and continued to be paid, and that “cultural heritage either be independent or that it be administered by the Ministry of Culture” and “implemented by a professional, unified State Board of Antiquities and Heritage.” The letter concluded by declaring that “only a strong, national, non-political State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, backed fully by the force of the State, can preserve the heritage that is left.”46
Striking is the request by the letter’s signatories—the letter is addressed to Iraq’s president, prime minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Culture, and two members of Parliament—that “Iraq’s cultural heritage be treated as a part of the rich culture of Iraqi people, to be preserved for future generations.” In the politics of cultural property, national governments have the authority to decide what is and what is not a nation’s cultural property. Typically, foreign archaeologists defend this authority against cultural property internationalists like myself by saying that we foreigners should respect a national government’s claim on its cultural property. After all, it is said, the government represents the people and has the people’s—the nation’s—best interest in mind when it defines, protects, and retains cultural property for the nation. In this instance, clearly, a group of archaeologists did not trust the Iraqi national government to make the “correct” decision with regard to its cultural property. And they concluded their letter with the admonition: “All persons who work in Antiquities should be above politics and allegiance to any party. . . . You are in positions to save the Cultural Heritage of Iraq for everyone, and we hope you do so.”
Nothing is certain about archaeology in Iraq except that, when once it served the political agenda of the prevailing authorities, now it is victim to the unpredictable violence of foreign invasion and civil war in a failed state. As the New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote recently:
It’s symbolic of the anarchy throughout Iraq’s capital that the museum’s entrances are now sealed with concrete to keep out new hordes of killers and thieves. But the violence, which seems to spiral with each declaration of a new security crackdown, is old news. More revealing is the other half of the museum’s current plight: it is now in the hands of Iraq’s version of the Taliban. . . .
The fortunes of [Iraq’s] museum, once considered the finest in the Middle East, have been synonymous with the fate of Iraq ever since. . . . That America has stood helplessly by as Mr. Sadr folds the museum into his orbit of power is as ominous a predictor of what lies ahead in this war as was our callous reaction to the looting of 2003. For all of America’s talk of stamping out a “murderous ideology” and promoting civilization and democracy in Iraq, we are now handing the very devil the keys.47
It was back to this, back to the Iraq Museum and to the Iraqi government—the government that three years later put Moktada al-Sadr and his forces in charge of the museum—back to Iraq and the chaos and violence of civil war, that UNESCO and the U.N. Security Council wanted the world to return Iraqi antiquities.
I began this two-chapter consideration of the political circumstances surrounding the question of art museums and the acquisition of unprovenanced antiquities by recalling a question put to me at a job interview more than sixteen years ago: what was my position on acquiring antiquities illegally exported from other countries? I replied that I would never approve of acquiring objects that were illegally exported from other countries. At the time it seemed like an obvious answer to a straightforward question. But in the years since, I have come to realize that the question is far from straightforward. Rather, it is inevitably inflected by the national and international politics of antiquities, archaeology, and museums. As the relations between the three phenomena are framed by politics, and politics is always motivated by a national, if not a nationalist, agenda, we need to ask why laws regarding the export, import, ownership, and possession of antiquities were written as they were, what they mean, and what purpose and whom in power they serve. That is a far more complicated set of questions than the simplistic one asked of me some sixteen years ago. And in the current debate between museums and archaeologists over the acquisition of antiquities, these questions are not being asked.