Plundering Iraq

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In this interview with Archaeology Odyssey editor Hershel Shanks, John Malcolm Russell of the Massachusetts College of Art—an expert on the looting of Iraq and author of The Final Sack of Nineveh: The Discovery, Documentation and Destruction of King Sennacherib’s Throne Room at Nineveh, Iraq (Yale, 1998)—describes the damage suffered at the Assyrian King Sennacherib’s “palace without rival.” Surprisingly, Russell expresses some sympathy for the looters. He would lift UN sanctions and send looted antiquities back to Iraq. He prefers that looted antiquities disappear rather than be “ransomed” by a collector. These are positions with which Archaeology Odyssey disagrees. We believe, however, that our readers should hear arguments other than our own. —Ed.

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Hershel Shanks: You’ve become something of an expert on the looting of antiquities from war-torn Iraq, especially the looting of the great palace of Sennacherib. How did you get into this?

John M. Russell: As an undergraduate at Washington University, I took a course, purely by chance, in ancient Mesopotamian art. And I got hooked. When I got to graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, not really knowing what I would focus on, I thought I’d study northern Renaissance art or Roman imperial architecture. Then Irene Winter, who is now at Harvard, came to Penn. Her specialty is ancient Near Eastern art, northern Syria, Mesopotamia—that is, ancient Iraq—and so somehow I ended up in that field. I guess I was still interested in ancient Mesopotamia, ancient Iraq mainly.

HS: Is Mesopotamia principally modern Iraq?

JMR: Ancient Mesopotamia encompasses all of modern Iraq and basically the northwestern third of Syria. That would mean sites along the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, well up into Syria. I was interested mainly in the palaces the great Assyrian kings built during the Neo-Assyrian period, say 900 to 612 B.C., in the area of Nineveh (modern Mosul) in northern Iraq. Irene suggested I write my [doctoral] dissertation on Ashurbanipal, the last great Assyrian king. His sculptured palace at Nineveh is very famous. A number of the sculptures—the famous lion hunts—are in the British Museum. Friends who see them there always come back and tell me they hadn’t expected the power of these images of the king hunting lions from his chariot and on foot. They’re among the greatest masterpieces of ancient art.

I was interested in taking these images that we’re used to looking at and reconstructing them as fully as I could in their palatial context and then in their cultural context, so as to get a sort of vision of what an Assyrian might get, or a diplomat from a subjugated country might get, walking through these suites of decorated rooms.

We’re talking here about mudbrick palaces. All that survives is the first story, but quite large single-story buildings that, for the protection and beautification of the walls, had stone slabs up to 8 feet tall lining them. These stone slabs, looking almost like white marble, were translucent. Assyrian artists under the direction of the king and his architects or palace supervisor would then carve images of the king’s campaigns in relief.

Some may have been painted. It’s not certain today how extensively. We tend to think that plain relief surfaces look very nice, and they do, but it’s not necessarily the effect that the Assyrians would have gotten, especially in a relatively dimly lit palace. You should imagine bright colors on these relief sculptures that would have made them really jump out.

HS: How do we know if they were painted or not?

JMR: In several of the palaces, traces of paint are preserved. The black is a very stable organic compound, and the red is also an oxide, a mineral compound. Both of those are durable and cover very well. They’re opaque paints, so you can put a 037thin coat of red or black on a surface and it will survive for a long time.

HS: Like 2,700 years?

JMR: Like that. But if you look at, say, blue paints in Egyptian images where the paint still survives, the blue is often very thick; it’s a ground-glass compound. Egyptian blue is a fired silicate copper compound that’s sort of like blue glass ground up. To get a dense blue you’ve got to put on a thick layer, and that means not much pigment now actually sits on the surface. All of which is a way of saying that some colors survive better than others. We speculate that others might have been used as well.

These large palace rooms are lined with stone sculptures, beautifully carved in low relief, showing any number of scenes—hunting, military campaigns, the receipt of tribute from parts of the empire that were either ruled by Assyrians or under Assyrian sway, plunder from captured cities.

