Baghdad Museum Research Articles

Art and Empire: On Oil, Antiquities, and the War in Iraq

I. VIEWING THE PLIGHT OF IRAQI ANTIQUITIES It is undoubtedly a sign of our times that Matthew Bogdanos, the reserve Marine Corps colonel who led the investigation into the April 2003 looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, has become somewhat of a celebrity spokesperson for the cause of Iraqi antiquities. Bogdanos, who earned an M.A. in Classical Studies and a Law degree from Columbia, served as an Assistant District Attorney in Manhattan prior to the events of September 11, 2001. Living near the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan, his family narrowly escaped the devastation of the attacks, making their way on foot through the chaos and confusion uptown, like many other New Yorkers on that dreadful day. The events prompted Bogdanos to return to active military duty, and he joined a counter-terrorism force in Afghanistan, eventually becoming part of a military team that helped draft plans for the early phases of 'Operation Iraqi Freedom'. 'I love the action and the challenges I experience in the military--I make no bones about that', he stated in his 2005 book describing these events, which claims to be a serious account of the investigation into the looting of the Baghdad Museum, titled Thieves of Baghdad. The book's subtitle, One Marine's Passion for Ancient Civilisations and the Journey to Recover the Worlds Greatest Stolen Treasures, however, announces the true spirit of the work: part military autobiography, part Indiana Jones-style treasure hunt, and part wartime thriller--even the Washington Post viewed the book as 'symptomatic of a new hubris in certain military and political circles'. (1) Although Bogdanos is donating the royalties from the volume (co-written with 'ghost-writer', William Patrick) to the Iraq Museum, he sold the story rights to a Hollywood production company that, in partnership with Warner Brothers, has been responsible for such contemporary releases as Terminator 3 and Superman Returns. 'This is one of the most dramatic stories of the war in Iraq', the producer of the soon-to-be-film version of Bogdanos' book explained in the showbiz journal, Variety. 'It's a compelling adventure, with intrigue, grit and pathos'. (2) Meanwhile, President Bush personally rewarded Bogdanos with the National Humanities Medal in 2005, an award that honours individuals whose work 'has deepened the nation's understanding of the humanities'. What is immediately striking about Bogdanos' book, and his range of efforts--some of them successful--to recuperate objects that were looted from the Baghdad Museum, is the way in which his mission to protect Iraqi antiquities feeds and sustains the larger premises and procedures of the American 'liberation and rescue' of Iraq. Bogdanos, paradoxically, does not oppose the conditions that gave rise to the destruction of material culture in Iraq in the first place. On the contrary, he is a loyal proponent of military culture, and he defends the American failure to protect the museum on those fateful days following the invasion on the tactical grounds that it was 'too dangerous' for American soldiers. Moreover, his personal story, proceeding from the assault on Manhattan to the retaliation in Afghanistan to the necessity of 'regime change' in Iraq, reinforces the fictional links between the events of 9/11 and the rule of Saddam Hussein, however oppressive, so actively promoted by the Bush administration. In the meantime, the real story--a human tragedy of epic proportion--remains only partially narrated: the story of damage to the ancient material culture of Iraq through looting and the destruction of archaeological sites resulting from the first Gulf War, the economic conditions caused by UN imposed sanctions, and the current occupation, now entering its sixth long year, that has unleashed a series of catastrophic civil wars in the country. Given these contexts, it seems both predictable and unacceptable that a military spokesman like Bogdanos has come to represent the face of the humanities at a national level. …

