An old work colleague told me a story of how he used to work at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London as a student in the 1950’s. Periodically they would throw stuff in the garbage that they didn’t feel was worth restoring. A restorer who had worked there all his life used to salvage these pieces and restore them, at home, in his spare time. When the restorer fell ill and, unusually, didn’t show up for work, his boss decided to visit him and check if he was OK. On entering the restorer’s house he found an Aladdin’s Cave of salvaged artifacts. The restorer was fired and his pension withdrawn. The restored artifacts were removed from his house, placed in a pile and burned.
Curators are outraged by the loss of Iraqi antiquities, but unless they offer up some of their own collections they are hypocrites. Looting during war was the very process by which much of the contents of Western museums was originally obtained. There are two solutions to the loss of antiquities in Iraq: 1. document and try and get back objects as they come on the market; 2. fill the Iraqi museums with objects sitting in the US and UK. Not surprisingly I don’t hear anyone at institutions like the British Museum suggesting the latter.
“Unlike Greece, Iraq has, up till now, never made any demand for the return of what may be considered its patrimony and heritage. Most of the vast holdings, some 250,000 items in the BM [British Museum] alone, were acquired long ago.”
The only justification for keeping stolen goods such as the Elgin Marbles (the sculpted frieze of the Parthenon) is protection. For many artifacts, this is a myth. Many museums do not have the funding to catalogue, or protect, let alone display a large proportion of their collections. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London reputedly has the largest collection of Indian Art anywhere – including any museum in India, yet the true extent is not known as it is not completely catalogued. The last complete specimen of the extinct Dodo rotted in a cupboard at the Oxford University Mueum of Natural History and had to be burned in the 19th century. Only part of its beak and a foot were salvaged, retrieved from the flames by a thoughtful curator.
Will there be an international architectural competition for a new Mesopotamian museum in Baghdad, to be stocked from the existing collections of institutions like the British Museum? I doubt it.