In 1979 I wanted to go Iraq to actually see the site, but couldn’t get a visa. Then in 1980 I tried again. But I wasn’t an invited scholar. In the 1970’s Iraq was pretty—I’m not sure if I want to say anti-American—but relationships were not warm between the two countries. Visas were not normally issued except to archaeologists who had projects and who would go as part of an archaeological group. So the next year I joined an Oriental Institute [University of Chicago] excavation at Nippur in southern Iraq. That was the winter of 1981 to 1982. At Christmastime, the dig director, McGuire Gibson, who still teaches at the University of Chicago, gave us a present of a trip to the north to visit the Assyrian palaces, so the antiquities department gave us a car and driver and a guide, and we went to visit the palaces. When we got to Nineveh, I walked around the palace of Ashurbanipal. It was my dissertation topic. But it was just pits in the ground. There was nothing to see. There had been no archaeological activity there for 70 years, maybe more.

We walked to the other side of the mound, and there was the palace of Sennacherib, which had been partially re-excavated in the 1960s and then restored as a site museum. The wall relief sculptures, about a hundred slabs, had been restored in place on the wall. You could walk through the throne room of Sennacherib’s palace and get a real sense of what this structure had looked like. You could see how the building sits on the mound, the effect of the shape and size of the building, at least the part that’s restored. You really can’t beat that kind of experience. You can’t match that experience by going to a museum, even if the museum exhibit is in a room the same size as the room the things were in.

HS: Who did the excavation of Sennacherib’s palace in the 1960s?

JMR: Tariq Madhloom, an Iraqi archaeologist. The history of excavation at Nineveh is quite extensive, beginning with Austen Henry Layard, a British lawyer who started out for India in 1845 and never made it. He got as far as Baghdad and decided that he was more interested in the mounds of ancient Iraq. He ended up excavating Nineveh and Nimrud, another palatial site just south of Mosul. And that’s when a number of sculptures went to the British Museum.

There was on-and-off digging at Nineveh throughout the rest of the 19th century and into the 20th century, but most of it was covered back up. In the 0381960s, Nineveh was in the process of being encompassed by the suburbs of modern Mosul. Mosul is on one side of the Tigris and Nineveh is on the other side, but Mosul had been expanding for some time across the Tigris. Its suburbs were really enveloping the ancient site of Nineveh, which really is a huge site. The city walls are a little over 7 miles around. All of this real estate was very attractive to developers.

Even in the 1960s the southern half of Nineveh had been completely overbuilt by a modern town called Nebi Yunis (the prophet Jonah). Remember Jonah went to Nineveh in the biblical book with his name. The locals believe that Jonah is buried in Nebi Yunis. They’ll tell you a story, which they may or may not believe: There are two mounds at Nineveh; the small mound, which is Nebi Yunis, is where Jonah is buried, and the big mound is where the whale is buried. They carried the whale up the river, they say. But I think they say that with a smile. It gives you a sense of the city, however. It’s this walled enclosure that the book of Jonah describes not quite accurately, but surely vividly, as a three-day journey to cross [Jonah 3:3]. It’s not even a day’s journey to go anywhere in Nineveh, but it is a big site, punctuated by these two large palace mounds, the biggest one of which is where Sennacherib’s palace and Ashurbanipal’s palace are, and a smaller one which was a sort of ancient military barracks, which is where Jonah’s mosque now sits.

Because the southern half of Nineveh had already been overbuilt by Nebi Yunis, the Iraq antiquities department, particularly Tariq Madhloom, was concerned that Nineveh might just disappear, might be swallowed up. After you excavate a lot of pits and basements and walls, the land is not good to build on. So Madhloom decided, with antiquities department backing, to create a visible presence of antiquities, so that it wasn’t just open real estate. They excavated a couple of stretches of the city wall and restored those, and they excavated the Nergal gate, which is a beautiful, large city gate with colossal human-headed 039winged-bull sculptures at the door. It’s a spectacular gate and it’s well preserved. They excavated another gate on the north wall, the Adad gate, one on the eastern wall and one on the western wall, creating a sort of box of four restored gates. Within the city, Madhloom excavated a section of Sennacherib’s palace, the throne room area, which wasn’t difficult to find because Layard had already excavated the site. It had been refilled. It was not too difficult to re-expose it, and then to consolidate it. Madhloom re-erected the reliefs along the walls and put a roof over the room.

Anyway, I plunked myself down in this site museum in Sennacherib’s palace. Instead of having to imagine reconstructing the palace, or at least the throne room, here it was in front of me. The Iraqi archaeologist had excavated and reconstructed it for me. It was a very impressive site.

