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 __________________________________________________________________ Mail submissions to [log in to unmask] For information about joining ARLIS/NA see: http://www.arlisna.org//membership.html Send administrative matters (file requests, subscription requests, etc) to [log in to unmask] ARLIS-L Archives and subscription maintenance: http://lsv.uky.edu/archives/arlis-l.html Questions may be addressed to list owner (Kerri Scannell) at: [log in to unmask]