Lost To The Ages

PATRICK ROBERT/CORBIS FOR TIME
TRASHED: A storeroom at the Iraq Museum looked more like a garbage dump after looters went through it

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Now that it's too late to prevent the looting, El Radi and dozens of other archaeologists, archivists and cultural preservationists from around the world are working up a damage-control plan. The first priority, everyone agrees, is to try to figure out exactly what is missing; and on that score the news is bad, though perhaps not quite as horrifying as the reports from Baghdad had first suggested. One reason is that the Iraqi antiquities authorities took steps to keep some artifacts safe. For starters, they had long since gathered some of the most precious items from regional museums, figuring they would be easier to protect in Baghdad. They had also moved many items from the Iraq Museum into vaults at Iraq's national bank. The bank was looted as well, but it's not clear yet whether thieves got into these particular vaults.

But some priceless pieces are already known to be missing. Among them: a 3-ft. carved alabaster vase, circa 3200 B.C.; a black, headless statue of the Sumerian King Entemena, circa 2430 B.C.; a Sumerian sacred cup, circa 2600 B.C.; a copper head of an Akkadian ruler, circa 2350 B.C.; and a gold lyre from Ur, circa 2500 B.C. What else might be gone is anybody's guess.

Apart from the unknown number of items stolen, hundreds and perhaps thousands have been smashed beyond recognition. Says Donny George, research director at the Iraqi Board of Antiquities: "It may be weeks, months, before we know what's there and what isn't." Archaeologists are praying for the safety of what may be the world's oldest calendar, a 10,000-year-old pebble with 12 notches; of the Warka head, circa 3200 B.C., depicting a Sumerian woman in white marble; and of a group of 800 neo-Babylonian cuneiform clay tablets that form the world's oldest intact library, circa 550 B.C.

Figuring out what's gone and what remains won't be easy: duplicate records of the museum's holdings exist, but they're widely scattered; in any case, the museum's catalogs are probably outdated. Some experts also suspect that members of the museum staff have been stealing, both last week and possibly in previous years. Even those who doubt such involvement, such as Jeremy Black, an ancient Iraq specialist at the Oriental Institute at Oxford University, are hard-pressed to explain some of the thievery. "We've seen it stated that some of these looters got in with keys," he says. "How they got those keys, I don't know." Soldiers who have belatedly been assigned to guard the museum told TIME they had heard eyewitness reports of staff members' sneaking large packages out of the museum in the days before the looting. Perhaps they were simply taking the objects away for safeguarding, but, says Staff Sergeant David Richard of the 3rd Infantry Division, "there was some shady stuff going on."

The gutting of the national museum may be a blow to Iraq's historical heritage, but the looting and burning of the National Library and the Awqaf Library, which was the repository for material from private and mosque libraries throughout Iraq, are spiritual blows as well. Between them, the two libraries made Baghdad the largest, most valuable repository of Arabic books outside Cairo's al-Azhar Library. The National Library's prized collection included royal court records and thousands of documents from the earliest Islamic periods, along with thousands of books (many handwritten, some of them one of a kind) on Islamic law and practice. In the Awqaf Library, attached to the Ministry of Religious Endowments, was a priceless collection of handwritten Korans (some said to be over 1,000 years old), religious manuscripts and calligraphy. "People used to come to Baghdad from all over the world even from al-Azhar to read these works," says National Library director Ra'ad al-Bandar. "For religious scholars across the Muslim world, this is a time of mourning."

Like the museum, the libraries are belatedly under guard in this case by Syed Munem El-Musawi, imam of the Imam Ul Huq Ali Mosque, and a group of Kalashnikov-toting volunteers from the impoverished Sadr City area of Baghdad, known until the city's liberation as Saddam City. It is from here that many of the looters came as well, and, says Ahmad Khalaf, 26, a software-engineering student, "we want to show the world that not everybody from our neighborhood is a thief and a looter."

When the situation stabilizes, experts from UNESCO and the British Museum will fly to Baghdad to help local authorities assess the losses in detail. UNESCO has also issued a set of recommendations, including a prohibition on the export of antiques, antiquities, works of art, books and archives from Iraq, and an immediate ban on the international trade in objects of Iraqi cultural heritage. Others have suggested amnesties and rewards for returned art, crackdowns at border checkpoints and websites identifying the missing objects. Meanwhile, the FBI has assigned 25 agents in the region to assist in the recovery effort and plans to send others who are experts in tracking stolen art. "We are firmly committed to doing whatever we can to secure the return of these treasures to the people of Iraq," asserted FBI Director Robert Mueller.