Perhaps the most famous of Hammurabi's legal codes was the tooth thing. Written in Mesopotamia about 2,700 years ago, it read, roughly, "If a man has knocked out the tooth of a man of the same rank, they shall knock out his tooth." There was the eye-for-an-eye clause, of course, and then many more intricate instructions. He covered domestic problems: "If the wife of a man has been caught while lying with another man, they shall bind them and throw them into the water. If the husband wishes to spare his wife then the king in turn may spare his subject." And lengthy treatments were made on how to take care of another man's property. If you rent his ox and kill it, you have to give him a new ox (same with slaves). And there were some tough rules for contractors. If you built a house so poorly that it collapsed and killed the owner's son, then your son had to be put to death.
What to do about the damage at the Iraq National Museum has never been so clear cut. Ever since it was looted in the anarchy after the United States 2003 invasion, it has been the subject of controversy over how many thousands of pieces were taken and how to get them back as they're sold around the world and general confusion. It continued as a symbol of America's haphazard occupation years later as top-flight Iraqi archeologists fled under threat. While experts from the United States and other countries have made efforts to aid Iraq's struggling antiquities institutions, Iraqi bureaucracy and corruption slowed the work and confounded the outsiders. Some stolen pieces were found and plastered back together but rebuilding an entire archeological establishment is a lot more complicated. The Iraq National Museum still has not been able to open for the public. It lacks air conditioning, regular electricity, security systems and safe surroundings.
But the slow road to recovery advanced a step today when U.S. and Iraqi officials met in the museum's auditorium to announce a $14 million aid program. The relatively modest sum compared to the billions poured into the country monthly for everything from generators to supplying the Iraqi army with weapons is the largest gift received by the museum so far, according to director Amira Edan al-Dahab. Al-Dahab called today the "happiest" day the museum has ever seen. Asked later about the saddest day, she said, "the looting, of course."
The two-year grant, which was announced by First Lady Laura Bush in Washington last week, is for refurbishing the museum complex, sending Iraqi archeologists to train in the United States and opening a conservation center in the northern city of Irbil. Stony Brook University in New York and the University of Chicago are two premier archeological brain trusts involved in the project and, indeed, have been working since the war began to protect Iraq's antiquities.
But the Baghdad ceremony was also another reminder of the remaining problems, as Newsweek wrote about in February. The event was held in the small auditorium, where there was no air conditioning and the room was lit by flood lights tacked to the walls while the main lighting stayed dark. The museum is a campus of buildings where hundreds of workers study artifacts from the country's more than 12,000 historic sites. All but a few of the sites are unprotected and open to continued raiding. To be sure, the war did not bring all the havoc. The sites were also regularly pillaged as Saddam Hussein's control slipped throughout the 1990s and corrupt officials sent some antiquities to the black market. Meanwhile today's government provides too little money to protect the country's vast network of ancient sites. Historical texts are being lost for sure as smugglers zero toss them aside in search of flashier objects.
An Italian archeological institute has led the renovation of two museum galleries. They are closed to the public but NEWSWEEK has toured them in the past. One is a spectacular collection of large statues and wall-sized stone relief tablets, more than 2,000 years old and telling stories or peace treaties and military offensives. Another gallery highlights stone and woodwork from early Islam. The rest of the dozen or so galleries are in disarray. The roof leaks and U.S. military project to repair it has been held up in a bureaucratic battle over money.
Mesopotamian history is hard to match. Writing was invented here with the wedge-shaped cuneiform impressions in clay. The first urban centers developed here. In a building with artifacts 6,000 years old, the speakers from the relatively nascent United States took pains to show that they value heritage. U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker called the aid program an "investment" in the world's heritage and "10,000 years of human history." But all that history is a heavy burden to carry.
