It Is The Death of History
2,000-year-old Sumerian cities torn apart and plundered by robbers. The very walls of the mighty Ur of the Chaldees cracking under the strain of massive troop movements, the privatisation of looting as landlords buy up the remaining sites of ancient Mesopotamia to strip them of their artefacts and wealth. The near total destruction of Iraq’s historic past - the very cradle of human civilisation - has emerged as one of the most shameful symbols of our disastrous occupation.
Evidence amassed by archaeologists shows that even those Iraqis who trained as archaeological workers in Saddam Hussein’s regime are now using their knowledge to join the looters in digging through the ancient cities, destroying thousands of priceless jars, bottles and other artefacts in their search for gold and other treasures.
In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, armies of looters moved in on the desert cities of southern Iraq and at least 13 Iraqi museums were plundered. Today, almost every archaeological site in southern Iraq is under the control of looters.
In a long and devastating appraisal to be published in December, Lebanese archaeologist Joanne Farchakh says that armies of looters have not spared “one metre of these Sumerian capitals that have been buried under the sand for thousands of years.
“They systematically destroyed the remains of this civilisation in their tireless search for sellable artefacts: ancient cities, covering an estimated surface area of 20 square kilometres, which - if properly excavated - could have provided extensive new information concerning the development of the human race.
“Humankind is losing its past for a cuneiform tablet or a sculpture or piece of jewellery that the dealer buys and pays for in cash in a country devastated by war. Humankind is losing its history for the pleasure of private collectors living safely in their luxurious houses and ordering specific objects for their collection.”
Ms Farchakh, who helped with the original investigation into stolen treasures from the Baghdad Archaeological Museum in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, says Iraq may soon end up with no history.
“There are 10,000 archaeological sites in the country. In the Nassariyah area alone, there are about 840 Sumerian sites; they have all been systematically looted. Even when Alexander the Great destroyed a city, he would always build another. But now the robbers are destroying everything because they are going down to bedrock. What’s new is that the looters are becoming more and more organised with, apparently, lots of money.
“Quite apart from this, military operations are damaging these sites forever. There’s been a US base in Ur for five years and the walls are cracking because of the weight of military vehicles. It’s like putting an archaeological site under a continuous earthquake.”
Of all the ancient cities of present-day Iraq, Ur is regarded as the most important in the history of man-kind. Mentioned in the Old Testament - and believed by many to be the home of the Prophet Abraham - it also features in the works of Arab historians and geographers where its name is Qamirnah, The City of the Moon.
Founded in about 4,000 BC, its Sumerian people established the principles of irrigation, developed agriculture and metal-working. Fifteen hundred years later - in what has become known as “the age of the deluge” - Ur produced some of the first examples of writing, seal inscriptions and construction. In neighbouring Larsa, baked clay bricks were used as money orders - the world’s first cheques - the depth of finger indentations in the clay marking the amount of money to be transferred. The royal tombs of Ur contained jewellery, daggers, gold, azurite cylindrical seals and sometimes the remains of slaves.
US officers have repeatedly said a large American base built at Babylon was to protect the site but Iraqi archaeologist Zainab Bah-rani, a professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University, says this “beggars belief”. In an analysis of the city, she says: “The damage done to Babylon is both extensive and irreparable, and even if US forces had wanted to protect it, placing guards round the site would have been far more sensible than bulldozing it and setting up the largest coalition military headquarters in the region.”
Air strikes in 2003 left historical monuments undamaged, but Professor Bahrani, says: “The occupation has resulted in a tremendous destruction of history well beyond the museums and libraries looted and destroyed at the fall of Baghdad. At least seven historical sites have been used in this way by US and coalition forces since April 2003, one of them being the historical heart of Samarra, where the Askari shrine built by Nasr al Din Shah was bombed in 2006.”
