LEGAL and ILLEGAL ACQUISITION of ANTIQUITIES in IRAQ, 19TH CENTURY to 2003 Mcguire Gibson

CHAPTER 8 LEGAL AND ILLEGAL ACQUISITION OF ANTIQUITIES IN IRAQ, 19TH CENTURY TO 2003 McGuire Gibson Mesopotamian antiquities became a focus of international interest in the 19th century, when British and French commercial representatives and diplomats began to explore Iraq (see Figure 1), map it, and try to identify sites that were known from biblical and classical sources.1 Claudius James Rich, a young representative of the British East India Company, correctly identified and mapped Babylon and Nineveh, and visited numerous other sites before his death in 1821. Several other British visitors mapped and described sites in Iraq in the ensuring years, but the real start of excavation and extraction of antiquities began in earnest in 1842, when Paul Emil Botta, the French consul in Mosul, began to explore Assyrian palaces at Khorsabad (ancient Dur Kurigalzu) and Nineveh, sending back to the Louvre shipments of huge winged bulls and wall slabs decorated with the exploits of the Assyrian kings. The British diplomat, Austen Henry Layard began excavations in Nimrud (ancient Kalhu) in 1845 and worked until 1851 at this site and Nineveh, sending back to the British Museum many reliefs and other objects. In some years, the French and British were in unfriendly competition to extract objects, sometimes from the same site. Working with Layard was an Assyrian, Hormudz Rassam, who later carried out major digging at a number of sites in the north and south of Iraq on contract from the British Museum. Where the French and British were systematic insofar as they followed the edges of walls, made plans of the buildings, and drew the scenes on the stone slabs in the palaces, even when they did not remove them, Rassam merely trenched and tunneled, gathering up thousands of cuneiform tablets and other objects. Once it became clear that there was a monetary value in antiquities, and that limestone reliefs, for instance, had a greater value as objects to be sold to foreigners than just as a source for lime, local Iraqis began to dig on their own, removing thousands of objects, especially cuneiform tablets, from sites. Especially important were the digging at Babylon and other sites in the south, especially Umma (see Figure 2) and Drehem, where very ancient layers containing Sumerian material were to be found right at the surface of the mounds rather than meters below, as at Babylon. 1 See H. HILPRECHT, EXPLORATIONS IN BIBLE LANDS DURING THE 19TH CENTURY (1903) for a history of exploration. 185 186 • Cultural Heritage Issues Figure 1. Map of Iraq With Major Sites Indicated. By the 1870s, however, the Ottoman government had also realized the importance of antiquities and had promulgated an antiquities law. Shortly after this, excavations were being carried out by scholars rather than by diplomats and commercial agents, although the digging methods were no better than before. The mining by de Sarzec of Tello (ancient Girsu) yielded masses of very important material but with virtually no context recognized or recorded. The first American expedition in Iraq, sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania at Nippur (1888–1900), was almost as chaotic, but it was important for supplying to the scholarly world a wealth of cuneiform documents that allowed the construction of ancient history, the continued understanding of the Akkadian language, and the decipherment of Sumerian. In the notes, letters, and publications of that expedition,2 it is clear that the expedition’s staff as well as scholars from other institutions in the United States and Europe were buying objects from dealers in Turkey, Baghdad, Hilla, and other places, and doing so by sneaking around the Ottoman authorities, including official representatives 2 H. HILPRECHT, THE SO-CALLED PETERS-HILPRECHT CONTROVERSY 45 passim (1908)..

Load more