HS: Sennacherib himself described the place as “a palace without rival.”

JMR: Yes. That’s in his building inscriptions. He was apparently proud of it. More than proud, he was intimately involved in the details of its construction. He describes something that sounds like a modern well with a pulley and crank. He talks about a new bronze-casting technique and how he was able to cast colossal sculptures out of bronze that no one had been able to do before. And he talks about finding new sources of stone and importing stones from all over the empire.

HS: These huge bulls are in one piece.

JMR: Yes, they’re one piece and in some cases the stones come from several hundred miles away, apparently.

HS: I understand they weigh as much as 40 tons.

JMR: That’s a good estimate. The biggest ones are nearly 20 feet tall, 20 feet wide and several feet thick.

HS: How did they move them? Forty tons?

JMR: That’s a good question. I don’t know the answer. It’s possible that stones of a certain size were floated down the Euphrates and then hauled overland up to Nineveh. We’re talking about a period when manpower was essentially inexhaustible, but you have to know how to organize that labor in a way that we no longer can conceive.

When you step into a king’s palace on the site, even if it’s badly deteriorated, even if the king’s not there anymore, and even if there’s been a couple of thousand years of wear and tear, when you stand where the king stood, it’s very exciting. Even standing in Layard’s footsteps, in the 19th century, is very exciting. Standing where Sennecherib stood when he ordered the campaign against Jerusalem—imagine! In 701 B.C. Sennacherib sent his army to the Mediterranean. They besieged Jerusalem, but the siege failed. That part’s in the Bible and in Assyrian records. It’s also recorded in cuneiform on the walls. An Assyrian account of the siege of Jerusalem is on one of the colossal bull sculptures at the door of the throne room.

The Bible and the Assyrians give different versions of the siege. And Herodotus has yet another version. In the Bible there are two stories about the campaign. In one, the angel of the Lord comes in the night while the Assyrians are encamped outside the Jerusalem wall and slays 185,000 men (2 Kings 19:35). In the same narrative, but a few verses earlier (2 Kings 18:13–16), Hezekiah agrees to pay a tribute to Sennacherib, a kind of a bribe to make him go away. I’m not going to judge which story is more likely to have happened.

Herodotus says that the siege failed because mice ate the Assyrians’ bowstrings, so they couldn’t shoot their arrows at the Israelites. Therefore they withdrew.

The Assyrian account is remarkably like the second of the biblical accounts involving tribute. The tribute includes 30 talents of gold in both the Bible and the Assyrian inscriptions. The silver tribute is different in the two accounts—300 talents in the Bible and 800 in the Assyrian account.

So there I stood in Sennacherib’s palace, seeing all those sculptures, most of which hadn’t been published. (In the 19th century, the British archaeologists focused on publishing drawings of particularly interesting slabs, more or less neglecting the others.) So the impression you get [of Assyrian monutmental art] is of episodes, a slab with a picture on it. But when you go to the palace, you get the impact of a sequence. That is, these slabs were all side by side and this story is a narrative that runs from slab to slab.

When I got back home—I hadn’t really changed my dissertation topic yet—I found that I was thinking more and more about Sennacherib’s palace. So one day I went and asked Irene if I might switch. Here I was thinking about Sennacherib all the time anyway, and it seemed like a better project, so why didn’t I just switch? And she said fine. So that was how I got engaged with Sennacherib’s palace. I wrote my dissertation on Sennacherib in 1989.

David Stronach, a British scholar teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, had been looking for a site in Iraq to work on, and the antiquities department offered him Nineveh. He decided to take me along. When I got there, I decided to use my afternoons when everyone else 040was napping to walk over to the site and photograph the reliefs. I did that unsystematically in 1989 and decided in 1990 to come back with enough film and equipment to take well-lighted photographs of everything that was still standing in the palace and then publish the pictures as part of a kind of Nineveh field report. I pretty much photographed all the sculptures in detail.

HS: And then came the Gulf War?

JMR: Yes. We left Nineveh in June 1990, and of course in August, Saddam invaded Kuwait. Further work at Nineveh was out of the question.

