Macheath

This article goes into some detail as to what was significant about the 5000 or so small items that were stolen, and also what happened to Iraq's National Library. (I've heard no overstated 'propaganda' about that before).
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Humble clay tablets are greatest loss to science

New Scientist vol 178 issue 2394 - 10 May 2003, page 8


ONE month after the looting of the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad, it is clear that the consequences will be devastating. The plunder is already being compared to the legendary destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria centuries ago.

But the losses that will wound archaeologists most deeply are not the stunning sculptures whose photos have filled newspapers since the looting. These great artistic treasures have already been studied closely by archaeologists, and there is little more to learn from them. The greatest loss lies in the mass of information recorded in thousands of cuneiform tablets and other small artefacts that have been reported missing.

These items formed one of the most comprehensive records of the lives and thoughts of Mesopotamian people thousands of years ago. "What's really interesting about this civilisation is not the high art," says Paul Zimansky, a specialist in Mesopotamian antiquities at Boston University. "Most of the stuff I dug up that went into that museum would not strike anyone as terribly beautiful. But they tell us how people lived in our first civilisation, and that's very important."

Fortunately, not all the information from such artefacts will be lost. Archaeologists keep careful records of the material they excavate - especially if, as in Iraq, foreign workers are often not allowed to take the objects out of the country. Instead, they photograph everything, write careful descriptions, and often make casts of the originals to take home for further study.

These records form a back-up of the original material, scattered among universities and museums around the world. Archaeologists are now trying to pull these back-ups together into a coherent, usable archive. "There's been a real mobilisation of scholars to try to start assembling this information," says Ellen Herscher of the Archaeological Institute of America in Boston.

But these secondary records can never provide as much information as the originals. In recent years, for example, archaeologists have begun analysing the clay from which cuneiform tablets are made, and using this to track the tablets to their source. "This is something that even 20 years ago nobody even thought of. In 20 or 50 years from now, there will be new techniques that people will want to apply. There's no substitute for the originals," says Herscher.

Worse, no secondary records exist at all for much of the material that was held in the Baghdad museum. Many of the artefacts, especially those excavated in the past decade, had not yet been catalogued or described, says Mark Altaweel of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute. Many had not even been photographed, because the trade embargo imposed by the UN after the first 1991 Gulf war restricted the import of photographic equipment and supplies.

This lack of back-up is particularly serious when it comes to the thousands of cuneiform tablets held by the museum that have never been read or translated. "There's a whole world that opens up as a document is deciphered," says Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. "If it's never read, it's a loss to our collective past."

Among the unread tablets reported missing are those containing a second copy of the Gilgamesh epic, one of the oldest recorded stories in the world. These could have filled in the gaps left by missing or broken tablets in the first version of the tale. Other tablets record more routine information: business transactions, inventories of livestock, legal records and the like. Yet even such apparently trivial information can be valuable to archaeologists, especially when they uncover a complete archive as they did in the late 1980s in the city of Sippar, south-east of Baghdad.

Such sources provide a snapshot of what people considered important and how they organised their lives and possessions, providing a rich picture of the workings of an early civilisation. Much of that value is lost if the archive is scattered or partially destroyed. "Are you ever going to get those materials back together so they can be studied? You're not. This is a great loss to humanity," says Samuel Paley, an archaeologist at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

There is, however, some good news: most of Iraq's archaeological treasures remain buried in its soil, awaiting discovery. "Archaeologically, Iraq is very underinvestigated," says Zimansky. "There's much work to be done there. And that, in the long term, is the hope. In another century, we could refill the museums."

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Iraq's libraries. The National Library in Baghdad, and several others, were destroyed in the aftermath of the war. Among their contents were Korans and other texts going back five hundred years, as well as more recent papers documenting the founding of the modern state of Iraq after the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. "The library is a disaster on a different level," says Irving Finkel, an archaeologist at the British Museum in London. "Burnt manuscripts are gone forever."