Global Policy Forum

By John Noble Wilford

War in Iraq would halt archaeology not just in that country but across the Middle East, experts say, and could result in some of the earliest cities of Mesopotamia being bombed or looted into ruins of ruins.

Researchers with long experience in Iraq say they are worried that postwar looting could cause even more damage to the antiquities than combat. They also fear that some art dealers and collectors might try to take advantage of any postwar disarray and change in government to gain access to more of Iraq's archaeological treasures. After the Persian Gulf war of 1991, ancient treasures were plundered and sold illegally in international markets.

Fear of war has already had a widespread effect. All European research teams left Iraq months ago, indefinitely suspending excavations along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers at places like Uruk, Assur, Nimrud and Nineveh.

Others doubt that they will return this year to dig sites in Syria, Jordan and some places in southern Turkey. In many cases it is impossible to get insurance for staff and students. Researchers in Egypt are growing wary, and nascent plans for reviving long-suspended operations in Iran have been abandoned.

Archaeology in Israel, already curtailed by internal hostilities, is expected to suffer further interruptions, with almost none of 30 American excavations likely to be operating soon. At one of the largest sites, the ruins of the old Philistine city of Ashkelon, archaeologists have not dug a pit for two years and will not return this summer.

Even Israeli teams that often work through the worst of times have decided not to dig this year. "Everybody's nervous, and virtually everybody's canceled," said Dr. Rudolph Dornemann, executive director of the American Schools of Oriental Research, which coordinates archaeological work in Israel, Jordan, Syria and elsewhere in the region.

Even those who have not yet called off this summer's dig season say they will have to make a decision in the next few weeks. They are not optimistic. "I want to go into the field, but I don't want to walk into a war zone," said Dr. Richard Zettler of the University of Pennsylvania, who has directed excavations in Syria at Tell Sweyhat, once considered safely distant from the Iraqi border.

Archaeologists have set aside their individual concerns and have tried to alert American officials to the cultural devastation that war and its aftermath could bring to the land of the oldest civilization, where urban life and the written word originated some 5,500 years ago.

Leading archaeologists and representatives of cultural groups have conferred with officials of the State and Defense Departments, stressing the importance of compliance with the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict.

The treaty obligates combatants not to target cultural sites and monuments except where military installations have been placed on or next to them. The United States signed but did not ratify the treaty. At the invitation of the Pentagon, archaeologists have provided military planners with the locations of hundreds of Iraq's outstanding ruins from antiquity. But the entire country, experts say, is an archaeological site.

"We've gone about as far as we can go," said Dr. McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago, one of the archaeologists who met with Pentagon officials. "We reminded them that there are no natural hills in southern Iraq, and if you see a hill, in most cases it's the mound of a buried ancient settlement."

As a legal adviser to the Archaeological Institute of America, Dr. Patty Gerstenblith, a law professor at De Paul University in Chicago, participated in some of the discussions and said the Pentagon seemed "very receptive, at least in terms of taking our information."

"They realize that our attitude toward cultural and religious treasures is very important to world opinion," Dr. Gerstenblith said. "And it may be especially important in dealings with Iraq's neighbors in the Middle East."

After last month's meeting with cultural and archaeological experts, including Iraqi expatriates, the State Department decided to add a panel on antiquities to the 16 working groups studying the future of Iraq. The panel is expected to begin discussions next month.

"We fully subscribe to the view that this is an asset that belongs to the Iraqi people," said Greg Sullivan, spokesman for the department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. "We want some process put in place to make sure the antiquities are not squandered and sold off."

Ashton Hawkins, an art lawyer in New York and former counsel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said that Middle East experts at the State Department were "interested in how to help Iraq protect its cultural heritage" after a war.

Mr. Hawkins participated in the meetings as president of the American Council for Cultural Policy, a New York-based group of museum officials and prominent art collectors.

Some archaeologists said they were suspicious of the council's motives because it represents the interests of private art collectors and museums and has advocated less restrictive laws governing international trade in antiquities.

"That's absurd," Mr. Hawkins said of accusations that he had a hidden agenda in his meetings with government officials over Iraq. He said he thought Iraq's strict laws on antiquities should not be changed.

In a recent article in the journal Science, William Pearlstein, the council's treasurer, was quoted as saying that the group favored "a rational and balanced approach to cultural heritage issues" and that if war came it hoped to encourage the American government to establish "a sensible post-Saddam cultural administration" and relax some of Iraq's strict antiquities laws.

Archaeologists and art collectors alike agreed that their greatest concern is looting after a war. In the Persian Gulf war of 1991, damage to known ancient sites was slight, but looting afterward left museums and excavations in a shambles.

Assyrian sculptures in northern Iraq were sawed up so the pieces could be taken out of the country, archaeologists said. Unexcavated sites in the south were bulldozed by plunderers, who hauled away artifacts in dump trucks. One expert said a diplomat's car was stopped crossing the border from Iraq into Jordan with 80 illicit artifacts. The expert would not say what country the diplomat was from.

Although some looters were poor people in need, experts said, others could have been part of organized international operations. Dr. John Malcolm Russell of the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston said that in the last decade "a flood of many thousands of undocumented Iraqi antiquities has been surfacing on the market, visible at every level of the market from the big auction houses to eBay."

Dr. Russell concluded, "They can't all come from Granny's attic and old Swiss collections." Fearing that looting could be worse after another war, the Archaeological Institute of America has called on the "appropriate governments" to help protect museums and sites and to help the Iraqi authorities rebuild museums and enforce laws against plundering.

The experience in Afghanistan has been sobering, Dr. Russell said. The United States has provided little money for cultural reconstruction and protection there, he said, adding, "Afghanistan must be like a gold field for looters."

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