The use of heritage sites as military bases is a breach of the Hague Convention and Protocol of 1954 (chapter 1, article 5) which covers periods of occupation; although the US did not ratify the Convention, Italy, Poland, Australia and Holland, all of whom sent forces to Iraq, are contracting parties.
Ms Farchakh notes that as religious parties gain influence in all the Iraqi pro-vinces, archaeological sites are also falling under their control. She tells of Abdulamir Hamdani, the director of antiquities for Di Qar province in the south who desperately - but vainly - tried to prevent the destruction of the buried cities during the occupation. Dr Hamdani himself wrote that he can do little to prevent “the disaster we are all witnessing and observing”.
In 2006, he says: “We recruited 200 police officers because we were trying to stop the looting by patrolling the sites as often as possible. Our equipment was not enough for this mission because we only had eight cars, some guns and other weapons and a few radio transmitters for the entire province where 800 archaeological sites have been inventoried.
“Of course, this is not enough but we were trying to establish some order until money restrictions within the government meant that we could no longer pay for the fuel to patrol the sites. So we ended up in our offices trying to fight the looting, but that was also before the religious parties took over southern Iraq.”
Last year, Dr Hamdani’s antiquities department received notice from the local authorities, approving the creation of mud-brick factories in areas surrounding Sumerian archaeological sites. But it quickly became apparent that the factory owners intended to buy the land from the Iraqi government because it covered several Sumerian capitals and other archaeological sites. The new landlord would “dig” the archaeological site, dissolve the “old mud brick” to form the new one for the market and sell the unearthed finds to antiquity traders.
Dr Hamdani bravely refused to sign the dossier. Ms Farchakh says: “His rejection had rapid consequences. The religious parties controlling Nassariyah sent the police to see him with orders to jail him on corruption charges. He was imprisoned for three months, awaiting trial. The State Board of Antiquities and Heritage defended him during his trial, as did his powerful tribe. He was released and regained his position. The mud-brick factories are ‘frozen projects’, but reports have surfaced of a similar strategy being employed in other cities and in nearby archaeological sites such as the Aqarakouf Ziggarat near Baghdad. For how long can Iraqi archaeologists maintain order? This is a question only Iraqi politicians affiliated to the different religious parties can answer, since they approve these projects.”
Police efforts to break the power of the looters, now with a well-organised support structure helped by tribal leaders, have proved lethal. In 2005, the Iraqi customs arrested - with the help of Western troops - several antiquities dealers in the town of Al Fajr, near Nasseriyah. They seized hundreds of artefacts and decided to take them to the museum in Baghdad. It was a fatal mistake.
The convoy was stopped a few miles from Baghdad, eight of the customs agents were murdered, and their bodies burnt and left to rot in the desert. The artefacts disappeared. “It was a clear message from the antiquities dealers to the world,” Ms Farchakh says.
The legions of antiquities looters work within a smooth mass-smuggling organisation. Trucks, cars, planes and boats take Iraq’s historical plunder to Europe, the US, to the United Arab Emirates and to Japan. The archaeologists say an ever-growing number of internet websites offer Mesopotamian artefacts, objects anywhere up to 7,000 years old.
The farmers of southern Iraq are now professional looters, knowing how to outline the walls of buried buildings and able to break directly into rooms and tombs. The archaeologists’ report says: “They have been trained in how to rob the world of its past and they have been making significant profit from it. They know the value of each object and it is difficult to see why they would stop looting.”
After the 1991 Gulf War, archaeologists hired the previous looters as workers and promised them government salaries. This system worked as long as the archaeologists remained on the sites, but it was one of the main reasons for the later destruction; people now knew how to excavate and what they could find.
Ms Farchakh adds: “The longer Iraq finds itself in a state of war, the more the cradle of civilisation is threatened. It may not even last for our grandchildren to learn from.”
