In the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation myth found inscribed on seven clay
tablets from the seventh century BCE and excavated at Nineveh in the 19th
century, Eridu, in southern Mesopotamia, is named the world’s first city.
اضافة اعلان
Despite 8,000
years of occupation, today there is precious little to see at the ancient site,
isolated on the fringes of Iraq’s southern desert some 35km southwest of
Nasiriyah.
What does remain,
however, is an extremely precious handful of stones and pottery shards taken
from the site by a British tourist who was jailed for the offense this month by
a Baghdad court.
Predictably enough,
there was uproar in the British media when 66-year-old Jim Fitton, a retired
geologist, was sentenced to 15 years in prison. To date, more than 347,000
people have signed an online petition calling for the British government to
intervene in Fitton’s case. It cannot, of course, and nor should it. Iraq is a
sovereign state with its own laws. Fitton claimed ignorance of the law
protecting Iraq’s archaeological treasures, but ignorance has never been a
legal defense the world over.
Fitton had faced a
maximum penalty of death — a deterrent that owes its existence to decades of
looting of Iraq’s ancient treasures — but the court clearly took the view that
his offense was not as egregious as the scandalous, industrial-scale stripping
of the country’s ancient treasures in the wake of the American military’s 2003
invasion.
Iraq is not the
only country in the region with heritage that has fallen prey to war and social
upheaval. In 2017, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City spent $4
million on a 2,000-year-old golden sarcophagus from Egypt. Two years later, it
was forced to repatriate the coffin after it emerged that it had been looted
during the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
In short, Fitton
should have known better. A geologist by profession and an amateur
archaeologist by inclination, he had been on an archaeology tour in Iraq when
he decided to pocket the artifacts — an act that surely would have been
unthinkable had he been touring an ancient site in Europe. His casual attitude
to the sanctity of Iraq’s ancient heritage is an echo of the imperial arrogance
that saw so many of the treasures of the Middle East and elsewhere looted
during the 19th century by wealthy “gentlemen archaeologists” from Britain.
The vaults and display cases of the British Museum in
London, for example, are stuffed with artifacts that by rights belong to the
states from whose territory they were taken by entitled adventurers. In 2019,
the British government made a great show of returning to Baghdad a recently
looted 3,000-year-old cuneiform boundary stone, saluting Iraq’s rich culture
and history, which was “at the core of its contemporary national identity.”
However, of the
British Museum’s vast collection of 170,000 treasures from Mesopotamia, dug up
and shipped out by British archaeologists authorized solely by imperial
entitlement, there was no mention. These pieces, as the museum is always at
pains to stress, were “acquired,” a term far less pejorative than “looted”.
The lesson of this case is one that should be taken on board by every museum director in every museum throughout the world that continues, without justification, to hoard treasures stolen at a time when, to most Europeans, the people of the Middle East simply did not count.
At Eridu, only
traces of a once great civilization remain. Gone are the life-giving
tributaries of the Euphrates that flowed around the seven mounds that formed
the heart of the city. On the largest of these stood the oldest temple in
southern Mesopotamia.
But while the
palaces and temples have disappeared, the clues are there if one knows where —
and how — to find them.
A few jumbled
stones, clearly worked by human hands, and a fragment of what appears to be an
ancient wall, caught seemingly in the slow-motion act of sliding back under the
sands, is all that remains of the former mighty ziggurat, built 4,000 years ago
from mud and baked bricks.
A depression in
the ground, an echo of a lavish palace, built 5,000 years ago.
Frequently, it is
the fragments of pottery found at such sites that offer the only clues to their
origins and timeline.
Much of Eridu was
discovered and mapped in the 1940s and 1950s by two of Iraq’s most
distinguished archaeologists, Fuad Safar and Sayyid Mohammad Ali Mustafa. They
were able to compare shards found at Eridu with those from other Mesopotamian
sites, which helped to establish trading links and refined understanding of the
chronology of the development of civilization.
At Eridu, these
fragments also served as time stamps, helping the archaeologists to identify
the existence of several temples, built one on top of the other over hundreds
of years. Whether legal or not, picking up and pocketing such evidence is
clearly wrong.
It is, perhaps,
unfair that Fitton should pay the price as a proxy for the looters of empire
who came before him, and the criminal gangs who followed in more recent times.
He will appeal and, in this, one wishes him well. After all, as his family has
pointed out, 15 years in prison will almost certainly amount to a life
sentence.
But the lesson of
this case is one that should be taken on board by every museum director in
every museum throughout the world that continues, without justification, to
hoard treasures stolen at a time when, to most Europeans, the people of the
Middle East simply did not count.
The human story
belongs to all of us. But the artifacts and remains that articulate that story
belong only where they were created. To spirit them away out of self-interest
is not only to rob a country of its heritage, but also to deprive everyone of
potentially vital chapters in the great, common story of humankind.
Jonathan Gornall is a British journalist, formerly with
The Times, who has lived and worked in the Middle East and is now based in the
UK.
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