Reclaiming a Plundered Past: Archaeology and Nation Building in Modern Iraq

CONCLUSION

CONCLUSION T he decades after 1941 witnessed a tremendous degree of archaeological activity in Iraq. Iraqi archaeology, like so many features of Iraqi political life, was under the close control of the central government. During these years, the thrust of Iraqi national identity was in flux, in that different historical paradigms and periods were emphasized to legitimize the state and the nation and took their turns in characterizing Iraqi political life. In this time period, archaeology and Iraqi archaeologists played a significant role. In 1940–1941, in close cooperation with Seton Lloyd, Fuad Safar excavated Tell ’Uqair and found materials belonging to the Uruk and Jamdat Nasr periods.1 That year, following the coup d’état by Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, al-Husri fell out of favor and was forced to leave Iraq in 1941. Yusuf Ghanima became the director general of antiquities in his place. Ghanima initiated the rearrangement of the Iraq Museum, which would be “representative of the successive cultural phases in the history of Iraq.”2 He stated, further, that because the “most important function of a modern Museum is an educational one,” it was important to organize the objects in a chronological sequence according to their approximate dating, “thereby giving some impression of the gradual development of Mesopotamian culture from the earliest times onwards.”3 As before, the Iraq Museum only displayed objects from the pre-Islamic period, leaving the Islamic objects to the Islamic museum. Shortly after World War II, Dr. Naji al-Asli became the director of antiquities and along, with the two recent Iraqi graduates from foreign universities, Safar and Taha Baqir, organized the department along apolitical and scientific lines. Their efforts to build a first-class scientific institution from within came at about the time that concerted attempts were made by the Iraqi government to become a modern state. Just prior to and during World War II, at the time the first Iraqi archaeologists were conducting their excavations, several notable cultural institutions were established to promote Western culture, such as the Institute of Music (established in 1937), the Iraq School of Fine Arts (1939), and the state-sponsored Museum of Modern Art (1943).4 In 1952, Safar and Baqir were two of the founders of the Faculty of Archaeology at the University of Baghdad, organized along the lines of similar departments in Western universities, which in subsequent years would be the main department educating Iraqi archaeologists.5 Their first major archaeological projects in the post–al-Husri era, when the fervor of Pan-Arabism had somewhat subsided in Iraq, were primarily directed toward Sumerian remains. In 1942–1943, Baqir conducted excavations at ‘Aqar Quf, a ruined ziggurat near Baghdad identified with the Kassite city of Dur Kurigalzu, which was first identified by Rawlinson in the 1860s. In the first excavation report, Baqir stated that in addition to the archaeological importance of the site there were several other reasons why this site was chosen. The first was economic; owing to the war, it was important to excavate in the vicinity of Baghdad.6 Second, the proximity to Baghdad also allowed people in Baghdad, both Iraqis and the many Allied troops stationed in the area, to witness an archaeological project in progress. Baqir maintained that many hundreds of Allied troops and many parties of Iraqi schoolteachers and students visited the site.7 Assisting Baqir in these excavations were Seton Lloyd, the technical adviser to the department of antiquities , the architect Muhammad Ali Mustafa, Ata Sabri, Sabri Shukri, and Izeddin Sanduq. The excavations, which lasted until January 1945, found numerous works of art, including gold ornaments and jewelry, and contributed to a better understanding of the Kassite dynasty.8 During the 1940s, Safar and Baqir, most often in cooperation with Seton Lloyd, conducted extensive excavations at Tell ’Uqair, where they unearthed the first known Sumerian painted temple, with colored frescoes covering the inside walls and the altar. At Tell Harmal, near Baghdad, Baqir found two thousand tablets—including letters and lexical , literary, and mathematical texts—and a temple. And at Eridu, Safar discovered the earliest Ubaid pottery, an Ubaid cemetery, and two palaces from the middle of the third millennium b.c.e. Samuel Kramer, the father of Sumerian literary studies, positively notes these Iraqi efforts, stating that they were of “particular relevance and importance” 212 RECLAIMING A PLUNDERED PAST to Sumerian studies and that they had “surprised the scholarly world.”9 The...