In 1995, I went to a conference on Assyria held in Helsinki. Just before that conference, I received from a museum photographs of sculptures they were considering putting on display. They wanted to know if these were sculptures that they should be exhibiting. They apparently weren’t documented. It turned out that these sculptures were from Nineveh. They were sculptures that I’d photographed.

HS: They were looted from the site?

JMR: Yes. In 1990 the sculptures were at Nineveh, and in 1995 they were in Europe, apparently, and being offered for sale. So I showed these photographs in my talk at the Helsinki conference. As a postscript to my talk, I added that apparently Sennacherib’s palace was being looted because the sculptures that should be there were no longer there.

A few months later, a lawyer acting on behalf of a prospective buyer showed me another ten sculptures. These were small fragments of slabs—maybe a foot square, fifteen, eighteen inches—that in my photographs were largely intact. Eight-foot-tall slabs had been reduced to small marketable fragments.

HS: Broken up?

JMR: Broken up. And mostly, broken up to harvest the parts that looked most marketable, without any concern for their context or the images around them.

HS: What did you tell the museum and the lawyer?

JMR: That they were stolen, that they were looted from Nineveh. I haven’t seen any of these pieces since. It proved impossible to find them, to figure out where they were. At least I couldn’t do it, and that really isn’t my job anyway as an art historian. That seems more of a police job. But what I could do was publicize the fact that people should be on the lookout for these things.

It seemed to me there were two possible 041courses of action. One would be to stay quiet and just not worry about it. Then the sculptures could appear on the market; they could eventually end up in private collections, be exhibited on loan to museums, and we’d have those bits of Assyrian culture visible in the West. It seemed to me that the down side of that was, well, of course eventually it would come out that some of these things were stolen, and that would be a problem.

HS: Why would that be a problem?

JMR: Well, because in the United States now, any documented stolen work of art is to be returned to the country of origin. So as these pieces started to surface, there would presumably be legal actions initiated, and I suppose in a best-case scenario some pieces could be confiscated and returned. Other pieces would disappear; if there’s a chance of losing pieces by letting parts of your collection be displayed, I suspect that you would just stay quiet.

HS: Do you have any idea of the extent of the looting from Iraq?

JMR: I’ve seen about 15 or 16 pieces from Nineveh, and another four or five from Nimrud. I did ask an Iraqi colleague to photograph certain slabs. I sent him a map and told him, this is where the pieces on the market are coming from. I’d like to see pictures of what these slabs look like today. The photographs from Iraq showed that the slabs I had expected would be destroyed were in fact reduced to rubble.

HS: I understand that there’s also been a lot of looting or sale of material from Iraqi museums.

JMR: There was, directly after the Gulf War. Before the uprisings in the north and south [of Iraq], the regional museums—a network of a dozen or so, each of which had a nice collection drawn from the Iraq state collection—represented a sort of a microcosm of ancient Mesopotamian culture. Mobs looted most of these museums.

HS: How about the Baghdad museum?

JMR: That one wasn’t touched. When the bombs started falling, everything movable was taken out of the Baghdad museum and put into storage.

HS: Do you blame anybody for the looting? Whose fault is it that the regional museums were looted?

JMR: I can’t quite imagine who to blame. I feel very sad that it happened. It’s hard to blame mobs.

HS: What about Iraqi officials who see a 042chance to make a buck?

JMR: There’s always that possibility.

HS: You have no reason to believe that’s the case, though?

JMR: I have no evidence, nor have I heard any credible stories of that. What I’ve seen is quite the opposite, despite the fact that the antiquities department is going through something that none of us would want to experience. Remember that following the war, the economic sanctions essentially destroyed modern Iraqi culture, moving them quite a few steps back in terms of their standard of living, standard of health and nutrition and so on. The sanctions have been a disaster for everybody except Saddam.

HS: Are you opposed to the sanctions?

JMR: I believe that on humanitarian grounds, speaking as a person with personal feelings, [yes]. I wouldn’t necessarily expect everyone to agree with me. As a historian and archaeologist and art historian, and also simply as a person interested in my past, the sanctions have been a disaster for human heritage, especially in the absence of any evidence that they’re serving a useful function. Politically, of course, I’m not in a position to judge that ultimately. I would say yes, I don’t like what the sanctions have done. If there’s any conceivable alternative, it’s past time to try it.

HS: Do you know where the antiquities that the lawyer presented to you are today?

