From pillage and plunder to deliberate destruction: What is left of Near Eastern archaeological remains?

15 March 2015

Following the theft and burning of 8,000 ancient manuscripts and rare books belonging to Mosul Library in Iraq, ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) attacked Neo-Assyrian (900–612 BCE) and Parthian antiquities (150–40 BCE) held in the city’s museum.

In fact, on 29 February, the Jihadist organisation posted video footage online showing some of their members destroying, with pneumatic drills, originals and replicas of statues and bas-reliefs from Nineveh and Hatra on display in the museum. They also posted footage showing the destruction of monumental representations of winged guardian bulls on the Nergal Gate at the ancient site of Nineveh, claiming that they were pagan representations which have been updated by the West. According to some sources, the video was shot in August 2014.

Nineveh, situated at Tell Nebi Yunus (the location of the prophet Jonas’s tomb, destroyed last July), is without doubt the most famous among the Assyrian capitals on account of its vast size, as recorded in biblical texts. In his palace, King Ashurbanipal left a huge scholarly library in the form of clay tablets bearing the literary and scientific output of Mesopotamia, including the Epic of Gilgamesh with its version of the Great Flood, predating the one that appears in the Bible. Later on, classical authors confused Nineveh with the great city of Babylon, locating it on the Euphrates rather than on the Tigris. Herodotus had it that Shammuramat, the mother and regent of the Assyrian king Adad-nirari III (810–783), was the legendary Semiramis, Queen of Babylon. This misapprehension encouraged the British Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley to seek the famous “Hanging Gardens of Babylon” (one of the seven Wonders of the World) at Nineveh, where the said gardens were depicted in bas-reliefs and described in texts.[1]

The Mosul Museum also contains discoveries unearthed at Kalhu (present day Nimrud), another Assyrian capital of King Ashurnazirpal II (883–859), and of his son Salmanazar III (858–824), where the walls of the palace were adorned with bas-reliefs. At the time of its rediscovery in the nineteenth century, the city was initially mistaken for ancient Nineveh.

ISIS occupied Mosul and the Nineveh area for several months and imposed their law. At the university, male and female students were separated before pursuing courses whose content was drastically modified. But already for some twenty-five years the cultural heritage of Iraq had been pillaged and devasted by successive wars. The thefts started at the time of the first Gulf War in 1990 and the embargo imposed on Iraq by the United Nations, which left the population utterly destitute. How can a starving smallholder be blamed for selling a cuneiform tablet in order to feed his family? But this looting of antiquities was highly organised and increased massively at the time of the American invasion in 2003 and the ransacking of the National Museum of Bagdad. Almost a third of the 15,000 objects stolen at that time have been recovered, but 5,000 cylinder seals bearing scenes engraved in miniature were still missing when the museum finally reopened its doors to the public. Pits were dug at many sites in the south of Iraq by people searching for antiquities to sell; Umma, Larsa and Isin resembled the surface of the Moon. Other sites, such as Babylon, were severely damaged by the establishment of military bases. In total, the country boasts more than 10,000 listed archaeological sites; in the south, over a third of them have been irreparably damaged.

Unfortunately, Iraq is not the only country in the Near East to have lost its past. In Syria, in addition to a terrible human toll — approaching 200,000 deaths — something like 300 archaeological sites have been pillaged, despoiled or destroyed since the beginning of the conflict in 2011! For example, serious damage has been suffered by Alep, Damas, Palmyra and Ebla, whose twenty-fourth century BCE palace held in its archives the very first international diplomatic correspondence, neatly arranged in rows on shelves. Likewise Mari (Tell Hariri), on the Middle Euphrates, the jewel of French archaeology since 1933, has also suffered damage. The palace of Zimri-Lim (the king of Mari in the twenty-eighth century BCE) is spread out over roughly 2.5 hectares; it accommodated several hundred people and held close to 15,000 cuneiform tablets that constituted the king’s archives and those of his forebears. Satellite images show the extent of the illegal excavations which have taken place on the site since the end of 2014: thenceforward the land has been riddled by more than 1,300 craters! The Syrian ruins have not been not spared the presence of personnel: members of the regime, rebels and jihadists. In Syria, as in Iraq, the trade in antiquities is controlled by ISIS; this is one of the ways in which their armed struggle is financed. Only the large unsellable items, such as the statues from the Mosul Museum, or the winged bull of Nineveh, have been reduced to rubble, deliberately staged acts of destruction intended to serve as jihadist propaganda. The sums of money reaped through the sale of antiquities are very considerable, the sellers making themselves complicit in the misappropriation of the world’s cultural heritage. Once severed from their archaeological context, the objects will have lost part of their intrinsic historical information when they eventually resurface; as for the remainder, they simply do not exist as far as scientists are concerned, having never been inventoried.

Who will help the Syrian, Iraqi and international archaeologists who are struggling to put an end to the pillage at its source and to record the damage which has already been sustained? Many have launched appeals to enlist governments and populations to counteract this situation: the Assyriologists and archaeologists who study these ancient civilizations; UNESCO by cautioning against the trafficking of antiquities; and the UN’s Security Council which has adopted a resolution to campaign against the trafficking of antiquities, thereby cutting off the flow of money to ISIS. But how can this madness truly be stopped?

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The International Association for Assyriology, which brings together researchers from all over the world who study cuneiform texts and the archaeology of the Near East, has launched an urgent appeal for the preservation of the ancient sites, monuments and museums of Syria and Iraq.

[1] Dalley, Stephanie (2013), The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon. An Elusive World Wonder Traced, Oxford: Oxford University Press.