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A head made of unfired clay, dating from the 2nd century B.C., is part of the touring show. (Copyright Thierry Ollivier — Musee Guimet)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/20/AR2007122002427.html

National Gallery to Host Nation’s Ancient Artifacts

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 21, 2007; C01

They survived the collapse of civilizations and crossed the known world on camelback. Some lay buried for centuries in an Afghan nomad’s sepulcher. Others were spirited out of a museum in modern-day Kabul under siege from looters and religious fanatics, then hidden in secret vaults under the presidential palace.

Now, a selection of Afghanistan’s ancient artistic treasures — from a dagger hilt carved with a Siberian bear to Greek coins from an excavated city called Woman of the Moon — is scheduled to come to Washington next May and continue on a 17-month national tour, the National Geographic Society and the National Gallery of Art will announce jointly today.

The exhibit, which will be on display here for nearly four months before traveling to museums in New York, San Francisco and Houston, aims to provide a rare glimpse of the long-lost, creative melting pot that Afghanistan once represented — centuries before it became known to most Westerners as a grim Cold War battlefield and a victim of horrific Islamic repression under the Taliban.

“We hope this exhibit will help overcome the darkness of Afghanistan’s recent history and shed some light on its rich past, thousands of years old, as a crossroads of cultures and civilizations,” said Said Tayeb Jawad, Afghanistan’s ambassador in Washington. “We also hope it will showcase the courage of people who put their lives on the line to safeguard and preserve these treasures.”

As a trove of history, the artifacts are as edifying as they are beautiful. Selected from four separate sites, they span 3,000 years, beginning circa 2500 B.C. (during the Bronze Age), and include designs, scripts and images from a dozen cultures as far-flung as India, China and Rome.

The exhibition is dominated by gold: bowls decorated with Afghan and Mesopotamian motifs, coins minted in the Greco-Bactrian era of the 1st and 2nd centuries B.C., a floral crown with collapsible leaves and a four-pound belt with designs of a man astride a mythical beast. There are also thrones and table legs of carved Indian ivory, glass pieces from Rome and ornaments made with local Afghan turquoise.

The modern-day accounts of concealments and excavations that preserved and unearthed these objects are as fascinating as the ancient cultures that produced them when foreign pilgrims, warriors and kings traveled the legendary trade route known as the Silk Road across Afghanistan.

The National Museum in Kabul, from which many of the artifacts come, endured rocket attacks during the Afghan civil war in the early 1990s, an orgy of idol-smashing under the radical Islamic Taliban regime in the spring of 2001 and a final bout of looting during the chaos of the U.S.-led assault that toppled the Taliban the same winter.

It was widely rumored that museum officials and employees had retrieved some objects and hidden them for safekeeping; other pieces were said to have been stolen and smuggled abroad. In 2003, a group of boxes from the museum was unexpectedly located in a sealed vault under the presidential palace. A year later, a team of international experts and Afghan officials began opening them.

“We had no idea what treasures were inside. It was a fantastic moment of rediscovery,” said Fredrik T. Hiebert, a National Geographic fellow who is curating the U.S. exhibition and has traveled repeatedly to Afghanistan to organize it. “We kept finding more and more boxes. There were objects from the Paleolithic era to the Buddhist period. It took us three months, working seven days a week, to inventory everything.”

One of the exhibit’s four original sources was an abandoned and half-buried city in northern Afghanistan known as Woman of the Moon, built by Greco-Bactrian nobles who passed through Afghanistan more than 2,000 years ago. It was lost to history until the 1960s, when a French archaeologist began a painstaking, 15-year excavation. Hiebert said the exhibit will re-create parts of the city, including the treasury, theater and gymnasium.

Another, equally exotic locale was the walled-up, basement tomb of a 1st-century noble Afghan nomad, discovered by chance in 1978. It contained six mummies — a man and five women — adorned with elaborate gold ornaments and other pieces with designs from Rome and Scythia, a region of what is now southern Russia, as well as the dagger hilt with the Siberian bear.

“Nomads are so hard to find archaeologically. They don’t have houses or temples. So this discovery was a real victory. It showed what a crossroads Afghanistan once was,” said Hiebert. The walled-up burial site, which he also inventoried, contained 22,000 objects as well as the carefully preserved remains of the noble and five “princesses,” who he speculated might have died from drought or plague.

