The official website of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad has come online,
http://the.iraq.museum
with much useful information, including beautiful color images
featuring some of the Iraq Museum's holdings in the foll. categories:
* Stone Age
* Ancient Sumerian
* Akkadian, Babylonian & Modern Sumerian [sic, Neo-Sumerian]
* Assyrian Sculpture
* Middle Babylonian, Assyrian
* Ivory
* Chaldean
* Urban
* Arab Before Islam
* Coins Cashier [sic]
* Islamic
The site is still under construction -- among features that are not yet
functional are the buttons for "Contact Information" and "Looting Impact"
... as well as the entire Arabic version of the site.
Nevertheless, despite the gaps and the occasionally mangled English, the
Iraq Museum's new website is an encouraging sign of life and recovery,
following two decades of isolation and neglect and the devastation of
last year's looting.
For more on the Iraq Museum's recovery and an update on the fate of art
and antiquities in Iraq, see the excellent article by Dr. John Russell,
recently posted on the website of the Art Newspaper (London)
"Iraq: the legacy of neglect and conflict"
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=11640
Dr. Russell, professor of archaeology at the Massachusetts College of Art
in Boston, has just returned from Baghdad where he spent the last
seven months as the acting senior advisor of the Coalition Provisional
Authority (CPA) to the Iraqi Ministry of Culture.
For additional images of objects from the Iraq Museum, useful bibliography
on this and other collections in Iraq, and for continual updates on the
situation of cultural heritage in Iraq, see the "Lost Treasures from Iraq"
website hosted by University of Chicago's Oriental Institute
http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/IRAQ/iraq.html
and the online archives of the IraqCrisis forum
https://listhost.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/iraqcrisis
András Riedlmayer
Fine Arts Library
Harvard University
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