Update, March 6th: There are new reports that ISIS has also looted and bulldozed the ruins of the ancient city of Nimrud, near Mosul, which was settled three thousand years ago. "There used to be statues and walls as well as a castle," a Mosul tribal source told Reuters, describing the destruction.
One of the peculiarities of a video showing the sacking of the Mosul Museum, released on Thursday, is that some of the newest things in the collection turned quickly to dust, while some of the oldest held out longer. In the video, a gang of men from the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham push what looks like an ancient relief off a wall, and it bursts like a broken bag of flour—a plaster reproduction. In contrast, statues that were more than two thousand years old stubbornly resist, at least for a while. Some, when they are toppled, stay mostly intact, or break into a couple of pieces that one hopes could be put back together. But the ISIS men brought sledgehammers, and pound and pound until the statues are fragments. At times, they seem to be aiming for the stone faces. The scene in the video shifts outside, to a monumental statue of a winged bull with a man’s head. It stood guard at the Nergal Gate, an entry into the ancient city of Nineveh, and is almost three thousand years old. The men climb on, and go to work on it with a jackhammer.
Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, has been under the control of ISIS for months. (An offensive to retake it is expected this spring.) The ruins of Nineveh, once the world’s greatest city and the seat of Assyrian emperors, are on the edge of town. An ISIS man in the video talks about how Muhammad destroyed idols of people he fought when he took Mecca. The camera zeroes in on a label near a portal leading to the Nergal gate, and a green light highlights a line explaining that Nergal was “the God of the Plague and the nether world and he is among the Sumerian Gods who was worshipped in Mesopotamia for a long time”—as if that were a telling indictment. ISIS is both indifferent to the value of the past and rhetorically obsessed with it. It has looted and sold plenty of “idols” to pay for its guns; these ones were probably just too big to carry.
The dramatic puffs of plaster raised hopes that many, or perhaps most, of the vandalized artifacts were reproductions. That wasn’t so. “Three [of] us have watched & rewatched: more originals than I first thought,” Eleanor Robson, a professor at University College London, tweeted. On the BBC, she explained that some of the stone figures inside the museum were from the desert city of Hatra, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and had been “damaged in antiquity and carefully put back together.” Iraqi antiquities were looted and, in many cases, destroyed or lost to smugglers in the days after the American invasion, in 2003. Not enough troops were sent to guard the museums, among many other mistakes. Some precautions were put in place afterward; but they do not seem to have entirely reached this museum in Mosul. The video, Robson said, represented an act of cultural terrorism, meant to make anyone in the world feel powerless. “More importantly, it is targeting the people of Mosul itself,” she said. “They feel very passionately, many of them, about their ancient history.”
With Syria’s civil war, and its two hundred thousand dead, and the renewed violence in Iraq, it can, no doubt, feel too comfortable to cry over statues. (Before the Mosul Museum, there were the Buddhas of Bamiyan, which were blown up by the Taliban. Of course, there have been other depredations, in other centuries, in the name of iconoclasm.) As archaeologists were going through the video frame by frame, cataloguing ancient losses, other lists of crimes were being written up. This week in Syria, there were reports that ISIS had gone into villages and kidnapped whole families of Assyrian Christians. The Times cited Assyrian community leaders who said that they had “counted 287 people taken captive, including 30 children and several dozen women.” We have seen worse videos than this one from ISIS. An American or Japanese journalist beheaded; a Jordanian pilot burned in a cage; Egyptian Christians killed on a Libyan beach. Some people must watch them the whole way through: to identify the victims and document their beheading or immolation, to look for clues in the landscape which might help in the pursuit of their killers. But, for the rest of us, there are reasons to abstain, either out of principle—to respect the dead, to restore a bit of their privacy, to refuse to be an audience in a staged spectacle—or because it’s just too awful. The video of the museum is, in some ways, a proxy. Watching it doesn’t feel like pressing play on a snuff video, but it is sickening. It tells you who ISIS is.
At one point, the wall that surrounded Nineveh was more than seven miles in circumference, with fifteen gates. In the video, an ISIS spokesman talks about how many of the statues had still been buried in Muhammad’s time—Nineveh had been largely destroyed a thousand years earlier, in a battle that marked the rise of the Babylonians—but had since been excavated by “devil worshippers.” That is what the group calls Yazidis, members of an Iraqi religious minority whom it has treated murderously, though it may have been a more general accusation. A. H. Layard, a British archaeologist who excavated the site in the mid-nineteenth century, has extensive descriptions of local Yazidis in his book “Nineveh and Babylon,” published in 1849. (Yezidi girls, he says, wore a garment “like a Scotch plaid.”) Layard writes that parts of the winged bull were designed “with a spirit and truthfulness worthy of a Greek artist,” but that others were only roughly outlined, “as if the sculptors had been interrupted by some public calamity.” He brought one of the bulls to the British Museum. (There is another at the Metropolitan Museum, in New York.) One of his successors, during the next decades, was Max Mallowan, who came to Ninevah with his wife, Agatha Christie, of all people. He was her second husband, thirteen years younger, and the reason that Hercule Poirot, in one novel, visits Aleppo. (He was also the source for a classic Daily Mail headline: “British Museum buys 3,000-year-old ivory carvings Agatha Christie cleaned with her face cream.”) In her autobiography, in which she talks about the face cream, she writes about how “times in Baghdad were gradually worsening politically,” and so, for a few years, there were no new excavations in Iraq; instead, “everyone went to Syria.” There are moments when one feels a desperate gratitude for museums, whatever their own ambiguous histories. Their objects from lost cities lead us back to who we are. Some viewers of the video of the rampage in Mosul recognized the plaster casts right away, because the originals are now in the British Museum.