Baghdad Museum to Reopen

Baghdad Museum to Reopen

In This Issue: Art That Insists: Persistence with Urgency

In This Issue: Art That Insists? Persistence with Urgency The Winter 2003 issue of Art Journal featured a thoughtful and alarming forum on the looting and destruction of historical objects from Iraqi museums and other institutions following the early stages of the United States-led invasion and the now legendary, blundering boast of a mission accomplished. Three years later, the lamentable conflict and cultural assault remain strikingly unresolved, increas ingly violent, and deeply unsettling. Interspersed throughout this issue are images from Perry Bard's project Status: Stolen. White silhou ettes?blanks or absences?placed on orange-alert backgrounds signify a handful of the many historical artifacts plundered from the Baghdad Museum during the first days of a seemingly inter minable occupation. This vivid physical evidence remains missing in action?an erasure of a past that renders the present and future vulnerable and incomplete.With so many others, I wish that Bards eloquently restrained project, introduced here in a text by Gregory Sholette, had become less relevant?no longer so urgently conse quential?but I am grateful for the vigilance it stimulates. Other features in this issue vividly extend a faceted and nuanced conversa tion on how and why art and artists communicate consequentially in the world. A number of the texts deploy a deliberately dialogic or dialectical structure to puzzle through the many roles of art and artists. Saloni Mathur's pursuit of ideas of collaboration, doubleness, and cultural and artistic identity in the work of Amrit and Rabindra Singh, identical twin sisters, analytically diagrams their introspective, twinned practice. Coauthors Chris Mills and Nick Muellner, by contrast, orchestrate a dialogical text?a speculative intellectual duet on repre sentations of thinking, learning, and pedagogy represented in the work of selected modern and contemporary photographers and filmmakers. And Doug Ashford, Wendy Ewald, and Nina Felshin join me in a discursive, deeply felt conversation on past and present practices, fruitful opportunities and formidable risks, and the inherent political and critical dimensions of artists' social collaborations. With dramatically different subjects in mind (sex in the museum and nor malizing, hegemonic art-historical practices), Kelly Dennis and Carolyn Dean examine how epistemological and disciplinary systems of naming and categor izing art often trouble our relationships and responses to objects and artifacts, Presenting another context that problematizes what and whom art is for, Natasha Goldman examines the intricate relationship of art, architecture, memory, and trauma atYad Vashem in Jerusalem. She examines the transitions and transforma tions of public representations of loss and memory, silence and observation that recognize not only victims but also survivors, and she traces this development in the evolving theories and spaces of contemporary memorialization. In the first of a series of thought pieces on graduate-level studio-art education ?the MFA and other postbaccalaureate programs and degrees?Timothy Emlyn Jones describes the studio-art doctorate in Europe and defends its application and viability for United States programs and curricula. Subsequent contributors will present contrasting perspectives on this field and its pedagogy in an unset tled time.

Breaking and Entering

Mural-sized, spartanly rendered, cunningly mobile, Perry Bard's public artwork Status: Stolen rolled through the streets of Manhattan one month last summer, seemingly entreating passersby, “Have you seen these missing objects?” “Are you aware what goes on in your name?” Bard's project depicted five renowned Near Eastern artifacts pilfered from the Baghdad Museum during the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Set against a saffron-color field, the missing treasures were rendered as empty, white voids, clinically dated and labeled with their places of origin. The entire graphic was then mounted to the side of a seven-by-twenty-one-foot private mover's truck, which went about its routine pickups and deliveries carrying the artist's project along with it.

Art That Insists—Persistence with Urgency

The Winter 2003 issue of Art Journal featured a thoughtful and alarming forum on the looting and destruction of historical objects from Iraqi museums and other institutions following the early stages of the United States-led invasion and the now legendary, blundering boast of a “mission accomplished.” Three years later, the lamentable conflict and cultural assault remain strikingly unresolved, increasingly violent, and deeply unsettling. Interspersed throughout this issue are images from Perry Bard's project Status: Stolen. White silhouettes—blanks or absences—placed on orange-alert backgrounds signify a handful of the many historical artifacts plundered from the Baghdad Museum during the first days of a seemingly interminable occupation. This vivid physical evidence remains missing in action—an erasure of a past that renders the present and future vulnerable and incomplete. With so many others, I wish that Bard's eloquently restrained project, introduced here in a text by Gregory Sholette, had become less relevant—no longer so urgently consequential—but I am grateful for the vigilance it stimulates.

The Nimrud Letters, 1952: Part VIII

It is appropriate that the eleven letters here published, mostly concerned with imperial and military administration in the Assyrian Empire, should be dedicated to my teacher Professor Sidney Smith on the occasion of his seventy-seventh birthday, since to him I owe both the origin of my interest in this subject, and also invaluable assistance in my initial steps towards the interpretation of letters of this collection.This publication, like that of previous sections of my ‘Nimrud Letters, 1952’, is to be taken as provisional only, since there still remain to be edited and published almost another hundred letters or fragments of letters, the contents of which may throw further light upon letters already published or necessitate some modifications of conclusions previously drawn from them. I am planning to publish all the Nimrud Letters in book form, with full grammatical and historical discussions, and to assist towards this project I have already collated all those Nimrud Letters previously published which are now in the Baghdad Museum; since these letters have been cleaned since I originally copied them, collation has in a number of instances produced improved readings.