JMR: One of those pieces turned up in London, and had entered a private collection. The owner of the collection was seeking to export the piece.

HS: To where?

JMR: I’m not sure about that. He is an Israeli, so I suspect Israel.

HS: Do you know his name?

JMR: Shlomo Moussaieff. He or his representative had, in a perfectly legal fashion, applied for a permit to export the piece from Britain, as British law requires. The review committee recognized it as a stolen piece, based on my photographs from when I was at Nineveh, so the export was blocked. The Iraqis were invited to enter negotiations with the collector to figure out a way to get the piece returned. I don’t know how that’s come out but I understand that there may be a resolution pending.

[In 1997 legal proceedings were initiated by the Iraqi Interests Sections in London, a group established in the Jordanian embassy to represent the interests of Iraq, which does not currently have diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom. Last year, a private agreement was reached between the parties, with Shlomo Moussaieff agreeing to turn over the slab to the custody of the Iraqi Interests Section, which in turn agreed to pay Moussaieff 10,000 pounds to cover the price he paid for the slab and lawyers’ fees.—Ed.]

HS: Let me put a hypothetical to you. Let’s suppose that a lawyer comes to your office. He says, “John, I want to show you a picture of a beautiful piece,” one that you recognize from Sennacherib’s palace. And he says, “I have access to an unnamed client who has access through an unnamed person, who wants to sell it.”

JMR: Which is very much how it happens. The person you’re talking to never knows, or will never say they know who has it.

HS: Right. But he has access to it. And he has shown it around and several people are interested, but he doesn’t quite like them and they’ll probably keep it in their basement and show it off to their friends. He says he’d rather sell it to you. And if you don’t buy it, that’s what will happen to it. He’ll sell it to these other people. He then names a price. At that point there’s a knock on your door and in walks a very wealthy woman whom you know. You tell her what’s going on, and she says, “I will be glad to put up the money for this purchase, John. And then you will have the piece and you can do whatever is appropriate.” What do you tell the lawyer?

JMR: It’s an interesting hypothetical situation. Um. [pause] I’d have to think about that one for a while.

I have two interests in the activities that I’m involved in with looting. One of my concerns is to try to discourage further looting by discouraging the supply end, by making the pieces difficult to sell. The other concern is that pieces that are out, it would be nice to have them back in Iraq. It would be nice to reunite them. We’re talking about sculptures that are still restorable to an extent.

HS: The piece in my hypothetical is in wonderful condition.

JMR: I’ve seen pieces like that, although not from Sennecherib’s palace. Okay, so we’ve got a piece in beautiful condition. I love beautiful things and I got into this in the first place because I’m enchanted by cylinder seals and Assyrian sculpture. But if I know that a piece is a fragment of something larger, and even the ones in beautiful condition have been sawed off or smashed out of larger pieces, then I can’t look at that piece and feel that I want that piece or feel that that piece belongs on the wall of a museum. All I can see is that piece in the context of its original setting. I believe that pieces removed illegally in recent times need to go not only back to Iraq, but in some eventual ideal world, back to Nineveh to be restored in a newly refurbished and reconsolidated site museum. So, to come back to your hypothetical question, I guess I would have to give some thought to how my purchasing that piece could be tied to repatriating it in as efficient a manner as possible.

HS: You would be free under my hypothetical to buy the piece and send it back to Iraq. Would you do that?

JMR: Actually, I would have to consult lawyers and U.S. customs officials, because buying that piece would be utterly illegal.

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HS: Well, let’s assume that’s it’s all perfectly proper, and we get the proper authorities to say okay. Would you buy it and send it back to Iraq?

JMR: I would think that it should go back to Iraq. I would like to be a middle man, I think, in such a transaction.

HS: Would you be concerned that it would be destroyed by going back to Iraq?

JMR: If I’m paying a fair market price for it, it means I’m paying the person who’s paid the person who’s paid the person to rip that piece out of the wall of the palace. That is, by buying anything anywhere along the chain of destruction, of plunder, I’m financing plunder. So I would have to weigh [matters]. What is my infusion of capital into that market, what’s the effect of that?

HS: It’s your infusion [of capital] or that of someone else who won’t send the piece back to Iraq.

