Article by John Derbyshire |
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| Churning Twenty years ago I had a
conversation with a Chinese friend in London.
I had mentioned the fine collections of Chinese art and ceramics
that can be seen in that city, at places like the Percival
David Foundation and the British
Museum. Pooh!
said my friend, that stuff was all looted from China by foreigners during
the Imperialist period. “Well,”
I replied, “we should be thankful that it was.
If it had stayed in China, it would have been smashed up by Red
Guards during the Cultural Revolution!” ** This conversation came to mind
when I read last week’s newspaper articles about the looting of the
Iraqi National Museum. The
April 13 New York Times reported that 170,000 items had been
carried away from the museum by looters in the previous three days.
The stolen treasures represent the entire history of Mesopotamia.
This, remember, is where civilization got started, in the ancient
states of Sumer, Akkad, Babylon and Assyria.
Dr. Philippe de Montebello, director of New York’s own
Metropolitan Museum of Art, chided the American armed forces in Baghdad
for “allowing Iraq’s ancient heritage to be pillaged.” Though I love history and am a
big fan of museums, I didn’t shed any tears over this story. In a moment I shall offer an optimistic take on it.
Before proceeding, though, let’s just parse that last quote.
“Iraq’s ancient heritage”?
In what sense do these ancient artefacts belong to Iraq’s
heritage? The nation of Iraq
has only existed since 1932. Prior
to that, the “land of the two rivers” was a British colony.
Before that, it belonged to the Ottoman Empire.
Heading backwards through time beyond that, it belonged to the
White Sheep Turks, the Black Sheep Turks, the Timurids (another variety of
Turk), the Mongols, the Abassids (Arabs), the Seljuks (more Turks), the
Buwayhids (Persians), the Abbasids again, the Umayyads (more Arabs), the
Sassanids (Persian), the Arsacids (Parthian), the Seleucids
(Macedonian-Greek), the Persians again, the Babylonians, the Assyrians,
the Aramaeans, the Elamites, the Kassites, the Amorites, the Akkadians and
the Sumerians. That’s a considerable amount
of churning. The ethnic and
linguistic connections between, on the one hand, modern Iraqis, and on the
other, the people of Babylon, Nimrod, Nineveh and Ur, are tenuous, to say
the least of it. In the case
of the Sumerians, they are probably non-existent.
We know the ancient Sumerian language well — can even sing songs
in it. It has no relationship
whatever with any other known tongue.
The origin and ethnicity of the Sumerians are deeply mysterious. You might have as much Sumerian blood as the average Iraqi,
for all anybody knows to the contrary. To describe the contents of
the Iraqi National Museum as being “Iraq’s ancient heritage” is,
therefore, to stretch a point. In
fact, since everything we know of as civilization began in Mesopotamia
back in that dim past four or five thousand years ago, it would be just as
correct to refer to these treasures as comprising humanity’s
ancient heritage. They belong
to us all. Recall the
hillbilly’s objection to foreign languages: “The Gospels are written in English, ain’t they?
If English was good enough for Our Lord, it’s good enough for
me!” We laugh, but in a way
the hillbilly has a point. The
Gospels don’t belong to any one people, certainly not to the Hellenized
Jews who wrote them down in Greek 1,900 years ago.
They belong to all of us, and are equally at home anywhere. Besides, there is the point I
started out with. Whether you
think these treasures belong to Iraqis or to all mankind, they are
treasures none the less. They
should therefore be stored and displayed in the safest place we can think
of. Where would that be? Well,
that depends on what course you think world events are likely to take over
the next few decades. I
don’t believe Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad would be near the top of
anybody’s list, though. Saddam’s
regime was lawless, and its fall — however it fell — was bound to be
accompanied by civil chaos. It
seems, in fact, that the old despot had helped himself to some of the
museum treasures, and used them to adorn his own numerous palaces. At any point in history, some
parts of the world are civilized, and some are sunk in barbarism.
The civilized part of the world at present is what we call the West
— a term not to be taken with strict geographical seriousness, as it
includes places like Japan and Australia. The Arab countries, including Iraq, belong to the sphere of
barbarism, subject to unpredictable spasms of war, revolution, and chaos.
In the present age, priceless artefacts from mankind’s history
should be kept in the West as far as possible.
This gives them their best chance of surviving for another century
or two. (Note:
“the best chance.” Nothing
is certain, and the World Trade Center looked pretty safe until 19 months
ago. All I am asking is that
we do the best we can.) As a matter of fact, we may
reasonably hope that the West is precisely where the artefacts looted from
the Iraqi National Museum will end up sooner or later. The Times quotes Mohsen Hassan, a deputy curator of
the museum, as saying that many of the looters were middle-class people
who knew exactly what they were looking for.
My guess is that there were some museum employees among them.
No doubt Baghdad has a few people who would like to have a Sumerian
vase on their mantel shelf just to look at.
What the city undoubtedly has many more of, though, is
well-educated people who are utterly penniless.
These people know that even “priceless” objects do, in point of
fact, have prices — that private collectors in other countries will pay
large sums of money for them. Then, twenty or forty years in the future, when those
collectors pass on and their irresponsible heirs sell off their estates,
those objects will find their way to institutions here in the West. *
* * *
* I am therefore sanguine about
the looting of the Baghdad museum. Look
at it from the point of view of the average Sumerian golden harp.
Some artisan created you around 2900 B.C. for Queen Shub-Ad of Ur.
You adorned the palace for a few years.
Then, with the queen’s demise, you were shut up in her tomb,
along of course with her harpist. (Not
much point sending the queen to the next world with a harp if there was
no-one to play it for her!) There
you languished in silence and darkness for 48 centuries or so, while
empires rose and fell on the land that concealed you.
Eventually along came Sir Leonard
Woolley to dig you up. You
were dusted off, admired, sketched, photographed, and finally placed in a
glass case at the National Museum of newly-independent Iraq.
There you sat for 70 years — the blink of an eye by your
standards — until, during the American occupation of 2003, a low-level
employee of the Museum, seeing his chance in the chaos of occupation,
smashed the case, stuffed you into a sack and took you home. You were hidden on a high
shelf in this man’s wardrobe for some months, till things settled down
and contacts with the outside world resumed.
Then your custodian’s old boss from the museum came calling, and
in a rather roundabout conversation over coffee and hummus hinted
that he was in touch with several collectors in foreign countries eager to
locate vanished exhibits from the museum, and that if your custodian knew
of any such, it would be worth his while to pass on the information, in
strict confidentiality of course. Some
transactions ensued, as a consequence of which you found yourself on
display behind glass again, this time in the Zürich town house of a Swiss investment banker. The banker’s family enjoyed
three generations of wealth and security.
Then, in the great European disorders of the later 21st century,
they had to run for their lives to the USA, taking whatever they could
carry. Arriving penniless,
they sold the harp at auction, and it was acquired by a museum in Houston,
Texas... *
* * *
* I once knew a man in London
who collected beautiful things — paintings, antiques, fine old
furniture. His attitude to
those things was, so far as I am concerned, definitive.
“I don’t really own these things,” he would say.
“I’m just taking care of them.
After a while I will pass on.
Then someone else will acquire them, and they will take care of
them...” So it will be with
the Iraqi collection. Saddam
Hussein owned this treasure trove for a while.
He was hardly a fit person, though, and the pieces have now been
scattered to new owners. I
suppose that by the vagaries of fate, some will be lost or destroyed, but
I am sure most will surface again in the slow churning of time.
Time, after all, is what 5,000-year-old objects have plenty of.
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