When Wartime Plunder Comes to Campus
IN 2022, the Art Crimes Division of the FBI became interested in a palm-size piece of carved ivory held by Emory University’s art museum in Atlanta, Georgia.
Though missing portions, enough remained to know the ivory originally showed a sphinx striding on a man’s head. Some 2,700 years ago, it embellished furniture in an Assyrian capital known to archaeologists as Nimrud, in present-day Iraq. It was one of hundreds of Nimrud ivories.
The object entered the school’s Michael C. Carlos Museum in 2006 through what curators believed were legitimate channels. But then a long overdue book, Ivories From Nimrud Vol. VII, was finally published. Within the volume, a photo taken in the 1980s showed an identical ivory piece in the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad.
In 2023, with the museum’s cooperation, the FBI returned the ivory to Baghdad, 20 years after it had presumably been looted during the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
But the Carlos Museum still holds many objects of questionable provenance—objects lacking information about when, where, and how they were discovered. With limited resources, museum staff slog through a hellish backlog, trying to confirm or deny the legality of every item held by the institution.
The Met Museum in New York, the Louvre in Paris, the Pergamon in Berlin—museums across the U.S. and Europe maintain objects from Southwest Asia, and elsewhere, that were collected unethically. Perhaps most infamously, in 2021, the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., was forced to return more than 8,000 objects stolen from Iraq. The problem of wartime plunder from Iraq and its neighbors is not unique to Emory’s Carlos Museum.
But being located within a U.S university, the Carlos brings an additional dimension to that problem. Should students engage with objects likely on campus because of unrest caused by the U.S. military’s invasion of Iraq? Should educators ever teach with materials obtained illegally or unethically?
As an archaeologist who teaches at Emory and conducts research in Iraq, I have grappled over these questions and decided yes: Learning with and from these objects can help amend their problematic acquisition—so long as that recent history pervades the lesson.
ROBBING IRAQ’S HERITAGE
Many of the world’s known firsts occurred on the lands that are now Iraq and once were part of Mesopotamia. “The land between the rivers” of the Tigris and Euphrates, Mesopotamia spanned parts of modern-day Iraq, Syria, Türkiye, Kuwait, and Iran. Between about 6,000 and 2,000 years ago, it was home to numerous states and empires, including Babylonia, Assyria, and Sumer. Incising clay tablets with wedge-like characters, resident Sumerians invented the earliest recognized writing system, today called cuneiform. Settlements such as Uruk, Babylon, and Nineveh were the first to grow large enough to be considered cities, with tens of thousands of residents and towering monuments such as Babylon’s Hanging Gardens, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
The global importance of Iraq’s heritage makes its destruction more tragic. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, sparked by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the country’s archaeological sites became easy targets for looters. The breakdown of political and military order, coupled with economic desperation, fueled rampant trade in stolen antiquities. These objects, dating back millennia, were smuggled out of the country and into the black market, where many were purchased by unscrupulous collectors.
In 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq to overthrow President Saddam Hussein’s government, a war justified by claims of weapons of mass destruction that were later proven false. The invasion unleashed a new wave of destruction. When U.S. troops entered Baghdad, looters pillaged some 15,000 objects from the Iraq National Museum. The perpetrators included desperate residents grabbing anything of value as they fled the city and opportunistic Baghdadis connected to foreign smugglers. Nearly overnight, objects from Iraq flooded the international antiquities market—and not just those from the Iraqi National Museum. Archaeological sites were also targeted and destroyed, with as much as 80 percent of their surfaces covered in looter’s pits.
Beginning in 2013, the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) group brought fresh horrors. The terrorist group deliberately targeted ancient sites, such as Nimrud and Hatra, in a calculated assault on Iraq’s history and identity, and as part of a broader campaign of cultural cleansing—at least, publicly. Another reason for targeting archaeological sites soon came to light: The revenue from antiquities looted by ISIS was second only to its revenue from illicit oil smuggling. The international art market played a key role in funding ISIS’ terrorism.
