Sherry Chandler » A culture destroyed
A culture destroyed
One of the things that I’ve found heartbreaking about the current war in Iraq is how destructive it has been of the ancient culture, and it is heartbreaking because, whatever you may think of the war, the cultural destruction could have been avoided with some care.
This report from The Independent gives some indication how bad it was:
Evidence of how quickly and irretrievably a country can be stripped of its cultural heritage came with the Iraq war in 2003.
The latest figures, presented to the art crime conference yesterday by John Curtis of the British Museum, suggested that half of the 40 iconic items from the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad still had not been retrieved. And of at least 15,000 items looted from its storerooms, about 8,000 have yet to be traced.
About 4,000 of the objects taken from the museum had been recovered in Iraq. But illustrating the international demand for such antiquities, Dr Curtis said around 1,000 had been confiscated in the US, 500 pieces had been impounded in France, 250 in Switzerland and 200 or so in Jordan.
Juan Cole identifies the piece pictured as The Lady of Uruk (3100 B.C.) Recovered September 2003 north of Baghdad. Uruk was the great city of Gilgamesh. Here are the ending words of that epic:
Gilgamesh said to Urshanabi, the ferryman:
“Go up, Urshanabi, onto the wall of Uruk and walk around.
Examine its foundation, inspect its brickwork thoroughly–
is not (even the core of) the brick structure of kiln-fired brick,
and did not the Seven Sages themselves lay out its plan!
One league city, one league palm gardens, one league lowlands, the open area(?) of the Ishtar Temple,
three leagues and the open area(?) of Uruk it encloses.
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2 Comments
1. MW replies at 25th May 2005, 1:32 am :
So far as I’m concerned the destruction of cultural artifacts is, apart from actively killing them, one of the gravest injustices any culture can visit upon another. It denies their history, degrades their art, and shows utter contempt for them as human beings. Even with all the fighting, I believe we could have been more careful, and more respectful, of these artifacts.
But then, that doesn’t look good on the evening news, does it?
2. Sherry Chandler&hellip replies at 21st December 2005, 6:36 am :
[...] nt Mesopotamia, the area that we now call Iraq. Those famous walls and towers of Uruk that Gilgamesh loved so well were used to make observations of the planets and the stars and to map their patterns. T [...]
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