Ancient statues lost in the waters of the Tigris River

30 April 2018

Since ancient times, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have served as waterways, particularly for the transportation of bulky goods. However, the Tigris is now used less often, because not only is its flow rather irregular, but it also passes through regions riven by political differences and which are often at war, a situation which renders its navigation a dangerous proposition.

The river rises in the Taurus mountains in Turkey; it then crosses Syria and Iraq, passing through Mosul and Bagdad. In the south, in the marshlands, the Tigris meets up once again with the Euphrates and forms the Shatt-el-Arab, which eventually discharges into the Persian Gulf. At the beginning of the twentieth century ce, the lower part of the river, close to the city of Basra, which remains a troubled area, crossed areas inhabited by Arab clans which often rebelled. It is within this zone that many boats loaded with ancient bas-reliefs and statuary sank in the waters of the Tigris, resulting in the irrecoverable loss of Assyrian and Babylonian antiquities.

The first ‘antiquities shipwreck’ happened in the middle of the nineteenth century. This incident took place during the shipping to France of various antiquities discovered at Mesopotamian sites. The French consul, Victor Place, had resumed the excavation of the palace built in around 710 BCE by the Assyrian king Sargon II at Dur-Sharrukin (Khorsabad). Unearthed at the site were some monumental statues of human-headed winged bulls, some bas-reliefs of genies which adorned the palace, and various other objects. In the centre of Iraq, the expedition headed by Fulgence Fresnel and Jules Oppert had undertaken some explorations at Babylon. The excavated antiquities should have been transported by small vessels to Basra, and then loaded on to a French ship that sailed from Nantes in January 1855. Unfortunately, the small vessels never arrived at their destination. Victor Place, in his published writings, comments very little about this incident.

Maurice Pillet reconstructed the series of events that occurred and presented the results of his investigation before the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in 1916. About forty crates from Fresnel’s mission, and some bas-reliefs originating from excavations carried out by the English at Nineveh and Kalhu, were loaded on to a boat chartered at Bagdad. The crates of antiquities from Dur-Sharrukin, together with two human-headed winged bulls, each weighing some 32 tonnes, were loaded on to four keleks (wooden rafts). The shipment consisting of 235 crates, in addition to some monumental sculptures, was entrusted to man named Clement. Alas, he was an unlucky man. The boat owner had substituted another vessel in a poor state of repair (instead of the one agreed upon) and had overloaded it with goods of his own. The dam at Om-el-Heunch which had collapsed a few years earlier, already resulting in the disappearance of a British vessel loaded with antiquities in 1850, had not yet been repaired. The Arab clans were in a state of rebellion, and the shipment was looted more than once. On 21 May 1855, at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, the boat foundered ‘three miles north of Kournah’. Three of the keleks were also attacked, the crates unloaded, and the wood of the crates hauled away. The forth kelek, carrying a human-headed winded bull, sank in deep water. In the end, only 28 crates were salvaged, and six months later a winged bull was recovered from the mud, together with a genie weighing fourteen tonnes. All the discoveries of Fresnel’s mission, along with the bas-reliefs from Nineveh and Kalhu, were lost.

Sixty years later, during the First World War, a second ‘antiquities shipwreck’ occurred quite close by, in the same area. According to the director of the new museum at Basra, Qahtan al-Obaid, two British boats coming from the North where fired upon by the Ottoman army and as a result sank in the Tigris. One was a military vessel, the other a mailboat. A team of Japanese archaeologists carried out an investigation in the 1970s, believing that the antiquities had been loaded on to the mailboat. However, Qahtan al-Obaid, who hopes to rediscover the wreck, believes that the relics, on account of their weight, were in fact loaded on to the military vessel. According to the British archives, the vessel was carrying about one thousand objects of Iraqi cultural heritage, including monumental statues of winged bulls. A cannon, which could have been one of eight cannons on the British military vessel, was discovered by some workers while they were working on the construction of a suspension bridge. For Qahtan al-Obaid, this discovery suggests that the military boat had attempted to continue its journey towards the sector held by the British. He is therefore preparing to investigate the wreck in that location by probing the deep waters of the river with the help of radar equipment.

If one of these sunken vessels were to be discovered, nothing guarantees that there will be anything left of the ancient statues and bas-reliefs that went down with them. Without doubt they will have been eroded by the churning waters of the Tigris River.