FROM IRAQ TO EMORY
For two months out of every year, I live in Iraq and lead an international team of researchers on an archaeology project. We work closely with our Iraqi and Iraqi Kurdish colleagues to document, study, and care for uncovered objects before they are given a new home in a museum—the local one.
My experiences in Iraq influence the way I teach. Questions of “who owns the past” are peppered through my Introduction to Archaeology course. We tackle thorny issues of archaeological context, data availability, cultural heritage, and museums’ role in it all. Meanwhile, we sit less than 500 feet from objects in the Carlos Museum that should not be in the U.S.
Winding through the museum’s narrow galleries with students, I watch them gander at objects from all over the world. Excitement rises when we reach displays holding the most ancient material.
Read more from the archives: “The Battle to Protect Archaeological Sites in the West Bank.”
“The Carlos Museum has acquired over 3,000 objects for their ‘Ancient Near Eastern’ collections since 2003,” I begin my lecture, standing before displays of lapis, ivory, and ceramic. “Does anyone know why I’m bringing up 2003?”
Most students have no idea. Sometimes, one uncertainly ventures, “Is that when Iraq was invaded?”
“Right-o. So why am I bringing up that the museum has acquired objects since then?”
Students start to weave together conversations we’ve had throughout the semester. They realize we are standing next to objects with worrisome backstories.
TO TEACH OR NOT TO TEACH
At this point, approximately 7,000 of the estimated 15,000 objects looted from Iraq’s National Museum have been recovered. However, that number comprises a small fraction of the total objects plundered from Iraq. Objects stolen from archaeological sites aren’t documented like the Nimrud ivory and others from the National Museum: No inevitable paper trail leads to reclamation. Foreign museums benefit from this obscurity. No proof of looting and no proof of illegal export equals a “free pass” in many cases.
The free pass is what I’m trying to avoid.
On one hand, engaging with these objects legitimizes their presence on campus. Students in the U.S. benefit from artifacts taken during a war for which the U.S. is to blame.
But pedagogical research has repeatedly shown the utility of learning with real-world examples and hands-on materials. Students connect when they stand in front of a case, reading the labels with new scrutiny in the face of damning historical context. That very object might have been looted from a specific museum or dug up illicitly from a specific site. The injustice hits harder than reading about it in a textbook.
The ultimate goal is for looted objects to return to their countries of origin, but it’s slow going. In the meantime, by teaching with these objects, I seed a conversation with each group of students that passes through Emory.
“What do you mean we bought these objects on the art market?”
“We should contact the countries to see if they have info.”
“We should hire more provenance researchers.”
The students come to see themselves as part of the problem and potential solutions. They enter a battle playing out around the world between the international art market, museums, universities, and peoples whose heritage has been stolen.
To teach with collections that may have been looted, that reality must be front and center. Ethically using these objects means not just illustrating points about the ancient cultures from which they came but also discussing their recent history.
The return of a 2,700-year-old Nimrud ivory to the Iraqi government marked a belated acknowledgment of a troubling chapter in the object and the museum’s histories. Many more objects ought to complete this journey. Until then, my students will learn their ancient and recent history, grapple with current debates, and stand directly in front of the problem.
Petra Creamer is an anthropological archaeologist researching the growth of empires and their impact on the populations under their hegemony. She is currently an assistant professor of Ancient Near Eastern studies at Emory University, where she teaches classes on archaeology, digital tools for the social sciences and humanities, and the ancient history of Southwestern Asia. In the field, she is the director of the excavation and remote sensing project Rural Landscapes of Iron Age Imperial Mesopotamia in Iraqi Kurdistan, where her ongoing fieldwork addresses lifeways in the ancient Assyrian imperial core (around 1350 B.C.–600 B.C.). She employs a variety of remote sensing and digital applications (such as magnetometry, satellite imagery, imagery from unmanned aerial vehicles, and GIS) to further understand the infrastructure and urbanism of the broader Assyrian landscape. She has conducted fieldwork in Iraq, Turkey, Italy, Azerbaijan, Greece, and the U.S.
