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| Sifting through torched manuscripts in Timbuktu |
“Looting has been a
part of war at least since 333 B.C., when Alexander the Great strolled into the
tent of King Darius III, helped himself to the vanquished Persian's best
tapestries and commandeered the royal bathtub for a soothing victory soak.”
“In the years since,” according
to the Smithsonian Magazine’s Robert
M. Poole, “victors have taken the spoils, and in their wake, ordinary
citizens and opportunistic thieves have grabbed anything of value in that
confused pause between war and peace.”
In context, Jihad
el-Zein, an old hand Lebanese political analyst, wonders in his
column this week for the independent Lebanese daily al-Nahar, “What if we read one day in future
that the Syria war was planned and is being fought simply to loot its
antiquities?”
Today, he says, the
question comes across like we would be reading “a political novel or a
conspiracy theory fantasy book mixing politics with police investigations, the
game of nations and mafia wars.
“But far from being
pure fiction, it is an established fact that looting is an instrument of the
war raging in Syria, much as the theft of antiquities was – and remains –
synonymous with the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.”
By the first week of
the U.S. invasion thieves had plundered at least 15,000
items from Baghdad's Iraq Museum, many
of them choice antiquities: ritual vessels, heads from sculptures, amulets,
Assyrian ivories and more than 5,000 cylinder seals.
"Every single item
that was lost is a great loss for humanity," says Donny George Youkhanna,
an Iraqi Assyrian archeologist, anthropologist, author, curator, scholar and
former Director General of Iraqi Museums, now a visiting professor at Stony
Brook University in New York. The Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad "is the
only museum in the world where you can trace the earliest development of human
culture—technology, agriculture, art, language and writing—in just one
place…"
In the case of Syria
now, Zein writes, the theft of antiquities for a rapacious
international black market is thriving.
He says antiquities plundered
from museums and archeological sites in Syria are finding their way chiefly to
(1) Beirut (2) Antakya, seat of the Hatay Province in southern Turkey, and (3) Erbil,
capital of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, by way of Qamishli, the city in
northeastern Syria that is a stone’s throw away from the border with Turkey.
Where Beirut is
concerned, Zein suggests offices and shops are currently opening under all
sorts of names to specifically market looted Syrian antiquities.
“The ongoing
devastation inflicted on the country’s stunning archaeological sites—bullet
holes lodged in walls of its ancient Roman cities, the debris of Byzantine
churches, early mosques and crusader fortresses—rob Syria of its best chance
for a post-conflict economic boom based on tourism,” Aryn
Baker wrote for Time magazine last year.
“All six of Syria’s UNESCO world heritage sites
have been damaged by rocket, tank and small-arms fire, some ‘potentially
irreversibly,’ according to archaeologist Emma Cunliffe, a PhD researcher at
the United Kingdom’s Durham University who has just published a report during
the course of her Fellowship at Global Heritage Fund, which details the
destruction of Syria’s historical sites.
“‘Archaeologically
speaking, Syria is a disaster zone,’ she says. Theft from some of the country’s
poorly guarded regional museums has added to the toll—an 8th century BC Aramaic
god from the Hama museum made Interpol’s Most Wanted Works
of Art poster in December — as has the wholesale plundering of
thousands of half-excavated archaeological sites in Syria…
“Syria has been at the
crossroads of culture and religion for millennia. The world’s first
agricultural societies are thought to have sprung upon its fertile plains, and
Damascus is one of the longest continually inhabited cities in the world, with
early temples dating back an estimated 5000 years.
“Alexander the Great’s
Macedonian lieutenants built vast cities in Palmyra and Apamea, and the Apostle
Paul sheltered in Damascus after his conversion to Christianity. Some of the
country’s Islamic mosques, still in use today, were built during the Prophet
Muhammad’s time.
“…The sheer diversity
of Syrian antiquities -- everything from Mesopotamian cylinder seals, Roman
statues, early Christian iconography, Jewish incantation bowls, and
centuries-old Korans have passed through smuggler hands —means that the
appetite for illicitly-acquired artifacts is unlikely to be sated.