Ancient near Eastern Seals in Birmingham Collections

The purpose of this article is to make available to specialists and others interested the resources of Birmingham in the matter of ancient Near Eastern Seals. As would be expected, the lion's share comes from the City Museum, and I am indebted to Nicholas Thomas, Keeper of the Department of Archaeology, for permission to study and publish this material. His assistant, John Ruffle, has helped me by gathering the material together and in every other way. Miss Tess Martin, also of the City Museum, has kindly made impressions of all the seals published here.Of the 56 seals in the City Museum, 42, numbered 541’65–582’65, were received quite recently as a bequest from Air Commodore E. St. Clair Harnett. He served as an officer in the Royal Air Force in Iraq shortly after the First World War, and assisted the late Miss Gertrude Bell in her founding of the Baghdad Museum. He is mentioned in her letters as “Squadron Leader Harnett”, and it is appropriate that his collection should be published in Iraq, the Gertrude Bell Memorial. A notebook accompanying the seals records that they were collected in Baghdad between 1922 and 1927. Only in one case, now numbered 566’65, does it record the source of a seal, as Kish. Of the other 14 seals (all received from other donors), five, 552’62–556’62, were given by Woolley, and need not have come from Ur, since they are not included in the official publications.

Antiquities Law, Iraq

The Iraqi Government is proposing to supersede the Antiquities Law drawn up eleven years ago, and approved by the League of Nations, by one which will admittedly be far more onerous to the foreign excavator working in Iraq. As a prelude to the introduction of the bill before the Iraqi Parliament there has been a regular campaign of propaganda intended to show that under the existing law Iraq has been robbed, by concessions made to foreign missions, of the treasures which were legally and morally hers, and that Iraq never has had fair treatment and will not have it so long as the division of the objects from excavations is conducted by a foreign Director of Antiquities. To what lengths this campaign has been carried may be illustrated by the following: in March 1934 Abdal Rizaq Effendi, the Curator of the Baghdad Museum, personally repeated to me the statement, published in the local press, that the normal share accruing to the Baghdad Museum from the division of antiquities with a foreign mission, as conducted by the Director, was no more than one half of one per cent. of the objects catalogued.

Further links between Ancient Sind, Sumer and elsewhere

During my leave to England in the spring of 1930, I revisited Iraq to acquaint myself further with the objects on view in the Baghdad Museum. As a result of excavations since I left that country the museum had acquired a large increase of material that I was not familiar with before, and I am now able to add to the links between the cultures of the Indus Valley and of Sumer which I have already pointed out in Mohenjo-dam and the Indus CiviZization,' to be published almost immediately.On plate 146,fig. 43, of that book there is reproduced a red carnelian bead, bearing a somewhat elaborate design in white, that was found in the uppermost levels of the vs area. Several almost exactly similar beads found by Woolley in the early graves at Ur are now in the Baghdad Museum. The slight difference between the two designs, in that there are concentric circles on this first found Indian bead of the type in place of the single circles on the specimens from Ur, is negligible in face of the general similarity ; and especially in view of the fact that another of these beads has since been discovered at Mohenjo-daro with single circles, so that the design is identical with that on the beads from Ur (fig. 2).

Reports from Professor Dougherty; His Explorations in Iraq; the School to Be Housed in the New Baghdad Museum

Next article FreeReports from Professor Dougherty; His Explorations in Iraq; the School to Be Housed in the New Baghdad MuseumR. P. DoughertyR. P. Dougherty Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Bulletin of the American Society of Overseas Research Volume 22April 1926 A journal of the American Schools of Oriental Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/1355014 Views: 2Total views on this site Journal History This article was published in the Bulletin of the American School of Oriental Research (1921-2021), which is continued by the Bulletin of the American Schools of Overseas Research (2022-present). PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.