In the 13th century, the Arab world had what was undoubtedly the greatest system of public libraries on earth, most open to rich and poor alike. “When the geographer Yakur al-Himawi visited the city of Merv in 1228,” Fred Lerner tells us in his book The Story of Libraries, “he found there ten libraries open to the public. From one of these, the Damiriyah library, he was able to borrow more than two hundred books at a time.” In such libraries, you might be given paper and ink to make notes on the text you requested, though if you planned to copy a text yourself (in those days before printing), you had to bring the necessary materials with you. The loaning out of texts — considered a religious obligation to facilitate the spread of knowledge — was typically done on the basis of one day for each leaf of text. “This was considered ample time for the borrower to copy the entire book.”
As Lerner tells us, “When the Mongols swept across the Muslim lands in the 13th century, they destroyed the great cities of central Asia and, in 1258, Baghdad itself. In one week most of that city’s thirty-six public libraries were destroyed. Al-Nadim’s Fihrist al’ulum (Index of the Sciences) lists the books known to a 10th-century Baghdad scholar; fewer than one in a thousand survives today because of the Mongol raids. Illuminated manuscripts and exquisite examples of calligraphy were burned as fuel, while finely decorated leather bindings went to shoe Mongol feet. Scholars and students were massacred, and the Mongol hordes rode westward across Syria until they were stopped in Egypt.”
Almost 750 years later — with the National Museum of Antiquities looted and trashed, with those tablets on which Hammurabi first had a code of laws inscribed simply gone, as may be cuneiform tablets with missing pieces of the Gilgamesh epic — the great National Library of Baghdad is again burning, and tens of thousands of manuscripts, and who knows what else, are lost, as a piece by Oliver Burkeman of the Guardian indicates. The Pentagon admits to confusion but denies responsibility, despite the fact that the Washington Post has now reported in some detail on the efforts of scholars, museum directors, archaeologists to warn the government of exactly this before the war; all of it, it seems, completely predictable – for those whose minds weren’t on other matters.
It turns out, however, that there was another group that may have had the ear of this privatizing administration of ours. As Burkeman reports,
“a letter from nine British archaeologists, published in the Guardian yesterday, [claimed] that private collectors were ‘persuading the Pentagon to relax legislation that protects Iraq’s heritage by prevention of sales abroad’.
“The American Council for Cultural Policy, a New York-based coalition of about 60 collectors, dealers and others, had received ‘no special treatment,’ the official insisted, despite reports that members of the group met with Bush administration representatives in January to argue that a post-Saddam Iraq should have relaxed antiquities laws.”
Undoubtedly, a contest between private collectors and public museums (and scholars) for the ear of this administration would have been like the contest between energy companies and environmentalists for Dick Cheney’s ear in another slash-and-burn moment of administration history. It seems that in the spirit of liberating Iraq by privatizing it, plans were indeed being laid for the “patrimony” of Iraq to come home – to well-endowed private homes elsewhere on this homeland planet of ours.
“The American Council for Cultural Policy, a New York-based coalition of about 60 collectors, dealers and others, had received ‘no special treatment,’ the official insisted, despite reports that members of the group met with Bush administration representatives in January to argue that a post-Saddam Iraq should have relaxed antiquities laws.”
Undoubtedly, a contest between private collectors and public museums (and scholars) for the ear of this administration would have been like the contest between energy companies and environmentalists for Dick Cheney’s ear in another slash-and-burn moment of administration history. It seems that in the spirit of liberating Iraq by privatizing it, plans were indeed being laid for the “patrimony” of Iraq to come home – to well-endowed private homes elsewhere on this homeland planet of ours.
The question of whether we are the new Mongols remains, of course, to be answered, though Wayne Marsden at least proposes it at www.counterpunch.com in a piece, Was Saddam right? Are American the new Mongols of the Mideast?. He writes: “The United States and Britain are among the few nations of the world to have refused signing The Hague Convention on the protection of cultural heritage during hostilities.” We, who now grasp the right to define alone how the world should work, are not the ones to be entrusted with the answer to this question.
I include as well LA Times columnist Robert Scheer’s latest on the “untidiness” of American policy in Iraq and a piece by Matthew Engel of the Guardian, who visits a sacred American historical site, Gettysburg, and suggests just how far this warrior nation of ours is from any but the most entertaining dreams of a warring world. Tom
Ancient archive lost in Baghdad library blaze
Oliver Burkeman
The Guardian
April 15, 2003As flames engulfed Baghdad’s National Library yesterday, destroying manuscripts many centuries old, the Pentagon admitted that it had been caught unprepared by the widespread looting of antiquities, despite months of warnings from American archaeologists.
But defence department officials denied accusations by British archaeologists that the US government was succumbing to pressure from private collectors in America to allow plundered Iraqi treasures to be traded on the open market.
Almost nothing remains of the library’s archive of tens of thousands of manuscripts, books, and Iraqi newspapers, according to reports from the scene.
It joins a list that already includes the capital’s National Museum, one of the world’s most important troves of artefacts from the ancient Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian civilisations.
To read more Burkeman click here
Pentagon Was Told Of Risk to Museums
U.S. Urged to Save Iraq’s Historic Artifacts
By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post
April 14, 2003In the months leading up to the Iraq war, U.S. scholars repeatedly urged the Defense Department to protect Iraq’s priceless archaeological heritage from looters, and warned specifically that the National Museum of Antiquities was the single most important site in the country.
Late in January, a mix of scholars, museum directors, art collectors and antiquities dealers asked for and were granted a meeting at the Pentagon to discuss their misgivings. McGuire Gibson, an Iraq specialist at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, said yesterday that he went back twice more, and he and colleagues peppered Defense Department officials with e-mail reminders in the weeks before the war began.
“I thought I was given assurances that sites and museums would be protected,” Gibson said.
To read more Washington Post click here
It’s U.S. Policy That’s ‘Untidy’
By Robert Scheer
Los Angeles Times
April 15, 2003How telling that U.S. forces so carefully protected Iraq’s oil fields while ignoring the looting of Baghdad’s internationally renowned museum. The complete, and by all accounts preventable, destruction of one of the world’s most significant collections of antiquities is a fit metaphor for current U.S. foreign policy, which causes more serious damage through carelessness than calculation.
The notion that Iraq even has history — let alone that 7,000 years ago this land was the cradle of civilization — is not likely to occur to the neocolonialists running a brawny young nation barely more than 200 years old. The United States’ earnest innocence is the charm that our entertainment industry markets so successfully around the world, but it is also the perennial seed of disaster as we blithely rearrange corners of the planet we only pretend to understand.
To read more Scheer click here
The thrill of battle
By Matthew Engel
The Guardian
April 15, 2003Anyone who thinks war never does anyone any good has obviously never been to Gettysburg. It has made a fortune for an otherwise unremarkable southern Pennsylvanian town. There are dozens of other civil war battlefields, offering discreet tourism for the discerning and the obsessed, but Gettysburg is in a different league.
This is mainly due to the uniquely bloody (nearly 7,000 dead) and decisive nature of the encounter: once the Confederate general, George Pickett, had indulged the fashion, set by the British at Balaclava, for pointless uphill charges, the south’s cause – though the end was nearly two years away – was essentially doomed. So now, even on the most dismal winter weekday, the town is full of school buses and camper vans; you can stay at the Battlefield Inn or the Drummer Boy campground, go on the Ghosts of Gettysburg tour, and eat heartily afterwards at General Pickett’s All-U-Can-Eat Buffet restaurant.