ROM Mesopotamia exhibit: the curator's secrets,
http://www.phoenixsun8s.biz/, German-born archeologist Clemens Reichel is associate curator, ancient near east, at the Royal Ontario Museum, which opens Mesopotamia: Inventing Our World on June 22. Mesopotamia, considered the cradle of civilization, encompassed modern Iraq, northeastern Syria and southeastern Turkey. It is where the first cities were established and writing developed. The world's first empires, such as Sumer (4,000-2,000 BCE), the Assyrian World Empire (1000-600 BCE) and Babylon (600-540 BCE), were in Mesopotamia. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. In May, I went on an assessment trip to Iraq with American colleagues. We went down to Basra and Nasiriyah essentially to do site visits and assessments of the possibility of resuming work in Iraq.
I think it is becoming feasible. We visited several sites, some of them previously excavated, some of them previously unexcavated but known. Ur, for example, is in the middle of a military base in Nasiriyah, the Tallil airbase. For me, it was the first trip to the south of Iraq. That is sacred ground; it is ground zero for Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia is credited with many things, the first cities, empires. But how did writing start there? The beautiful thing is the writing system comes out of bureaucracy and an inherent need to take control. It is not the need to write poetry or write down your life story; it is bureaucracy, which really comes out of mutual distrust between people. People back then were not that different from us. You have these big temples that are being built in the cities. At the village level you need to store your commodities. How do you know who owns what? Very early on, even around 6000 BCE, you have people sealing jars with lumps of clay and identifying ownership with a stamp. That gets developed later on to the cuneiform writing system. Drawing in clay with a tool is a cumbersome business.
If you can just attach abstract images to a few wedges, which is cuneiform writing, it is a lot faster. You have to make sure that somehow you check what the other person is doing. Not very romantic, but the Mesopotamians have, to some degree, made our daily miseries today with respect to creating bureaucracy. How bad is the damage from looting in Iraq? One thing is you can't generalize. There was the museum looting,
http://www.bugsbunnys8s.biz/, but the much bigger tragedy was that after the fall of the Baath Party regime in 2003 there was no control anymore, especially in the south of Iraq, and large gangs of looters just emptied the sites. When we went for visits, within minutes armed guards would show up, which is encouraging. I can only talk about the south of Iraq, but they seem to be well protected now. But it doesn't take away from the extreme looting that has taken place. How did you become interested in archeology? I went to Rome as a child, I was about 12.
I walked around the Roman Forum; it wasn't the monuments that fascinated me but the fresh cleanings or excavations. I could see layers and although no one could explain it to me, I could understand immediately what that meant oh, that's earlier, that's later. And that is a story that's being told and no one would have seen it that way. You started the Iraq Museum Database Project, an online database to catalogue artifacts looted from the Iraq Museum after the 2003 invasion. How many pieces have been recovered because of this? I know 7,000 out of 15,000 were returned to the Iraq Museum, but I can't tell you which ones because the information comes piecemeal. An unanticipated side effect was an educational one. Kids use it to write about high school essays. The most rewarding experience was when I gave a talk at Aleppo University in Syria. They did beautiful copyright violations, they printed it all out and created their own little manuals. It is very hard for the students even before the war they had few foreign books.
So the database became a teaching tool and took on a life I never expected. You talk about Aleppo. What are your thoughts on what is happening in Syria and the destruction of its sites? This is the second time in my career this has happened first Iraq, now Syria. The damage will be much more drastically visible. Iraq is essentially a country of mud-brick sites, which are rather resilient against warfare. They are not resilient against looting, that is really what destroyed them. But if you explode a mortar shell on them, well there is a crater but it is not taking the whole site down. Syria, you've seen pictures of Palmyra,
http://www.jordangrapes5s.biz/, or wonderful sites like Apamea (north of Hama), which is one of the largest cities in the world, mentioned in the Bible. It is about seven square kilometres and that site was shelled in 2011. The damage that we saw in Iraq, enormous as it was, could be visually overshadowed by what's happening in Syria.
But doesn't excavating a site also make it vulnerable to damage and looting? The best way to protect archeological sites is to excavate them. This may sound a little bit strange, but it is saying that this site is worth protecting. Also, in Iraq and Syria we had long-term projects where you had generations of a family working for you and taking pride in it. In Iraq, many of these sites, which had not been looted,
http://www.playoffs12s.biz/, had these long-term relationships. The famous site of Uruk was protected by the local tribe. Dying Lion wall panel relief Meaning: This small panel depicts a lion in its death throes, an arrow in its back, blood pouring out of its mouth,
http://www.squadronblues13s.biz/, eyes dull, veins pronounced. It is considered a masterpiece of ancient art.
It was part of a large relief panel showing King Ashurbanipal hunting and once hung in a palace in Nineveh, modern Iraq. Scenes of kings hunting lions were a popular theme in Assyrian art and were meant to demonstrate their supremacy over nature, although the animals would have been smaller than their modern counterparts. The panel was discovered in the 1850s by a British archeologist and was not seen again until 1991, when Lilian Boutcher, the great granddaughter of artist William Boutcher, who accompanied the archeologist to Iraq, decided to donate it the British Museum. The panel had been kept in a wooden frame in her family home. Meaning: This elegant sculpture was found buried in a series of royal tombs in Sumer, modern Iraq. The tomb held the bodies of soldiers, servants and courtiers who followed their rulers into the afterlife.
Their remains are long gone, but the earthly goods that accompanied them have survived, including the Ram in the Thicket. Mesopotamia was a colour-deprived landscape, so such a colourful piece of art would have been astonishing. The ram was probably used in daily life, as perhaps a table support in a royal palace. Meaning: Assyrian rulers were conscious about how they would be remembered by history, as this stela of King Ashurbanipal carrying a basket on his head illustrates. His grandfather had destroyed the holy city of Babylon, shocking the world. The Assyrians were embarrassed. Ashurbanipal was restoring Babylon and to ensure his deed would be remembered in the future, he wanted to depict himself carrying foundation stones in a basket for the reconstruction of an important Babylonian temple.
Meaning: This tablet both shows how writing was first developed in Mesopotamia the cuneiform script originated in Sumer in the 4th millennium BCE but also gives an insight into the inquisitive ancient mind. On the left hand side of the tablet is cuneiform from around 2500 BCE, probably giving administrative details of commodities such as wheat or barley. On the right is a translation later done from the Babylonians. They were engaging and discovering their own past. The Mesopotamians were famously bureaucratic; hundreds of thousands of clay tablets chronicling their administrative affairs have survived to the present day.
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