Tom Campbell, director of the Metropolitan Museum, was among those sickened by the videos released today by Islamic State (to which I shall not link) showing militants smashing archaeological artifacts (which they regard as forms of idolatry) from Iraq’s Mosul Museum.
The museum was also looted during the 2003 Iraq war.
Here in full is Campbell’s statement, issued this afternoon, regarding this deplorable destruction:
Speaking with great sadness on behalf of the Metropolitan, a museum whose collection proudly protects and displays [emphasis added] the arts of ancient and Islamic Mesopotamia, we strongly condemn this act of catastrophic destruction to one of the most important museums in the Middle East.
The Mosul Museum’s collection covers the entire range of civilization in the region, with outstanding sculptures from royal cities such as Nimrud, Nineveh, and Hatra in northern Iraq. This mindless attack on great art, on history, and on human understanding constitutes a tragic assault not only on the Mosul Museum, but on our universal commitment to use art to unite people and promote human understanding. Such wanton brutality must stop, before all vestiges of the ancient world are obliterated.
In an NPR segment last July, Christopher Dickey, foreign editor of the Daily Beast, described the importance of the holdings of the Mosul Museum, which was then under Islamic State’s control:
What’s at risk are some beautiful monumental sculptures, these winged figures, lions and bulls, with the faces of bearded men—Kings, that clearly were idols in the time of the Assyrians but that are now part and parcel of the history of Western civilization and biblical history especially.
And then we’ve also got gorgeous gold jewelry which certainly will go onto the black market and all kinds of smaller pieces of sculpture, earthenware, the kinds of things that give you the texture as well as the beauty of life in that period. So it’s a rich museum but all of that collection is now in the hands of ISIS….
What is in the museum in Mosul has not been destroyed, not yet. But the people who are occupying the museum were very explicit and said we are just waiting for the orders when to do it.
Now they’ve done it. We had months of warning. Are we powerless to arrest the ruthless destruction of world heritage and, more importantly, of innocent lives?
As it happened, I chatted two weeks ago with Pedro Azara, professor of aesthetics and the theory of art at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, who had been working on an archaeological dig at a Neo-Assyrian site near Mosul, in the area now occupied by Islamic State. He was at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York, as co-curator of an exhibition of ancient Mesopotamian objects (including a standing male figure loaned by the Met), juxtaposed with modern and contemporary works inspired by them.
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
Azara told me that “apparently there is no visible damage” to the archaeological site where he had worked. “But you cannot go there. You cannot stay near the site because it is too dangerous, because it is too near Mosul.”
Pedro added:
We thought they [the occupiers] would have begun to dig in search of objects [to be converted to cash]. The good thing is that Islamic State stayed for only 10 days on the site, so we suppose that not too much damage could have been produced. You have to dig a lot to get to the Neo-Assyrian strata. So we hope that nothing important has happened.
But we don’t know.