- BAGHDAD -- The famed Iraq
National Museum, home of extraordinary Babylonian, Sumerian and Assyrian
collections and rare Islamic texts, sat empty Saturday -- except for shattered
glass display cases and cracked pottery bowls that littered the floor.
-
- In an unchecked frenzy of cultural theft, looters who
pillaged government buildings and businesses after the collapse of Saddam
Hussein's regime also targeted the museum.
-
- Gone were irreplaceable archaeological treasures from
the Cradle of Civilization.
-
- Everything that could be carried out has disappeared
from the museum -- gold bowls and drinking cups, ritual masks worn in funerals,
elaborately wrought headdresses, lyres studded with jewels -- priceless
craftsmanship from ancient Mesopotamia.
-
- "This is the property of this nation and the treasure
of 7,000 years of civilization. What does this country think it is doing?"
asked Ali Mahmoud, a museum employee, futility and frustration in his voice.
-
- Much of the looting occurred Thursday, according to a
security guard who stood by helplessly as hoards broke into the museum
with wheelbarrows and carts and stole priceless jewelry, clay tablets and
manuscripts.
-
- Left behind were row upon row of empty glass cases --
some smashed up, others left intact -- heaps of crumbled pottery and hunks
of broken statues scattered across the exhibit floors.
-
- Sensing its treasures could be in peril, museum curators
secretly removed antiquities from their display cases before the war and
placed them into storage vaults -- but to no avail.
-
- The doors of the vaults were opened or smashed, and everything
was taken, museum workers said.
-
- Gordon Newby, a historian and professor of Middle Eastern
studies at Emory University in Atlanta, said the museum's most famous holding
may have been tablets with Hammurabi's Code -- one of mankind's earliest
codes of law.
-
- Other treasures believed to be housed at the museum --
such as the Ram in the Thicket from Ur, a statue representing a deity from
2600 B.C. -- are no doubt gone, perhaps forever, he said.
-
- "This is just one of the most tragic things that
could happen for our being able to understand the past," Newby said.
-
- A museum employee, reduced to tears after coming to the
museum Saturday and finding her office and all administrative offices trashed
by looters, said:
-
- "It is all the fault of the Americans. This is Iraq's
civilization. And it's all gone now." > > ProletarianNews >
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