The Great London:
Iraq

The highly anticipated exhibition From Ancient to Modern: Archaeology and Aesthetics, opens at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) on February 12, 2015. With some 50 outstanding ancient objects, and more than 100 related documents, photographs, and drawings, this groundbreaking exhibition examines the fascinating process through which archaeological objects are transformed from artifacts to artworks and, sometimes, to popular icons, as they move from the sites of their discovery, to be publicized by mass media and exhibited by museums.

From Ancient to Modern: Archaeology and Aesthetics displays a series of spectacular early Mesopotamian objects alongside rich documentation, opening a window onto the ways in which archaeological finds of the 1920s and 1930s were transformed from artifacts into works of art. This process raises fundamental and critical questions: What biographies were initially given to these objects by their discoverers? How were these objects filtered through the eyes and voice of the press before they were seen by the public? How were the objects’ biographies affected by or reflective of the tastes of the time? How were the items presented in museums and received by artists of the period?

And finally, how do they continue to influence artistic practice today? The goal of Archaeology and Aesthetics is to demonstrate that these biographies do not begin and end in antiquity, or span the period from their discovery to the present, but continue to be written—through scholarly inquiry and reconsideration, through museum displays and the relationships they create between object and viewer, and through the ways in which they inspire artists of our time. The modern unearthing of an object is in fact the starting point for a multiplicity of approaches, each creating a better understanding of both the artifact and the people who produced it.

Archaeology and Aesthetics begins with a gallery devoted to a number of early Mesopotamian archaeological sites. Concentrating on the city of Ur and several sites in the Diyala River Valley, the display comprises many now-iconic objects, including a wide array of Sumerian stone sculptures, spectacular jewelry in a variety of precious and exotic materials, and such luxury items as ostrich-egg vessels and bronzes.

These exceptional artifacts are shown with field notebooks, excavator’s diaries, archival photography, and original newspaper clippings, among other archival items, illustrating the ways in which the finds were carefully described and presented to the press, the general public, and the academic community. Selected objects are followed as they are strategically presented to an international audience, effecting their transformation from archaeological artifact to aesthetic item.

The exhibition continues with a gallery devoted to twentieth- and twenty-first-century artistic responses to ancient Mesopotamian objects. As these artifacts began to make their way into museums across pre-World War II Europe and North America, artists including Alberto Giacometti, Henry Moore, and Willem de Kooning drew inspiration from what they saw as a new kind of energy and vision inherent to the material.

Today, many artists return to the archaeological object to explore its role as a window onto human history and cultures rather than as an aesthetic object. Archaeology and Aesthetics demonstrates this approach with work by Jananne al-Ani, who was born in Kirkuk, Iraq, and lives in London, and by the Chicago-based Michael Rakowitz, who is of Iraqi-Jewish heritage. Both create art expressive of the traumatic loss of human heritage caused by wars and the spreading conflict in the Near and Middle East.

“From Ancient to Modern: Archaeology and Aesthetics” runs through June 7 at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World.

Source: Institute for the Study of the Ancient World [February 15, 2015]

Iraq's government is investigating reports that the ancient archaeological site of Khorsabad in northern Iraq is the latest to be attacked by the Islamic State militant group.

Adel Shirshab, the country's tourism and antiquities minister, told The Associated Press there are concerns the militants will remove artifacts and damage the site, located 15 kilometers (9 miles) northeast of Mosul. Saeed Mamuzini, a Kurdish official from Mosul, told the AP that the militants had already begun demolishing the Khorsabad site on Sunday, citing multiple witnesses.

On Friday, the group razed 3,000-year old Nimrud and on Saturday, they bulldozed 2,000-year old Hatra — both UNESCO world heritage sites. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has called the destruction a "war crime," and a statement by his spokesman on Sunday night said Ban was "outraged by the continuing destruction of cultural heritage in Iraq" by theIslamic State group.