Although the monetary value of the collection is incalculable, the Afghan government has agreed to let it tour the United States in exchange for $1 million. A few critics have suggested that Afghanistan, one of the world’s poorest countries, should have been paid a much higher sum or negotiated a percentage of special museum admissions fees.

But Jawad said his government was satisfied with the financial arrangement and that Afghan President Hamid Karzai saw the exhibit as one way to give something back to the Western countries that have defended and assisted his government for the past six years. He said it would be presented in conjunction with a festival of Afghan crafts and carpets, on sale to benefit artisans back home.

“We appreciate that people want us to get the most out of it, but this is a good deal for us culturally as well as financially,” he said. Jawad added that the Kabul government also hopes to bring some of the officials who hid the museum pieces, so they can tell their stories. “They could have gotten passports and fled like other people, but they stayed and saved these treasures,” he said. “They are the real heroes.”

A women checks archives of newspapers at the Iraqi National Library in Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, March 25, 2007. (AP Photo/Samir Mizban, File)

http://abcnews.go.com/International/IraqCoverage/story?id=4006405

After Looting, Burning, Iraqi Archive Makes Comeback

By TROY MCMULLEN

BAGHDAD, Dec. 16, 2007 —

In the weeks after the U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, the charred, partly gutted Iraqi National Library and Archive became a symbol of the chaos and lawlessness that swept through the capital.

During a three-day rampage, looters pillaged and burned the building, stealing hundreds of rare, centuries-old Islamic documents and texts. Fire, smoke and water damaged much of what remained.

Mounir Bouchenaki, the deputy director-general of the U.N. cultural body Unesco called it “a catastrophe for the cultural heritage of Iraq.”

Now, on the brink of the first anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s death, and some four years since it was looted, the library’s recovery is exceeding even the most optimistic predictions.

Windows once shattered by stray bullets have been replaced. Fresh coats of paint cover newly renovated walls, and dozens of new desktop computers line refurbished work spaces. The library employed about 90 people before the war. Today, 400 mostly young staffers have turned it into a hive of activity.

“After the burnings and chaos, no one was in here but the dogs and cats,” said Saad Eskander, a Baghdad-born ethnic Kurd who has run the archive since 2003. “Today the library is better than before the war.”

An infusion of critical help from foreign non-governmental organizations is playing a key role in getting the archive back on its feet:

More than 100 new-model computers were donated by Japanese and Italian NGO’s, which installed high-speed Internet throughout the building.

A Czech Republic aid group contributed state-of-the-art digital microfilm machines and scanners, and paid to have Iraqi employees travel to Prague to learn how to use the equipment.

The British Library provided microfilm copies of thousands of rare books and microfiche copies of important Iraqi records.

An Italian outfit even donated furniture that matched the mid century motif of two-story building’s interior architecture.

The archive is succeeding in other areas, too. Eskander has managed to keep sectarian divisions out of the building by fostering a sense of national pride among his young employees. Pictures of politicians and tribal leaders are banned from the building, as are deep discussions on religion or political policy.

Women, who typically held menial positions before the war, now head archive departments. Last month, the archive celebrated what Eskander called “women’s day.”

“We don’t have a sectarian problems here,” says Eskander, a thin, bespeckled man with graying short dark hair. “What makes a Shia or a Kurd or a Sunni is having something very special in common and that is a national library.”

The archive’s recovery comes as other important cultural institutions are still struggling. The National Museum of Iraq remains closed, despite a great push from political leaders here to reopen it. It’s been shuttered since 2003 except for two brief openings for officials and other guests in late 2003 and earlier this month.

Looters stripped the museum of some 15,000 Mesopotamian artifacts in the days after Baghdad fell. It’s considered one of the world’s most important locations for artifacts from the ancient Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian civilizations. Though museum directors have managed to recover 4,000 missing pieces, they refused to set a date for reopening.

The museum’s executive director, Amira Eidan, said restoration efforts are being slowed by insufficient financing and lack of proper security.

Man on a Mission

After the 2003 invasion, Eskander was among a small group of Iraqi expatriates who streamed into Baghdad to help rebuild. By then, archaeological sites in a nation with 11 centuries of history had already been raided by looters.

Eskander said gradual repairs in the weeks after the looting helped the archive become a haven for students and scholars in Baghdad. They flocked to its location on Mutanabi Street, the city’s intellectual heart, which is filled with book sellers and book lovers.

Though he vowed to keep the doors of the archive open, Eskander has been forced to close it for short periods amid Iraq’s deepening violence and chaos. It was shuttered last November after several staff members were killed and the building increasingly came under fire.

