The National Museum of Iraq

After reading the article emailed to us by Dr. Li, I decided to take a better look at this museum, its history, and the looting's that occurred. Also known as The Baghdad Archaeological Museum, the National Museum of Iraq was established with the help of Gertrude Bell in 1926. From this time until the 1930's the museum was under the Ministry of Public Works until being taken under the Ministry of Education thereafter. The museum has had help from German and Italian governments in the construction of more buildings surrounding the museum.

During the Gulf War in 1991 the Museum was closed and did not re-open until April 28th, 2000 for former president Suddam Hussein's birthday. On April 7th, 2003, theft and looting began continuing until April 12th. The museum staff was asked to leave on April 8th though they attempted to hold back looters until U.S. Forces arrived on April 16th. Most Storage rooms were looted though none of the steel doors showed signs of forced entry. Museum staff believe about 15,000 items were stolen of which over 3,000 have been recovered.

http://www.gadling.com/photos/the-national-museum-of-iraq/

The museum has since been protected, however Iraqi archaeological sites have not causing large-scale looting. This looting has been causing a lot of work for museum staff who have been receiving large loads of undocumented artifacts that have been confiscated from the borders.

The museum has been opened since February 23, 2009 for VIP Tours and school groups and is suspected to re-open to the public in 2013. As of late, the museum workers, with the help of many other organizations have been working hard to get the museum back up and running. There are prospected to be twenty-seven galleries total by the opening of the museum.

As we've been talking about the question of the ethics of looting this research has brought a couple of questions to mind. It seems a little fishy that the whole place was looted including storage rooms with out a single sign of forced entries. It makes it almost seem as though the looting was some sort of inside job. The looting of the museum was devastating, however, the looting of the sites seems to only benefit them. While yes, they have no idea as to where the artifacts came from and have to do a little extra work to figure out their origins, the museum is receiving free artifacts all the time to add to their new exhibits but now they are lost to their archaeologists.

So for my  fellow classmates, what is your personal position on looting and how did this article affect it?