(Phiroze Vasunia is Professor of Greek at University College London and the author, most recently, of 'The Classics and Colonial India' (Oxford, 2013).
Last month, the "press office of the province of Nineveh" released a video that showed Daesh (ISIS) militants destroying statues and other historic objects in Mosul's central museum. Anyone who loves art will find it painful to watch the images of destruction, although the images are tame by the standards of ISIS videos. The militants, making no attempt to conceal their faces, apply sledgehammers and electric drills to ancient statues. Even after the statues have been toppled and broken into smaller fragments, the men in the video continue to hammer away, smashing at fragments of heads and torsos. The video also shows the defacement of a lamassu, or winged bull, which appears to come from Nineveh. Few outsiders can assess the extent of the damage in the area of Mosul, which has been under ISIS control for some months, and perhaps both replicas and originals have been attacked. But evidently, many beautiful works have been assaulted, and their loss is horrendous.
History's sigh rises over ruins, as the poet Derek Walcott once said. Iraq is rich in its past, and its sites and museums contains artefacts that come from a seemingly bewildering variety of periods and cultures. The people who have left a mark on the area of modern Iraq are known to us as Sumerian, Assyrian, Akkadian, Jewish, Persian, Seleucid, Roman, and Christian. Every time a conqueror ravages the land, the aftershocks can be felt in the history of a dozen cultures and more.
Some of these old cultures and peoples are still a part of the fabric of Iraq and feel the heat of ISIS on a daily basis. The militants have targeted Yazidi shrines, Christian churches, and Shi'a mosques, as we learned last summer, and the fate of these people and their places of worship should matter to us no less than the well-being of more ancient monuments.
Of course, the loss of statues pales into insignificance beside the many deaths caused by ISIS, the violent attacks on women, the horrifying treatment of homosexuals, and a hundred other acts that ISIS has committed in the last year. We express our outrage over antiquities or statues partly because we feel helpless in the face of the other atrocities carried out by the militants. In the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, the displacement of our attention onto these objects is a form of cathexis. Yet, this is a false choice: we should not have to choose between saving an art work and saving a life, and we resent ISIS all the more for forcing us to pose the problem in such terms.
The uproar over the damage seen in the recent video has been mainly about the harm caused to objects from the Assyrian empire, the major cities of which were located along the Tigris River. When the excavation of Assyrian sites such as Nimrud and Nineveh was undertaken, the French and British colonial powers had a long history of meddling in the region. The area of modern Iraq lay along one of the overland routes between Britain and India, and was of sufficient interest to the East India Company that it established an agency in Basra in 1763 and sent a British 'Resident' to Baghdad in 1765.
The Europeans who removed ancient artefacts from the area in the nineteenth century and dispatched them to museums and collectors around the world were motivated in part by a strong interest in Biblical history, including the narrative of the flood. The militants who run "the press office of the province of Nineveh" know all too well the kind of headlines that their images and actions will generate; they understand that assaults on art with Biblical associations are likely to generate a firestorm in countries with large Christian populations, and that is what they have achieved.
While the actions of ISIS in demolishing Assyrian art are deplorable, the truth is that we cannot yet say how much has, in fact, been lost. The density of the archaeological record in Iraq means that there will be scores of sites that ISIS will miss because the sites are in regions beyond their control, or have histories that are poorly understood, or lie invisible under the very earth that the militants march over.
Archaeologists who work in Iraq are bemused by the recent interest in Iraq's ruins and will mournfully tell you about the dozens of sites that yet remain undocumented or under-explored.
Few of us are without sin when it comes to the destruction of art or the vandalism of other people's temples. There is no need to rehearse here the events leading up to the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the consequences of what happened in Ayodhya in December 1992. That the Taliban dynamited the statues at Bamiyan is also well known. Perhaps less familiar is the news that the Saudi authorities have cleared historic sites in Mecca and Medina in order to provide space for the development of hotels and shopping malls. And, of course, the current situation in Iraq is the direct and indirect result of an invasion launched by the USA and its allies in 2003. Given the military involvement of Americans in Iraq, it is disconcerting to see the head of a famous collection in the United States writing to the
New York Times and almost implying that Iraqi antiquities would be safer in American museums than in Iraq. Incidentally, ISIS is not ignorant of the sums exchanged on the global antiquities market and it has itself been accused of raising millions through the sale of its loot.
"Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole," as Walcott said. That is one reason for keeping alive the flame of hope. The archaeologists, scholars, and Iraqi people who have tended to their art and monuments are best placed to re-join and repair the shards of their forlorn history. Eleanor Robson, a professor at University College London and a colleague, says that they are still, at risk to their own lives, attempting to watch over the sites, museums, and ruins that the militants are looting or destroying.
At the moment, they need the unstinting support of the so-called international community, which means the support of those who are better resourced, better endowed, and better equipped than they are. Their love is stronger than the hatred of ISIS, and when the Iraqi army finally defeats the militants and reclaims the lands of Iraq from terror, they will be the ones to put the pieces back together again.
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