Khorsabad was constructed as a new capital of Assyria by King Sargon II shortly after he came to power in 721 B.C. and abandoned after his death in 705 B.C. It features a 24-meter thick wall with a stone foundation and seven gates.

Since it was a single-era capital, few objects linked to Sargon II himself were found. However, the site is renowned for shedding light on Assyrian art and architecture.

The sculptured stone slabs that once lined the palace walls are now displayed in museums in Baghdad, Paris, London and Chicago.

The Islamic State group currently controls about a third of Iraq and Syria. The Sunni extremist group has been campaigning to purge ancient relics they say promote idolatry that violates their fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law. A video released last week shows them smashing artifacts in the Mosul museum and in January, the group burned hundreds of books from the Mosul library and Mosul University, including many rare manuscripts.

At a press conference earlier Sunday, Shirshab said they have called for an extraordinary session of the U.N. Security Council to address the crisis in Iraq.

"The world should bear the responsibility and put an end to the atrocities of the militants, otherwise I think the terrorist groups will continue with their violent acts," he said.

Author: Sameer N. Yacoub | Source: Associated Press [March 09, 2015]

Islamic State fighters have looted and bulldozed the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud, the Iraqi government said, in their latest assault on some of the world's greatest archaeological and cultural treasures.

A tribal source from the nearby city of Mosul told Reuters the radical Sunni Islamists, who dismiss Iraq's pre-Islamic heritage as idolatrous, had pillaged the 3,000-year-old site on the banks of the Tigris River.

The assault against Nimrud came just a week after the release of a video showing Islamic State forces smashing museum statues and carvings in Mosul, the city they seized along with much of northern Iraq last June.

"Daesh terrorist gangs continue to defy the will of the world and the feelings of humanity," Iraq's tourism and antiquities ministry said, referring to Islamic State by its Arabic acronym.

"In a new crime in their series of reckless offences they assaulted the ancient city of Nimrud and bulldozed it with heavy machinery, appropriating the archaeological attractions dating back 13 centuries BC," it said.

Nimrud, about 20 miles (30 km) south of Mosul, was built around 1250 BC. Four centuries later it became capital of the neo-Assyrian empire - at the time the most powerful state on Earth, extending to modern-day Egypt, Turkey and Iran.

Many of its most famous surviving monuments were removed years ago by archaeologists, including colossal Winged Bulls which are now in London's British Museum and hundreds of precious stones and pieces of gold which were moved to Baghdad.

But ruins of the ancient city remain at the northern Iraqi site, which has been excavated by a series of experts since the 19th century. British archaeologist Max Mallowan and his wife, crime writer Agatha Christie, worked at Nimrud in the 1950s.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said he was deeply disturbed by the destruction at Nimrud.

"This crude attempt to erase the heritage of an ancient civilization will ultimately fail. No terrorist can rewrite history," he said in a statement.

A local tribal source confirmed the attack had taken place.

"Islamic State members came to the Nimrud archaeological city and looted the valuables in it and then they proceeded to level the site to the ground," the source told Reuters.

"There used to be statues and walls as well as a castle that Islamic State has destroyed completely."

Archaeologists have compared the assault on Iraq's cultural history to the Taliban's destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas in 2001. But the damage wreaked by Islamic State, not just on ancient monuments but also on rival Muslim places of worship, has been swift, relentless and more wide-ranging.

Last week's video showed them toppling statues and carvings from plinths in the Mosul museum and smashing them with sledgehammers and drills. It also showed damage to a huge statue of a bull at the Nergal Gate into the city of Nineveh.

Archaeologists said it was hard to quantify the damage, because some items appeared to be replicas, but many priceless articles had been destroyed including artifacts from Hatra, a stunning pillared city in northern Iraq dating back 2,000 years.

Islamic State, which rules a self-declared caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria, promotes a fiercely purist interpretation of Sunni Islam which seeks its inspiration from early Islamic history. It rejects religious shrines of any sort and condemns Iraq's majority Shi'ite Muslims as heretics.

