In one episode, Bahrani said she watched a bulldozer plow through previously unearthed portions of Babylon while a military officer insisted that coalition forces were working to protect the site. “I felt like I was in a Marx Brothers movie,” she said. “It was just completely surreal.” The base was closed and the site turned over to the Iraqi Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities in January 2005. But now the ancient city of Ur is also at risk, archaeologists say, from an encroaching military base. “At this point, we don’t know the extent of the damage,” said Bahrani. “I don’t think they’ll ever be able to live this down. It’s already become part of the history of this war.” A spokesman for the U.S. multinational forces in Iraq referred questions about Ur, Babylon and other sites to the Iraqi Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities in Baghdad, which did not respond to requests for comment and which seems to have its own problems with disorder. On May 19, the Iraqi news Web site Azzaman reported that U.S. military forces had twice raided the ministry’s offices, drawing the ire of Iraqi officials. “This action is a violation of the ancient Iraqi heritage,” Chairman of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage Abbas Al-Husseini said in a statement, according to Azzaman. Also in May, Zuhair Sharba, the owner of hotels in Najaf, was nominated by the Nouri Maliki government to be minister of tourism and antiquities as part of a broader cabinet shuffle, according to press reports, but it’s unclear what his powers or policies will be. Meanwhile, antiquities continue to leave the country, with goods offered for sale on Web sites in the Middle East and showing up in European auction houses. Gibson of the University of Chicago suggested that people searching for looted antiquities start by checking their own mantelpieces. “In the ’90s, a lot of stuff came out of Iraq in diplomatic pouches,” he said. But nowadays, objects are leaving Iraq in much greater volume—using smuggling routes by many of the same people who are trading drugs, weapons and other sources that contribute to Iraq’s shadow economy. Many experts figure the trade in antiquities is helping to fund insurgent and other armed groups, a notion suggested in “Thieves of Baghdad,” U.S. Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos’s account of the looting of the National Museum and the recovery of some objects. Unlike many end-users of drugs and weapons, however, antiquity collectors tend to be wealthy people whose social status rises in proximity to the exotic objects they amass. “They’re buying social prominence and laundering their stolen goods,” said Gibson. Once a piece of pottery or clay tablet leaves Iraq, it’s difficult to prove where it came from. In addition, for every illicit object that reaches the marketplace, hundreds are discarded. Pilfered clay tablets, if not stored in proper conditions, will simply turn to dust. Out of context, cleaned of ancient dirt and removed from the other materials that could add to the understanding of the object, an ancient relic can quickly lose its meaning. William Pearlstein, a lawyer who served as treasurer for the American Council for Cultural Policy, a group representing museums and collectors, contends that few of Iraq’s relics are reaching U.S. shores. But other experts disagree and argue that plenty of objects are making it over to the United States. They claim that even universities have purchased large batches of materials that turned out to be of questionable provenance and therefore extremely problematic to study. “Unfortunately, there are collectors in Europe, the United States and even Japan that are just buying the antiquities and hiding them,” charged Donny George Youkhanna, who headed the Iraqi National Museum at the time of the fall of Baghdad and is now a visiting professor at Stony Brook. Youkhanna, who sealed and bricked up the National Museum after its initial looting to protect what remained, said there are ongoing efforts to reconstitute security forces at the sites, but they have been inadequate and underfunded. Some archaeologists favor keeping control of antiquities with the nation in which they are found. Pearlstein, however, favors a policy of “limited deaccession,” or private ownership of some items, by which “excess inventory” such as duplicate items and items that are not museum-quality could be sold to collectors. “It’s the countries that nationalize everything in the ground that have the real problems,” he said. Archaeologists such as Stone and Gibson counter that collectors need to stop driving the market and that keeping national relics within their nation maintains scientific integrity. They also point out that museums already display items they do not own, on long-range loans with the nations that control them. “I don’t see why the institutions think they have to own objects,” said Stone. “Why should you own the past?” Sanjay Talwani is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat.

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