A land with fields of ancient pottery
By Joanne Farchakh, archaeologist
Iraq’s rural societies are very different to our own. Their concept of ancient civilisations and heritage does not match the standards set by our own scholars. History is limited to the stories and glories of your direct ancestors and your tribe. So for them, the “cradle of civilisation” is nothing more than desert land with “fields” of pottery that they have the right to take advantage of because, after all, they are the lords of the land and, as a result, the owners of its possessions. In the same way, if they had been able, these people would not have hesitated to take control of the oil fields, because this is “their land”. Because life in the desert is hard and because they have been “forgotten” by all the governments, their “revenge” for this reality is to monitor, and take, every single money-making opportunity. A cylinder seal, a sculpture or a cuneiform tablet earns $50 (£25) and that’s half the monthly salary of an average government employee in Iraq. The looters have been told by the traders that if an object is worth anything at all, it must have an inscription on it. In Iraq, the farmers consider their “looting” activities to be part of a normal working day.
Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
© 2007 The Independent
Sad…. very, very sad. The war crimes just keep piling up. The looting of the history of Mesopotamia is nearly as bad as the one million, two-hundred thousand souls who have lost their lives as a result of this war (1,200,000).
Nothing, but nothing will bring those people back. Nothing.
The physical destruction of the past is the 3-D version of what plunder-capitalism and books (which emerged at the same times that men took over Western civilization)have always done—destroy the past built by somebody else without a thought, in order to destroy all other “frames of reference” and the more pseudo-legitimize itself. (”It’s always been this way,” Grandpa lies.)Does anybody care to know that THE LONGEST CONTINUOUS PERIOD OF WESTERN PROGRESS was Minoan Crete—a high tech, peaceful and international trading culture with women at the heart of it and a LunarSolar calendar that shames the Parthenon? http://ancientgreece-earlyamerica.com …When we really get sick of war as a way of life (a mere 4000 years of male-centered history) we’ll find we have far better “role models” waiting for us in the facts outside of books…
USA, empire of DESTRUCTION.
USA, empire of DEATH and DESTRUCTION.
Im lovin the way “mankind” pops up while referring to the history of the area.
The chinese have been civilized longer than any of this, and have history recorded to this effect.
ZPF: I was not aware that China had a city older than Ur. Could you post a link to some source material so I can read more?
No two ways about it when minds, bodies and spirits are being polluted this country is definitely on the path of self destruction.
Between you and me our government is looking for something and I hope they never find it!
It’s what happens when a bunch of barbarians of the lowest possible order invade a civilized country.
I will dance on the US’scollective grave.
This is the deliberate erasure of Mesopotamian history - the Israelis have perfected the art of historical and cultural erasure of the Palestinians and the other peoples in the Holy Lands. Their ethnically cleansed paradise has served as the model for the Americans in Iraq.
Does anyone still find the ferocity of the Iraqi resistance incomprehensible? Long live the resistance! The planned destruction of Iraq is being derailed by the heroic Iraqi people. They have been making the ultimate sacrifice for our collective historical and cultural heritage.
This is what the US will do to Iran if they lower their defenses.
But Moonraven, the one’s responsible for the destruction will be long gone. It will be innocent civilians that will suffer.
The cannibalist system has eaten it’s own for generations. Not is is eating the very foundations of civilization. All these sites and artifacts are the property of all humanity. Those who use their wealth to plunder and hoard them should be dispossessed and imprisoned.
The Shock Doctrine has really paid off. As the Guardian writes:
It’s a tried-and-tested torture technique: strike fear into your victims, deprive them of cherished essentials and then eradicate their memories. In 2003, the US applied this on an enormous scale for its invasion of Iraq. And then, after Saddam’s regime crumbled, Washington set out to rebuild the traumatised country through a disastrous programme of privatisation and unfettered capitalism, as Naomi Klein shows in this exclusive extract from her new book
From Naomi Klien:
The bombing badly injured Iraq, but it was the looting, unchecked by occupying troops, that did the most to erase the heart of the country that was.