JMR: Well, yeah. [Pause] I would tend to favor getting the best bargain I could and sending the piece back, but it would be a genuine concern, especially depending on the appearance of creating a market, creating a demand, that I would have to think carefully about. It is the buying, in my opinion, that drives the looting.

HS: That’s right. If we could eliminate all the buying, then we would eliminate the looting, wouldn’t we?

JMR: I don’t know that we would, but I think that would be a great step along the way.

HS: Yes, if the looters only loot because they can sell it, isn’t that true?

JMR: That’s what I assume. I can’t think of any other reason to loot.

HS: So the answer to that would be a simple yes.

JMR: Yes.

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HS: But you also have to recognize that there will always be buyers regardless of what the law is. Am I right?

JMR: That may be a fact. But it may be something that I would prefer to try to address rather than to accept.

HS: Well, we’d all love to see the looters caught and put in jail, no?

JMR: [Pause]

HS: Can you answer that with a simple yes?

JMR: It’s not an easy question to answer with a simple yes. I mean, to some extent yes.

HS: Aren’t we all opposed to looting?

JMR: Well, the looters are part of a chain that begins with the person who removes the piece and ends with the person who buys it.

HS: They’re all criminals who actually get the piece and loot the piece, aren’t they?

JMR: But when you say put the looters in jail, do you mean the consumer at this end? The collector?

HS: No, I mean the person who cuts the slab out and whoever he’s working for.

JMR: Let’s say we’re talking about an identifiable diamond, a famous diamond that’s registered, photographed, whatever. Someone steals the diamond, someone moves it through the middle man, the pawn shop, to the jeweler who knowingly sells stolen diamonds and recognizes it as a stolen diamond, to the consumer who buys it knowing that it’s stolen. Now, who in that chain should go to jail?

HS: Well, since you brought up the hypothetical of the diamond, let me change it a little bit.

JMR: Okay.

HS: Instead of a diamond, let’s suppose it’s a little baby. And the looters of the baby come to you and say we want a million dollars. We’ll give you this baby back. Otherwise, we’ll sell it somewhere else. Would you buy it if you had the money?

JMR: I can sort of see what you’re saying, but I think a baby is a different sort of thing than what we’re talking about.

HS: Well, it’s a choice between having it go underground or ransoming it.

JMR: Can we try a different 057example? I think it’s important in dealing with heritage issues not to confuse them with humanitarian issues, which is one reason I don’t like that example very much. I’m reluctant to talk about putting the looters in jail, because the people who are looting are looting because they’re hungry.

HS: You have some sympathy for the looter?

JMR: I have some sympathy for people who have a choice of looting and eating or not looting and starving.

HS: That’s in line with your view that the sanctions should be lifted.

JMR: It is in line with my view that the sanctions are what have precipitated this.

HS: I guess the hypothetical I’m putting to you is the choice between putting looted antiquities on public display and having them published and available to the scholarly world, on the one hand, and having them going into someone’s basement, on the other, in which case you’ll never hear of them again. Isn’t that the choice?

JMR: [Pause]. Well, the ten pieces the lawyer showed me have no scholarly value at all. They’re broken fragments of other pieces. A full sculpture that tells a story essential to my humanity—say the story of the siege of Jerusalem—that’s something that I find interesting. I find all of that culture, that history, interesting. But the fragment of a slab, mutilated, on the wall, tells me absolutely nothing. It has no value of any sort.

HS: So you would just as soon have it go into some private basement.

JMR: I would like to see it go back to Iraq.

HS: That’s not the choice.

JMR: If that doesn’t happen, then I see that it makes little difference.

HS: Might as well go into someone’s basement?

JMR: [Pause] Yes.

HS: Thank you very much, Dr. Russell.

In this interview with Archaeology Odyssey editor Hershel Shanks, John Malcolm Russell of the Massachusetts College of Art—an expert on the looting of Iraq and author of The Final Sack of Nineveh: The Discovery, Documentation and Destruction of King Sennacherib’s Throne Room at Nineveh, Iraq (Yale, 1998)—describes the damage suffered at the Assyrian King Sennacherib’s “palace without rival.” Surprisingly, Russell expresses some sympathy for the looters. He would lift UN sanctions and send looted antiquities back to Iraq. He prefers that looted antiquities disappear rather than be “ransomed” by a collector. These are positions with which Archaeology Odyssey disagrees. […]