• Message Board Plundering the Past The Rape of Iraq's National Museum Francis Deblauwe During the second week of April, something terrible happened in Baghdad: Looters broke into the National Museum, smashing display vitrines full of ancient objects and making off with some of the museum’s prized holdings. The damage didn’t stop there; frenzied mobs also set fire to the National Library and then continued on to the Awqaf (Religious Endowments) Library and the Saddam House of Manuscripts. Whether these acts were motivated by revenge, greed or temporary insanity, the loss to knowledge—especially knowledge about the roots of Western civilization and the world’s three great monotheistic religions—is incalculable. The National Museum in Baghdad was founded in 1921 by the British, who administered Iraq after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. It is the most important museum in the Middle East, rivaled only by the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Until mid-April, the National Museum housed about 170,000 artifacts. Although it is considerably smaller than the great museums in Paris, London, Berlin and New York,* its collection consists of objects unearthed in controlled excavations in Iraq—meaning that it provides an almost continuous record of life in ancient Mesopotamia, something no other museum can boast. Moreover, since the museum’s objects were mostly found in well-documented archaeological contexts, we know how to interpret them, and we know that they are authentic, which is not always the case with museum objects. “History begins at Sumer,” wrote University of Pennsylvania Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer. “Sumer” refers to a collection of city-states—including Ur, Nippur and Uruk—that arose around the end of the fourth millennium B.C. in southern Iraq. Although we don’t know where the Sumerians came from (their language is not related to any other known language), they are in a sense our earliest recognizable ancestors. They created the world’s first written numbering system, and they created the first fully developed writing system, which came to be called cuneiform (from the Latin, meaning “wedge-shaped”). ** Learning to write by scratching simple inventories on clay tablets, they eventually created the world’s first written fables, prayers and epics, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. # They