“If anything, the
chaos will accentuate the demand for Syrian antiquities, says Lebanese
archaeologist and journalist Joanne
Farchakh-Bajjaly, who documented the extensive looting of Iraqi antiquities
in the wake of the U.S. invasion. ‘The Iraq war awakened a hunger for Middle
East artifacts,’ she says. ‘Now private collectors follow conflict closely.
With the collapse of the economy the easiest thing is to tell people to go dig.’
And, she adds, collectors now ask for specific items, and are willing to front
the money to get them…”
Zein says the looting
and destruction of Syria’s past is taking place in Damascus and Rif Dimashq,
Deraa, al-Jazirah area (which is extremely important archeologically), Idlib, Maarrat al-Nu’man
(near the Dead Cities), Homs,
Hama, and of course Aleppo.
Zein adds:
“Only crystal gazers
would claim to know what is being looted from these places and sold to gangs
specialized in marketing their loot in Western countries.
“The heartbreaking
reality -- or sneaking suspicion -- is that renowned Western museums have been
the final destination of our stolen heritage through the ages.
“Remarkably, the Iraqi
government is still trying to this day to retrieve from a range of Western
governments its stolen national treasures and priceless antiquities. It
succeeded in some instances and failed in most others.
“This is not to speak
of distant precedents when priceless Arab world relics surfaced in the West.”
Zein says historians
have yet to determine if the modern-day looting of the Arab world did not start
with Napoleon’s Egypt campaign.
One of the most important
treasures brought back from the campaign was the Rosetta Stone, which is now
in the British Museum.
In today’s Egypt, sophisticated
and systematic looting is taking place across major archaeological sites.
Satellite images from
before and after the Revolution of January 25 show a marked increase in looter
holes. In fact, parts of the landscape are starting to look like “Swiss
cheese,” Deborah Lehr, chairman of the Capitol Archaeological Institute at
George Washington University, who has been charged with helping the Egyptian
government protect its antiquities, told the New York Times last
October.
Zein’s mind goes into
fast forward to ponder the loss 10 weeks ago of ancient Islamic manuscripts in
Mali’s fabled desert city of Timbuktu.
It is not known how
many of the priceless documents were destroyed by al-Qaeda-linked fighters who torched
the Ahmed Baba
Institute library.
News of the destruction
came last January 28 from the mayor of Timbuktu.
With its Islamic
treasures and centuries-old mud-walled buildings including an iconic mosque,
Timbuktu is an UN-designated World Heritage Site.
The damage caused by
the fleeing fighters was limited, but irreplaceable treasures were lost.
The documents date back
to the late 12th century, the start of a 300-year golden age for Timbuktu as a
spiritual and intellectual capital for the propagation of Islam on the
continent.
In a VOA interview,
Michael Covitt, chairman of Malian Manuscript Foundation, said the 30,000 manuscripts
cover a wide variety of topics.
“The manuscripts cover
pretty much every science under the sun, from astronomy to astrology to
numerology to mathematics to medicine to jurisprudence,” he said.
All are in Arabic
script, in the Arabic language and African languages.
Zein says, “Because of
the preplanned Iraq National Museum precedent, I initially cast doubt on the
story of rebels torching the library in Mali. I then thought the story might be
plausible in view of the rebels’ brutality and fanaticism.
“Still, my nagging
questions: Did the rebels do it? What happened to the manuscripts that weren’t
lost? Why did the media embedded with French troops at the time remain
close-mouthed on the whereabouts of the spared manuscripts?
“The questions remain
open-ended because whereas the looting of the Iraqi National Museum coincided
with U.S. forces storming Baghdad, the torching of the manuscripts preceded the
storming of Timbuktu by French troops.
“We thus have little
knowledge about the number of conserved manuscripts, their whereabouts and if
any were moved out of Mali.”
Recalling how Lebanon
too fell victim to looters -- of its National Museum in Beirut, all the way to its
Roman archeological site in the southern city of Tyre and its Crusader castle
in the northern seaport of Tripoli -- during the Lebanese civil war, Zein
laments, “Each time a museum slips in our lands, one is built in Western
countries.”
