Re: art history & the war (re-posted from CAAH - please pardon
duplication).
http://www.guardian.co.uk is a good source of news, with free
subscription.
Suzanna Simor
> -------
>
> To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited
site,
go to http://www.guardian.co.uk
>
> The end of civilisation
> Iraq is one huge world heritage site, a unique storehouse of art
and
archaeology. Now the war threatens to destroy it all, says Fiachra
Gibbons
> Picture gallery: Iraq's heritage sites
> Fiachra Gibbons
> Tuesday April 01 2003
> The Guardian
>
>
> This week, B52s were circling the holy city of Najaf, emptying,
we are
told, their payloads on to the Medina division of the Republican
guard. They
know all about slaughter in this city of half a million people now
surrounded by the tanks of the US Seventh Cavalry, Custer's old
devil-may-care outfit.
>
> Ali, the charismatic son-in-law of the Prophet - who occupies a
place in
the Shi'ite pantheon of similar significance to Christ - was murdered
at the
gates of Najaf. His tomb has been one of the most sacred Shi'ite
shrines
since.
>
> Up the road at Kerbala (pronounced Herbala, despite what the
BBC says),
Ali's son Hussein, his family and followers were massacred by the
Sunnis in
680AD in a "turkey-shoot" of a battle that divides Islam to this day.
Hussein's mausoleum is like the Vatican, Gethsemane and the
Wailing Wall
rolled into one. It is at Kerbala where Saddam, like his namesake,
seems to
have decided to stand and fight.
>
> In museums and universities across the world, scholars and
curators are
fearful of another armageddon. One not perpetrated on the Iraqi
people but
on their history and monuments. Iraq, particularly the green heart of
Mesopotamia, the fertile crescent of land between the rivers Tigris
and
Euphrates, is the cradle of civilisation, the land of Nineveh, Babylon,
Nimrud and Uruk, the world's first city. This is where the Sumerians
invented writing 5,000 years ago, where the epic of Gilgamesh - the
model
for Noah and the flood - was committed to cuneiform a millennium
and a half
before Homer. It is the land of the Old Testament, the Tower of
Babel and of
Ur, where Abraham, the father of the three great monotheistic
religions, was
born.
>
> It may have only a single official Unesco listing but, with 1,000
acknowledged archaeological sites, Iraq is one huge world heritage
zone. And
on to this in the past few days have poured 740 Tomahawk cruise
missiles,
8,000 smart bombs and an unknown number of stupid ones. One of
the first
acts of the war was an attack on the museum in Saddam's home
town of Tikrit.
To an Iraqi regime eager for ammunition for propaganda, this was
proof of
American and British barbarism. The allies preferred to see it as a
symbolic
strike at the personality cult of Saddam.
>
> The museum in Mosul, the northern city that is home to the
oldest churches
in the world, is also dedicated to a pernicious personality cult, that
of
Sennacherib, a seventh-century BC Assyrian ruler. That, too, has
been hit.
>
> The Mosul museum houses some of the most important finds
from nearby
Nineveh and Nimrud, like the giant winged Assyrian bulls with
human heads
that awe visitors to the British Museum and thousands of cuneiform
clay
tablets that have yet to be deciphered. The museum's director, a
Christian,
like many in Mosul, has spent the last year blast-proofing the
windows and
evacuating her most delicate exhibits. Some, however, were simply
too big to
move.
>
> But it is the damage that may be happening out of sight of the
cameras
that has historians and archaeologists worried. At Trinity College,
Cambridge, Professor Nicholas Postgate is resigned to the worst
but angry
about the destruction.
>
> On Iraq's pancake-flat southern plain, archeological sites are the
only
raised features, the only cover and, therefore, key military positions.
"Some are 30 metres high and extend over kilometres," Postgate
says. "With
modern machinery, an entire 6,000-year-old village can be recycled
into a
defensive earthwork in a day or two, and even old-fashioned
trenches, which
were much used in the last hostilities, can do irreparable damage."
>
> American bulldozers razed the ruins of Tell al-Lahm, south of Ur,
during
the last Gulf war. What might a squadron of B52s be able to do?
From the
air, archaeological trenches are easily mistaken for military
emplacements,
and therefore fair game for a pummelling. But it's not just the direct
hits
that wreck. In 1991, the great arch of Ctesphion, still the widest
unsupported brick arch in the world, was cracked by the rumble of
American
carpet bombing.
>
> The Iraqis themselves, of course, are adept at recycling ancient
defences.
There is evidence that tanks were parked around ancient sites
during the
last war, and the Americans are quick to point to the Iraqi airbase
that
sits in the shadow of the great ziggurat of Ur. With an
administration
stuffed full of biblical literalists - Christian and Zionist
fundamentalists - it is easy to understand their anger at the Iraqis'
use of
the city of Abraham as a shield. But what few in the Pentagon
seem to
realise is that the Ur airbase was built by the British in the days of
its
colonial mandate, when the RAF first demonstrated the civilising
capabilities of bombing civilians from the air.