In July it destroyed the tomb of the prophet Jonah in Mosul. It has also attacked Shi'ite places of worship and last year gave Mosul's Christians an ultimatum to convert to Islam, pay a religious levy or face death by the sword. It has also targeted the Yazidi minority in the Sinjar mountains west of Mosul.

Author: Dominic Evans and Saif Hameed | Source: Reuters [March 06, 2015]

Ali al-Bayati clambered onto the remains of a giant winged bull statue that once stood as a protector of Iraq's fabled ancient Nimrud before the Islamic State group came.

"When you came here before, you could imagine the life as it used to be," the local leader and tribal militia commander told AFP on Tuesday.

"Now there is nothing."

Iraqi forces announced that they had recaptured Nimrud -- located some 30 kilometres (18 miles) south of Mosul, the country's last city still held by the Islamic State group -- two days before.

The capital of the kingdom of Assyria some 3,000 years ago, Nimrud was one of the richest archaeological sites in the region.

But after IS took over the area along with swathes of other territory in 2014, it sought to level what remained of the city for propaganda gain.

The jihadist group released video footage last year of fighters blowing up the remnants of the famed Northwest Palace and smashing stone carvings at the site -- destruction it justified as wiping out un-Islamic idols.

Now it appears that almost nothing is left undamaged.

Statues lie shattered, the reconstructed palace is wrecked and the remains of a ziggurat -- once one of the tallest structures left from the ancient world at some 50 metres (yards) high -- has been reduced to a fraction of its height.

"One hundred percent has been destroyed," Bayati said as he surveyed the hilltop site, just 500 metres from his native village, for the first time in more than two years.

"Losing Nimrud is more painful to me than even losing my own house," he said.

UNESCO has said that the destruction of Nimrud by IS amounts to a war crime.

Bombs and booby traps

The group also blew up and looted antiquities in the spectacular Syrian site of Palmyra, smashed sculptures at ancient Hatra in Iraq, which is still under IS control, and rampaged through the Mosul museum.

In Nimrud, the jihadists attacked the antiquities with ferocity as they claimed they represented idols banned under their extreme interpretation of Islam.

But that has not stopped them from looting and selling such allegedly forbidden items to fund their operations.

"They want to make a new picture of Iraq -- with nothing before Daesh," Bayati said, using an Arabic acronym for the group.

He said he thought IS "destroyed this place because they wanted to destroy Iraq -- the new Iraq and old Iraq".

Most of Nimrud's priceless artefacts were moved long ago to museums in Mosul, Baghdad, Paris, London and elsewhere, but giant "lamassu" statues -- winged bulls with human heads -- and reliefs were still on site.

Now it will take experts to carry out a full evaluation of the damage IS has wrought at Nimrud.

But it may be some time before they can get there: the jihadists that Iraqi forces are fighting to drive back are still just a few kilometres away, and occasional explosions can be heard in the distance.

The site also still needs to be fully investigated and cleared by security forces of any hidden dangers IS may have left behind.

"There are many (bombs) and booby traps suspected," said Lieutenant Wissam Hamza, a member of an army explosives disposal team, as he walked carefully across the site.

"So we want to find them and clear the area -- then after that it can be called safe."

Source: AFP [November 17, 2016]

When a man arrived at Iraq's Sulaymaniyah Museum offering to sell 80 to 90 clay tablets in 2011, it was Farouk Al-Rawi's job to study them.

The professor at SOAS, University of London, found a few fakes in the mix, but spent much of his time examining a large inch-thick tablet, for which the seller was asking a large sum.

Suddenly, Al-Rawi told the museum's director to buy the thing, 4.3 inches long by 3.7 inches wide, no matter the cost.

As Al-Rawi had suspected, the $800 buy turned out to be a missing version of the 12-tablet Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, considered to be among the first pieces of literature.

After five days spent translating the Neo-Babylonian cuneiform language, Al-Rawi discovered the tablet was a fragment of Tablet V of the poem and adds 20 lines and previously unknown details.