Five staff members were killed in violence in 2006. In March, a car bomb exploded on near the archive killing 26 people.

“The library is a symbol of hope,” Eskander said. “Destroying it will divide our society even more. It’s not just an Iraq, it’s a cultural attack on us as well.”

Eskander and other cultural curators here have been heartened by a lull in overall violence in Baghdad in recent months. Though scattered deadly attacks still occur, the U.S. military says the weekly number of attacks has fallen to the lowest level since January 2006.

Casualties suffered by Iraqi security forces are down 40 percent since the beginning of the troop reinforcement plan — commonly known as “the surge.”

Civilian fatalities in Baghdad are down 75 percent in recent months, the U.S. military says. Some areas of Baghdad are seeing the lowest levels of overall attacks since the spring and summer of 2005, according to Iraqi and U.S. military data.

Copyright © 2007 ABC News Internet Ventures

Intricately patterned stone panels were among the artifacts that proved too heavy for looters to haul off when the National Museum of Iraq was overrun in 2003.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/12/world/middleeast/12iraq.html?ref=middleeast

December 12, 2007

By CARA BUCKLEY

BAGHDAD — For a few brief hours Tuesday, three dozen spectators — journalists, local politicians and their guards — gathered at the National Museum of Iraq here, their voices echoing through its vast, darkened halls. It was one of the few times outsiders had been allowed inside since Baghdad fell, looters stripped the galleries of some 15,000 Mesopotamian artifacts, and the museum became a wrenching symbol of the losses of the war.

Aside from a brief opening in late 2003, when officials and other guests were invited in, the museum has been shuttered since the invasion. But there has been a great push to reopen it of late. Its directors have managed to recover 4,000 missing pieces, among them gems, Islamic coins and carved stones. The pace of recovery picked up as word spread that rewards were offered for items returned.

Still, the executive director, Amira Eidan, said Tuesday that she could not forecast when the museum might reopen again because restoration efforts had been slowed by insufficient financing. The cost of recovering the artifacts has consumed the bulk of her museum’s budget, and pieces sometimes have turned up at foreign auctions and been too expensive or difficult to retrieve, she said.

The museum still houses hulking centuries-old statues and intricately patterned stone panels, items too heavy for plunderers to haul off. Its most valued items, including pieces of Assyrian gold known as the Nimrud treasures, were saved because they had been sealed in crates and locked in a bank vault.

Yet on Tuesday, much of the museum’s collection remained out of sight. Many of the ancient heavy stone statues were covered in plastic. Dozens of glass display cases sat empty but for thick layers of dust. Workers were mixing epoxy in one gallery, the Assyrian Hall, where walls were lined with great stone bas-relief and little else. The 4,000 pieces that have so far been recovered remained in the museum’s underground vaults.

Ms. Eidan, who had recently said that two halls of the museum would reopen this month, said Tuesday that even if the museum was fully restored, she was not certain that the city was stable enough to ensure a safe reopening. She also lamented the illegal digging that continues at Baghdad’s 12,000 largely unguarded archaeological sites. According to Abdul Zahra al-Taliqani, a spokesman for the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Antiquities, thieves have stolen, and likely trafficked, 17,000 pieces from these sites so far.

American forces have been widely faulted for failing to protect the museum as pillaging swept Baghdad after the invasion. Concern over the museum’s fate peaked again in August 2006, when the museum’s director, Donny George, resigned and left Iraq, saying he had been threatened by extremists with ties to the Shiite-led government.

The museum visit on Tuesday, a media event, was organized by Ahmad Chalabi, the Shiite politician and former exile leader who helped shape the Pentagon’s case for war. By organizing the visit, Mr. Chalabi sought to highlight the museum’s restoration efforts and insert himself in the recovery process. Before a row of photographers and cameramen, he presented the museum’s director with some 400 missing artifacts that he had procured through a friend.

“We need help from international experts,” he told Ms. Eidan. “We have so many more missing pieces, we need to do active search to get them back.”

In violence in Baghdad on Tuesday, two policemen were killed when a car bomb exploded near security booths guarding the homes of Ayad Allawi, the former prime minister, and Saleh al-Mutlak, a member of Parliament.

Mr. Mutlak is the head of the Sunni-Arab party, the National Dialogue Front. Twelve policemen and guards were wounded, though neither Mr. Allawi nor Mr. Mutlak was hurt.