>
> John Curtis, the keeper of the department of the ancient near
east at the
British Museum, visited Ur last spring and has little doubt the
Americans
strafed the ziggurat - a great, stepped pyramid - with heavy
machine-gun
fire the last time they passed that way. "Whether this was an
accident, I
couldn't say," he says. A fair amount of what he drily calls "bayonet
archaeology" had also gone on, presumably by passing GIs.
>
> Postgate is not so phlegmatic. "This argument that it doesn't
matter if
these places are hit because the Iraqis are using the archaeology
like human
shields is a non-starter. If you put a machine-gun emplacement
anywhere in
Mosul, for instance, it will be next to antiquities. That is the nature
of
the country, but that doesn't make Mosul a valid target."
>
> And there is another reason, he argues, why the Iraqis are
justified in
putting machine guns outside museums. In the aftermath of the
last Gulf war,
when large parts of the country rose up against Saddam, several
important
museums and archaeological sites were looted in the chaos.
Around 4,000
precious objects went missing and more were destroyed. Most of
the stolen
items followed the well-worn route to Israel, Switzerland and,
finally, to
London, where many Assyrian pieces, broken up for easier transit,
ended up
on the art market or in the back rooms of antiquarian dealers.
Having
failed, as a pariah state, to get them back through official channels,
the
Iraqis were still trying to buy some back from western collectors
when
hostilities started. "I am not trying to make any argument for
Saddam, but
any responsible government must protect their cultural heritage,"
Postgate
says.
>
> But, for all his butchery, torture and repression, Saddam has
been mostly
a good thing for archaeology. He has his reasons, of course. Like
many a
dictator before him, he promised national rebirth and a repeat of the
glories of the past, comparing himself to Nebuchadnezzar who built
the
Hanging Gardens of Babylon. He even rebuilt the old city walls with
bricks
embossed with his own name next to that of Nebuchadnezzar. You
don't have to
be an expert to see this exercise as a crime against archaeology
and
aesthetics. Then there is the presidential palace Saddam built
himself on
the site.
>
> But Saddam saw protecting Iraq's heritage as a patriotic duty,
even if his
methods were brutal. Five years ago, 10 men from near Mosul who
cut the head
off an Assyrian winged bull at Khorsabad were executed. Such was
the
desperation of Iraqis that the looting and smuggling continued.
>
> Since the phones went down 12 days ago, nothing has been
heard from the
museum in Baghdad. Emails have gone unanswered, too. The
culture ministry is
said to have been bombed. The museum sits close to a telephone
exchange and
a television transmitter in the Salihyia district. Trenches have been
dug
outside.
>
> At the British Museum, Curtis is worried on three fronts. First, for
his
friends in Baghdad, seven of whom have recently spent time in
London on
scholarships. When he visited last year, Donny George, one of
Iraq's
brightest archaeologists, was packing away the smaller exhibits
into crates.
He has spent the past few months sandbagging the big bas reliefs,
tombs and
statues that cannot be moved. George, an Assyrian Christian, has
spent
recent years excavating the city of Umma armed with a trowel and a
semi-automatic. It was the only way he could fend off the looters
who came
with lorries, mechanical diggers and AK47s.
>
> George and his colleagues were talking then of the possibility of
using
bank vaults and bunkers if the worst came. But having listened to
the
Americans boast about their "bunker-busting" bombs, Curtis is
anxious.
"Bunkers are possibly not safest places in Iraq at the moment." He
is also
fearful of what might happen to the exquisite Assyrian sculptures
and
reliefs still in situ in Nineveh and Nimrud if Kurds have to take the
area
trench by trench.
>
> Irritation with Old Europe is clear when you call US Central
Command in
Qatar, never mind Extremely Old Mesopotamia. They have more
pressing things
on their minds than the fate of sixth-century BC cylinder seals.
"We are
doing our darnedest to avoid collateral damage of any type, be it
civilians
or buildings," a spokesman says. "However, in cases where
military targets
are located by the regime in sites that are dual use, we still see
those as
viable sites."
>
> Does that mean they have attacked Babylon and Saddam's
palace? "I can't
discuss the procedure used for targeting. If it had command-and-
control use
or if any weapons were held there, then yes we would attack it. We
understand how sensitive these areas are. Whether this is taken
into
consideration in targeting, I can't say."
>
> Postgate, however, gives the Americans some credit. Unlike the
British,
who ignored all the information he and his colleagues sent them,
US military
planners took heed. "They contacted us asking what they should
do if they
find antiquities, which sites they should try to avoid, and how they
could
minimise damage if that was not possible. All we had from the
British was a
deafening silence." Riding roughshod over Iraqi sensitivities could
prove
fatal, he insists.
>
> Kerbala and Najaf have reportedly come under heavy
bombardment. If Imam
Hussein's mausoleum or Ali's tomb and mosque at Najaf are
damaged, the
archaeologists agree the allies risk alienating the Shi'ites of the
south,
the people who were meant to rise up and greet the Americans as
liberators.
The lessons of history are there, but will they be heeded?
>
> · A series of lectures on Iraq's cultural heritage continues
at the
British Museum, London WC1, today and tomorrow. Details: 020-
7323 8000.
>
> Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited

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