The tablet, made of three fragments, had been glued together, but researchers aren't sure who repaired it or even who dug it up.

Scientists do suspect, however, that the collection came from the ancient area of Babylon. Tablet V tells of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, and his companion Enkidu going to kill the giant Humbaba, who guards the Cedar Forest, home of the gods.

The tablet confirms Enkidu spent time with Humbaba as a boy, but shows Humbaba to be more of a "foreign ruler" than a "barbarian ogre," the impression that comes across in other versions, according to 2014 study.

It mentions that monkeys, cicadas, and birds were present in the forest, and their chatter formed a kind of symphony.

It also shows that Gilgamesh and Enkidu felt guilty after killing Humbaba, which hadn't previously been referenced.

For more information see the online nonprofit publication Ancient History Et Cetera.

Author: Arden Dier | Source: Newser [October 02, 2015]

The FBI is warning collectors that buying Iraqi and Syrian artifacts could help fund ISIS activities, as the militant group has been plundering important historic sites and selling stolen items on the black market.

"We now have credible reports that US persons have been offered cultural property that appears to have been removed from Syria and Iraq recently," said Bonnie Magness-Gardiner, the FBI's Art Theft Program manager, in a statement.

The announcement follows a May US Special Operations raid on an ISIS operative's home, which recovered over 400 stolen artifacts, many from the National Museum of Iraq.

The FBI, however, is only the latest group to speak out against smuggling in the region, and the warning should come as no surprise to anyone in the market for Middle Eastern antiquities.

The Syrian government, for instance, condemned neighboring Turkey this past March for turning a blind eye to the import of looted antiquities. Satellite imagery shows hundreds of illegal excavations at Dura-Europos, a 2,300-year-old city and archaeological site known as the "Pompeii of the Syrian desert," and at other cultural properties in the region.

In October, UNESCO confirmed that ISIS was partially funding its activities through the sale of such stolen artifacts, the blood diamonds of the Middle East. The following month, US lawmakers proposed creating a cultural property protection czar position, that would look to preserve the world's endangered cultural sites.

“This is the greatest scale of looting we have seen since the Second World War," former Christie's director Robert Jenrick told the Art Newspaper in January, as the UK looked to crack down on smuggling following the discovery of $58 million-worth of stolen Middle Eastern artifacts.

UNESCO's United Nations Security Council Resolution 2199, passed in February, is attempting to place new legal measures in order to stop ISIS from funding itself through antiquities trafficking.

"Every person needs to know that the purchase of property from Iraq is punishable, but also that it supports and finances terrorist activities," German state minister Maria Boehmer told the UN this May, during a General Assembly meeting.

In June, the International Council of Museums released an emergency red list of Iraqi cultural items threatened by terrorist activities, in an attempt to thwart trafficking. Syria has had an emergency red list since 2013.

Nevertheless, looted objects have been found in London antiques shops as recently as last month.

ISIS's cultural destruction, particularly the brutal attack on sculptures at the Nineveh Museum in Mosul, Iraq, have been widely condemned. New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, US Secretary of State John Kerry, and the United Nations have also denounced such acts as war crimes.

The FBI's ISIL Antiquities Trafficking document contains the following message:

Please be cautious when purchasing items from this region. Keep in mind that antiquities from Iraq remain subject to Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctions under the Iraq Stabilization and Insurgency Sanctions Regulations (31 CFR part 576).

Purchasing an object looted and/or sold by the Islamic State may provide financial support to a terrorist organization and could be prosecuted under 18 USC 233A.

Robust due diligence is necessary when purchasing any Syrian or Iraqi antiquities or other cultural property in the U.S. or when purchasing elsewhere using U.S. funds.

"Check and verify provenance, importation, and other documents," Magness-Gardiner told the FBI. "What we're trying to say is, don't allow these pieces that could potentially support terrorism to be part of the trade."

Author: Sarah Cascone | Source: Artnet News [August 28, 2015]