Archaeology and nation-building in Iraq.

• Author: Gibson, McGuire
• Position: Reclaiming a Plundered Past: Archaeology and Nation Building in Modern Iraq - Book review

Reclaiming a Plundered Past belongs to a fairly new genre of history that examines the use of archaeology in the creation of nationalism (see p. 323, n. 14 for references). In this study, Magnus Bernhardsson, a historian of modern Iraq, has focused on the creation and history of the Department of Antiquities and the role of the past as employed in the process of Iraqi state building since the British occupation after the First World War. Like the authors of other such studies, he is addressing historians in general and modern Middle East historians in particular, but he has another audience in the archaeologists and philologists who specialize in ancient Mesopotamia and Islamic-period Iraq.

Written initially as a doctoral dissertation at Yale (1999), Bernhardsson's book reached its present form in the days after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, with the looting of the Baghdad Museum and other cultural institutions throughout the country. The book comes at an opportune time, given the current debate and lawsuits related to the responsibility for cultural property in time of war and occupation, the "ownership of culture," and the ongoing contest for "ownership" that pits consumer-countries' museums, collectors, dealers, and some allied academics on one hand and the source-countries, UNESCO, and many field-research-oriented academics on the other. The present situation in Iraq gives Bernhardsson a good starting point in his introduction for a discussion of the attitudes of foreigners and Iraqis to antiquities and to the use of antiquities for political purposes, chiefly the fostering of national unity and for the elaboration of a national heritage.

The book is a mine of information drawn from original documents and published memoirs and histories that most specialists of the ancient past will not know. Bernhardsson writes well, and persuasively, dealing with two main themes: national identity as it is derived from archaeology, and the removal and repatriation of Iraqi artifacts. He has not had access to the Antiquities service's own records, nor has he had the long-term experience in the country that archaeologists and philologists have enjoyed, so he cannot know certain aspects of the situations upon which he touches. He does, however, weave a many-stranded tapestry that gives a context to events that researchers in Iraq experienced often as puzzling actions that were the result of decisions that they had no way of anticipating.

Governmental records, which most archaeologists do not consult, give fresh insights into the motives and actions of participants, especially the British in the period from 1918 to 1941. (It would have been helpful had Bernhardsson included a list of abbreviations for these sources, seeing that many of his readers will be unfamiliar with the conventions.) Quotations from Foreign Office, India Office, Colonial Office, and Army records, reflecting different attitudes toward the people of Iraq and toward antiquities and who should own them, have a regrettably familiar ring today. Despite the twentieth-century adoption of international conventions on cultural property, the same arguments that were being made in the nineteenth century and in Mandate Iraq are still being made, with claims that Western countries appreciate antiquities more and can take care of them better, and therefore are justified in removing them from Iraq, regardless of how they are removed. The British Foreign Office was the main unit that called for the preservation of Iraq's past by keeping the monuments and artifacts in Iraq, in part through the setting up of a museum. Other British units sought to justify and excuse the extraction of antiquities from the country. The role of the academics in Britain regarding the disposition of antiquities captured from the Germans was not an attractive one, but neither was the expressed attitude of many officials, including T. E. Lawrence, whom we think of as the champion of the Arabs (pp. 71ff.).

After an introduction, the first chapter takes a look at archeology in Iraq before the First World War, emphasizing Western attitudes toward the area as part of the Biblical and Classical past. Bernhardsson discusses the Ottoman attitude toward Iraq, indicating that its rule was largely indirect, with governors being given great autonomy. He touches upon the first Ottoman Antiquities Law of 1874, by which excavators were to receive a share of objects. He might have stressed more the fact that this law was an attempt to regulate what he calls the "scramble" for antiquities by Europeans, particularly the British and French. In one section (pp. 50-52), Bernhardsson discusses the American appearance in Mesopotamian archaeology, with the Pennsylvania expedition to Nippur (1889-1900). He mentions the University of Chicago's work at Adab in 1903-4, but names only Robert Harper, who was not on the site, and omits Edgar J. Banks, who was the field director. He then goes on to detail the Oriental Institute's work at Khorsabad and in the Diyala basin, leading the reader to think that the Institute existed in the Ottoman Period and carried out these excavations at that time, rather than being established in 1919 and sponsoring those expeditions in the late 1920s and 1930s.

Chapter two focuses on World War I and the British Occupation. Bernhardsson states that Iraq had not been the scene of economic and social movements that had brought about great change in Istanbul, but he later mentions that many of the young Iraqi men who had been trained in Baghdad and Istanbul became Arab nationalists, and many joined the revolt against the Ottomans. They later became the core bureaucrats and the elite of the monarchy in Iraq. I suspect that the nationalist feeling of these and other Iraqis has not yet been properly gauged. Most of the young officers and officials were from old families of Iraq, who were usually very mixed in background, with combinations of Arab Sunni and Shii, Turkish, Turkoman, and Kurdish ancestors, and with many tracing descent from the Mameluk pashas who had ruled all of Iraq from Baghdad during the eighteenth century. That experience of virtual autonomy of all of Iraq under the Mameluks has...