“The hundreds of looters who smashed ancient ceramics, stripped display cases and pocketed gold and other antiquities from the National Museum of Iraq pillaged nothing less than records of the first human society,” reported the Los Angeles Times. “Gone are 80% of the museum’s 170,000 priceless objects.” The national library, which contained copies of every book and doctoral thesis ever published in Iraq, was a blackened ruin.
Thousand-year-old illuminated Qur’ans had disappeared from the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which was left a burned-out shell. “Our national heritage is lost,” pronounced a Baghdad high-school teacher. A local merchant said of the museum, “It was the soul of Iraq. If the museum doesn’t recover the looted treasures, I will feel like a part of my own soul has been stolen.” McGuire Gibson, an archaeologist at the University of Chicago, called it “a lot like a lobotomy. The deep memory of an entire culture, a culture that has continued for thousands of years, has been removed”.
In short, everything according to plan . . .
Though the Chinese will always refer to their “5,000 years of history,” and though they of course have a continuous history that is unrivalled, in no way do the artifacts of ancient China ( few older than 2,500 years ) compare with the antiquities now being destroyed in Mesopotamia.
Mesopotamian civilization pre-dates Chinese or Indian Civilizations based on archaeological findings. The Sumerian cities are probably the oldest ‘civilized’ cities discovered and is only appropriate they are wiped off the map by modern day barbarians. History repeats itself.
Capitalism rears its ugly head.
When we have a country so stupid that we let the so called Religious Right and a criminal Supreme Court appoint a president who can’t read and doesn’t give a damn about history this is what you wind up with. What a terrible shame to destroy such wonderful priceless history.Bush/Cheney and their warmongers have destroyed a great society another reason to try them at the Hague for crimes against humanity
1,200,000 Iraqi dead, 4,000,000 refugees, and one national treasure destroyed after another…
It doesn’t look much like an accident, a result of negligence or incompetence.
If Bush-Cheney had intended to destroy Iraq in every possible way, down to the bedrock, as the story says, is there anything they would have done differently since 2003?
All too well and too poignantly said, normanx.
clyde paige____ you are right on about what happened in our country that brought this shameful disaster to be. Our great decider did not major in history or geography, it was alcoholic drinks and cheerleading. The veep got so involved in greed as Haliburton CEO that nothing means anything to him but more power and cash. They make all of us so proud.
neomunk September 17th, 2007 3:29 pm & ZPF
Sumerian civilization goes back to around 3500BC.
China only goes back to abuout 2200BC.
http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/prehistory/middle_east/middle_east.html
http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/prehistory/china/timeline.html#ancient
The Bush cartel destroys history; history will destroy the Bush cartel.
Not so long ago, Donny George ( an Iraqi Christian ) ,was interviewed on BBC Hardtalk. For years he’d been the Deputy Director of the Baghdad Museum and was subsequently elevated to its Directorship . During the interview ,he clearly and forthrightly spoke about how they’d been given the all the requisite wherewithal (under that ‘evil’ regime ) to protect its priceless antiquities.
Later, when the ‘elected ‘ Govt. was put in place , its leaders lost no time in holding the gun to Mr. George’s head. Fearing for their very safety ,he and his family fled to the West.And have remained there ever since.
This article couldn’t be clearer: an obscurantist Western Establishment couldn’t give a damn for the preservation of the artifacts of the Cradle of Civilzation. In fact it might well suit them to a ‘T ‘ were it all to somehow vanish overnight .
(It shouldn’t surprise me if ,as far as they are concerned, History began with Plymouth Rock.)
Who gives a damn about Mesopotamian history? If you bomb a nation a few vases get broken.So what? Muslim fanatics don’t deserve a history. Next the US will bomb the Pyramids and destroy the remaining artifacts of Pharonic Egypt.
I have become Death destroyer of worlds.
The Decider has morphed into the Destroyer.
So, when are you lot going to get off your collective arses and do something about the “Loonitary Decider”?
