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Originally posted by Spiffor
Che : I am too lazy to translate in all right now. I've copied the whole article for further notice in case Le Monde puts it down. Right now, I have only translated the relevant excerpt, at the end of my previous post
Che : I am too lazy to translate in all right now. I've copied the whole article for further notice in case Le Monde puts it down. Right now, I have only translated the relevant excerpt, at the end of my previous post
The thirty-two galleries of the archaeological Museum were put at bag the WORLD | 14.04.03 | 14h00 Did the museum of Baghdad undergo the same fate as the Museum of Kabul? More than 80 % of the parts of the Afghan establishment had been plundered after the departure of the Soviet troops. The essence of what remained was destroyed later by the talibans.
According to the New York Times, it will have been necessary less than 48 hours so that the thirty-two galleries of the national archaeological Museum of Iraq "are cleaned", under the nose of the American troops. Several Iraqi archaeologists would have made steps near the American command so that the museum "is sanctuarisé". In vain. The British daily newspaper The Independent insists, Sunday, on the destruction: mutilated statues, broken windows, crashed to pieces objects.
The Iraqi authorities had however envisaged the worst. In the February 2003 issue of of the Archéologia review, the director of the museums of Iraq, Dr. Nawala Mettwali, indicated that "the personnel followed training courses to evacuate the 32 rooms of the museum in one day. The objects will be put at the shelter in secret places." The person in charge for the museums, who cries today his disappeared collections, had not provided that the personnel would be the first to be volitilized.
The current museum of Baghdad was inaugurated in 1976. Its collections had counted approximately 150 000 parts, of small shelves of clay engraved of wedge-shaped writings to the powerful winged bulls of Khorsabad or the low-reliefs of the palates of Nimroud which weigh each one several tons, the unit constituting a rather complete anthology of all civilizations which followed one another, for more than 7000 years, between the Tiger and Euphrate: prehistoric testimonys, vestiges sumériens, akkadiens, babyloniens, assyriens néobabyloniens, perses, Greeks, parthes, sassanides, and a very rich Islamic bottom.
LONG RESTORATION At the time of the first war of the Gulf, most of these parts had been put at the shelter and the closed museum. It had been reopened for the year 2000. Many objects, which had suffered from their reclusion in metal cases, required a long restoration which was not completed.
The most invaluable treasures, as those which had been found in the royal tombs of Our, had remained in their hiding-places: only their photographs were exposed in the museum of Baghdad. Are these parts for saved as much? Following the first war of the Gulf, nine of the thirteen regional museums had been more or less plundered.
According to professor McGuire Gibson (Science, March 2003) which teaches archaeology mésopotamienne in Chicago, 3000 parts had been catch. On his side, Japanese professor Ishi had been charged by UNESCO with gathering a documentation on the objects stolen in the Iraqi museums, but also on the 10 000 archeological sites. He had counted 5000 of them.
It is to be feared that this time, the figure of the stolen objects? or worse, destroyed? is not much high any more. After the plundering of the Museum of Baghdad, the general manager of UNESCO, Koïchiro Matsuura, let know, in an official statement, which it "at once had seized the authorities American and British and asked to immediately take measurements of monitoring and protection of the archeological sites and institutions cultural Iraqi".
With the armed intervention day before, Mounir Bouchenaki, deputy manager of the culture with UNESCO, had declared in the World: "the Americans know the value and the diversity of the Iraqi inheritance. We gave the list of the significant sites to them. I hope that they will make good use of it."
edit: created paragraphs, to make it a little more bearable.
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