The Met Museum in New York, the Louvre in Paris, the Pergamon in Berlin—museums across the U.S. and Europe maintain objects from Southwest Asia, and elsewhere, that were collected unethically. Perhaps most infamously, in 2021, the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., was forced to return more than 8,000 objects stolen from Iraq. The problem of wartime plunder from Iraq and its neighbors is not unique to Emory’s Carlos Museum.
But being located within a U.S university, the Carlos brings an additional dimension to that problem. Should students engage with objects likely on campus because of unrest caused by the U.S. military’s invasion of Iraq? Should educators ever teach with materials obtained illegally or unethically?
As an archaeologist who teaches at Emory and conducts research in Iraq, I have grappled over these questions and decided yes: Learning with and from these objects can help amend their problematic acquisition—so long as that recent history pervades the lesson.
ROBBING IRAQ’S HERITAGE
Many of the world’s known firsts occurred on the lands that are now Iraq and once were part of Mesopotamia. “The land between the rivers” of the Tigris and Euphrates, Mesopotamia spanned parts of modern-day Iraq, Syria, Türkiye, Kuwait, and Iran. Between about 6,000 and 2,000 years ago, it was home to numerous states and empires, including Babylonia, Assyria, and Sumer. Incising clay tablets with wedge-like characters, resident Sumerians invented the earliest recognized writing system, today called cuneiform. Settlements such as Uruk, Babylon, and Nineveh were the first to grow large enough to be considered cities, with tens of thousands of residents and towering monuments such as Babylon’s Hanging Gardens, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
The global importance of Iraq’s heritage makes its destruction more tragic. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, sparked by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the country’s archaeological sites became easy targets for looters. The breakdown of political and military order, coupled with economic desperation, fueled rampant trade in stolen antiquities. These objects, dating back millennia, were smuggled out of the country and into the black market, where many were purchased by unscrupulous collectors.
In 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq to overthrow President Saddam Hussein’s government, a war justified by claims of weapons of mass destruction that were later proven false. The invasion unleashed a new wave of destruction. When U.S. troops entered Baghdad, looters pillaged some 15,000 objects from the Iraq National Museum. The perpetrators included desperate residents grabbing anything of value as they fled the city and opportunistic Baghdadis connected to foreign smugglers. Nearly overnight, objects from Iraq flooded the international antiquities market—and not just those from the Iraqi National Museum. Archaeological sites were also targeted and destroyed, with as much as 80 percent of their surfaces covered in looter’s pits.
