Iraq and Ruin

Such recordkeeping has a strong precedent in Iraq, with the government's Department of Antiquities. As Baghdad regains a semblance of order, experts say the Department of Antiquities, now in chaos, will be the best hope for the salvation of Iraqi artifacts. "They know how to run the antiquities of Iraq," Dr. Armstrong says, "They don't need to reinvent the wheel: The laws, the procedures, the necessary bureaucracy, the people who know how to do this are largely available. What they need is support."

Meantime, at least during daylight hours, the National Museum staff can begin assessing damage to its catalogs.

"Everything depends on the catalogs," says Richard Zettler of the University of Pennsylvania. If Iraqi antiquities authorities want help from Western scholars, he says, and "if their inventories are more or less intact, we can go right to searching for what's missing, preparing what was damaged to be exhibited once more. If not, rebuilding them will be very time consuming."

That, he explains, would mean countries pooling field records and catalogs of objects from hundreds of digs in Iraq from the 1920s through the early '90s to determine what artifacts other museums have in their collections - and what the Baghdad museum should have had.

Scholars hold out hope that some of the museum's best-known stolen artifacts will prove too famous to smuggle or sell, and may yet be recovered. "Like that bronze head of the Akkadian ruler with his eyes gouged out? That picture's in every high school history book. You can't sell that," Dr. Zimansky says.

At the Paris meeting last Thursday, UNESCO Director-General Koichiro Matsuura urged the UN to impose a temporary international embargo on Iraqi cultural objects. Others - including US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld - say they are in the process of offering rewards for the return of museum pieces.

In fact, if the objects make it to national borders, that return will be mandated by international law - particularly a 1970 UNESCO convention which prohibits the import of objects stolen from museums or cultural institutions, and requires their return, according to Patty Gerstenblith, professor of law at DePaul University and a member of the President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property. In addition, she says, since 1936 Iraq has vested ownership of all its artifacts (excavated or not) in its national government, so any object removed without permission since then is stolen property under national law - and thus also under US customs law and the National Stolen Property Act.

US laws on this matter are not insignificant, experts agree. Since looting of Iraqi sites began in the chaos following the 1991 Gulf War and continued amid crushing poverty under the US embargo, "this stuff moves through middlemen in Turkey and Iran in a straight line into North America, Europe, and Japan," Armstrong says. "So what happens effectively is the West looting a prostrate country."

Sensitive to this dynamic, and to a deep conviction throughout Iraq that US troops have selectively protected oil fields and palaces at the expense of archaeological treasures, some in the museum community have begun to consider repatriating small artifacts, and replicas of larger ones, as gestures of goodwill.

After all, they say, Iraqi artifacts don't matter just to Iraqis. Ancient Mesopotamia spans fully half of recorded human history: The Sumerians, Babylonians, Akkadians, and Assyrians are ancestors of us all. These are the people who brought you the 60-minute hour, the 360-degree circle, the signs of the zodiac, city life, criminal courts, and social mobility.

But amid all the outcry over looted Mesopotamian treasures, it's perhaps the period's least-discussed legacy that could prove most significant for Iraq today.

"If you want to find a symbol for a post-Saddam secular Iraq, that symbol would have to be Mesopotamia," Dr. Stone says. "It's the only other time in history you have a single political system, a single pantheon, a single written and spoken language in both northern and southern Iraq. This is no little thing here."

• Philip Smucker in Babylon, Iraq, contributed to this report.

Page: 1 | 2