The rest of the world is waiting.
The rest of the world can stop us via an embargo and devestment campaign.
“It’s” is not a possessive. “It’s” is the contraction for “it is.” The correct word for the possessive is “its,” as in, “The cannibalist system has eaten its own for generations.”
Incorrect version: “The cannibalist system has eaten it’s own for generations.”
Another obvious example of what’s wrong with our educational system.
neomunk
Please see the findings in the Gansu province….
Of course, China is filled with myriad archaeological wonders, and Gansu Province has its share. There are Majiayao Culture sites and artifacts which have been dated as early as the 7th Century BC, and the province contains the Dunhuang caves from about 300 AD, a remarkable place.
I explored quite a bit of China, and nothing knocked me out like the Shang Dynasty bronzes from about 1700- 1300 BC. Ancient Greece and Rome has nothing to equal them.
But still, in terms of state of preservation, antiquity, quality and quantity, the relics of Mesopotamia are ( or, sadly, were ) unsurpassed.
These are interesting times to live in. We are witnessing history in Iraq and our granchildrens’ grandchildren will never know how this history will be revised.
By this I mean, the plundering of Iraq’s history means that at some point (I hope) people will wake up and criminalize the possession of these artifacts (at least). Of course this will happen because people will be outraged at the plundering. As a result, the people who purchased these treasures will not put them on display, or loan them to museums, or anything like that. THey will enjoy them privately…and instruct their children to do the same. And after…say 200-400 years, our grandchildren’s grandchildren will be taught about the war in Iraq but Mesopotamia will go the way of the Mycenae and the world of the Acheneans….it will be mythical, a legend.
THink I’m exaggerating? Most people, even some so-called academics, fail to make the logical connection between KMT (Egypt) and Greece. This, despite the well-known connection between Alexander’s youth and KMT/Egypt and then the Ptolemaic Kings. Our technology should make sure this doesn’t happen though, right? Yeah…right. Because the mainstream media has done such a good job of telling you that this plundering is STILL going on…right!
But, THis is the way people are conquered (despite the current Iraqi resistance). They are not just brutalized, but devalued. Their ancestors’ contribution to humanity is altered and labelled worthless. The ancestors of a worthless people, have no value. It was so with the erasure of the “contributions” of the Aztecs, Mayans, Incas, Caribs, Arawaks, Iroquois, Navaho, Mohawk, etc. It is so with the Inuit people (funny, how their perspectives are rarely raised in discussions on asserting claims on the North Pole). It was so throughout the entire African continent (Egypt proved tricky, but we’ve reconciled that by determining that Egypt is not really African). It has begun in the Middle East with Mesopotamia…Persia it seems, is next, then…Asia (to finish what Alexander the Great could not)???
True, history may regard the Bush Presidency unfavourably…but it (and he) will be remembered. I fear that one day Mesopotamia will not.
“Ms Farchakh, who helped with the original investigation into stolen treasures from the Baghdad Archaeological Museum in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, says Iraq may soon end up with no history.”
Wasn’t that the reason why the U.S. didn’t protect those treasures in the first place? With all the military and private contractors involved in “Mission Accomplished”, how many really believe they couldn’t spare personnel to cover the looting of these historical museum sites?
Does anybody see Bush’s parallel with the WWII German paper hanger? Hitler felt compelled to plant his swastika on top of great civilizations and their archeological sites. Now Bush builds a military fortress on top of old Babylon.
Coincidence? It seems that the Nazi connection runs much deeper than that.
Click here, then scroll way down (some bushmen are possibly attacking the site, making it appear to be a blank page)
http://www.nhgazette.com/the-bushnazi-stories/bushnazi-link-confirmed/
click also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prescott_Bush
cheers,
pacplyer
One of our most reliable writers dates the Sumerian targets of Uncle Sam’s current wrath as being a piddling 2000 years old - Jesus’s time, of course. Is our night as young as that?