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Why should anyone care about ancient cultures? And why should an ordinary citizen in the United States, for instance, care about what happens to an old object buried in the sands of Iraq? “It's the cradle of civilization,” says Professor McGuire Gibson, who teaches Mesopotamian archaeology at the University of Chicago. Ancient Iraq is “the place where we get the first cities, the first writing, the first thoughts about man’s relationship to God, the first ideas about death. It's the first recorded literature that we have.” Simply, it’s “the first everything,” according to Elizabeth Stone, an archaeologist with the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Six thousand years ago, the region now known as Iraq was Mesopotamia, a civilization that rose along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The region was home to rich cultures that operated under quasi-democratic systems, shared written literature and poetry, built armies and temples, and fostered the invention of plows, irrigation, and sanitation systems. In an article in Natural History in February 2001, Professor John Russell of the Massachusetts College of Art wrote about ancient Iraq’s cultural heritage, “The emergence of complex communities was accompanied by developments such as writing, the wheel, irrigation agriculture, cities, monumental architecture, state-sponsored warfare, organized religion, written laws, kingship, a wealthy class, imperialism, centrally organized production of hand-crafted goods, and large-scale trade. By and large, the first eleven chapters of Genesis are set in southern Iraq…. Mesopotamian royal gardens, notably the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, may have inspired the story of the Garden of Eden.” The few Western scholars who visited the National Museum of Iraq in recent decades said its holdings were unparalleled. “It contained the full archive of 10,000 years of human history,” said Dr. Russell. “If you wanted to see everything from the first villages in 8000 B.C. to the Mongol invasion in 1258 A.D., the only place in the world you could get it all, and in incredible depth, was Baghdad.” In addition to their enormous monetary and historic value, these objects from Baghdad include creations of the highest artistic quality. H. W. Janson wrote in History of Art that they are “An artistic achievement…on the level of the finest works of Egyptian Old Kingdom sculpture” and “in the company of the greatest works of any period.” But even a simple cuneiform tablet used to keep records of ordinary daily life connects us to ancient human history and evolving civilization. Created several millennia ago, it bears some of the oldest writing known to humankind. This is a tangible and powerful connection to the physical reality of the past. Looking at the precisely drawn cuneiform signs, we can imagine the scribe holding it in his hand, inscribing the message with a reed stylus, never imagining that thousands of years later people would continue to value his handiwork. That man can still speak to us—if the tablet is preserved, studied, and translated. What a sad fate if instead it is destroyed, or sold on eBay as a curiosity. The idea that our children might not be able to walk into a museum and examine that piece of clay is unthinkable. Amidst political turmoil, and tremendous humanitarian needs, why should we worry about culture and antiquities? One answer is that “wars end, and shattered lives, communities and societies must be rebuilt.” (Nature, Vol 423, 29 May 2003) In other words, the physical fabric of the past is vital to the moral and spiritual fabric of the present and future. Several scholars note that the lost artifacts also might play a role in rebuilding Iraq because of their potential to unify the disparate ethnic and religious groups through a shared cultural heritage across time and space. Dr. Stone said that this focus on the cultural unity embodied in the artifacts could help promote a democratic society. “It had a culture that ranged across many regions from the south to the north, but they all used the same writing system and worshiped the same gods.” (The New York Times, April 20, 2003) The looting jeopardizes the possibility of using this model of cultural unity as inspiration and roadmap. It is the past’s relevance to the present and future that made what happened in Iraq a tragedy greater than any cultural theft since the Nazi era. Our challenge is to deliver this message to the general public in a clear, concise manner. WHAT HAPPENED TO ANTIQUITIES IN IRAQ? HOW WERE TREASURES PLUNDERED IN THE MUSEUMS? |
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