Donny George Youkhanna, 1950-2011

Dr. Donny George Youkhanna, the former head of the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad, died from a heart attack in Toronto last Friday. He was 60. From the NY Times obituary:

Dr. George was director of research for the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage when United States troops and their allies invaded Iraq. He fought through blocked bridges, explosions and troops to report to the museum in the chaotic days afterward, finding he could not persuade American troops to protect it because no order had been issued to do so.

An estimated 15,000 artifacts were stolen, less than a tenth the initial guesses. Working with Col. Matthew Bogdanos of the Marines to investigate the thefts, they recovered half the stolen the artifacts, partly by granting looters amnesty.

Dr. George soon became head of the museum, then chairman of the antiquities board, replacing a cousin of Saddam Hussein. He slowly put the museum back together, rebuilding damaged walls, fixing the plumbing, installing guard houses and much else. He obtained aid from Italy to build a new Assyrian hall and started a conservation training program.

George's tireless work to recover artifacts and secure help for Iraq's heritage was heroic, and put his life in danger. He was an excavator and a scholar with a distinguished career and many publications on  He left Iraq in 2006 after death threats against him and his family. He behaved admirably in abominable conditions, and did a lot to salvage the wholesale destruction of Iraq's heritage because of the hallucinatory narcissism of American neoconservatives. I met him briefly in 2005 - he was kind but looked very, very tired. I hope wherever he is he has found some rest.

His 2006 interview with Cindy Ho of Saving Antiquities for Everyone gives a sense of the man and his achievements:

Accidental Monuments: Saddam's Palaces, Repurposed

BLDGBLOG has up a great interview with Richard Mosse, a photographer who has recently visited, and photographed, a number of Saddam Hussein's palaces. He is especially interested in capturing the ways they have been repurposed by the American military units that now occupy them. Mosse has an interesting take on monumentalism:

my proposal was to make work around the idea of the accidental monument. I'm interested in the idea that history is something in a constant state of being written and rewritten—and the way that we write history is often plain to see in how we affect the world around us, in the inscriptions we make on our landscape, and in what stays and what goes.

Read the rest!

Babylon to Reopen

The Babil provincial government plans to reopen Babylon to visitors, as the New York Times reports today:

Colonial archaeologists packed off its treasures to Europe a century ago. Saddam Hussein rebuilt the site in his own megalomaniacal image. American and Polish troops turned it into a military camp, digging trenches and filling barricades with soil peppered with fragments of a biblical-era civilization.

Now, the provincial government in Babil has seized control of much of Babylon — unlawfully, according to the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage — and opened a park beside a branch of the Euphrates River, a place that draws visitors by the busload.

It seems that Iraq, like several other Mediterranean nations with lots of tourism potential, has created a single Ministry that deals with antiquities and tourism. While in theory such a move can provide more resources and better planning to archaeological sites, in practice there are serious conflicts of interest. Dollar signs start dancing in the heads of local governments and tourism operators, who don't necessarily have any interest or expertise in the absurd amount of conservation and maintenance that a site like Babylon requires.

In Iraq, it seems like the new Ministry overlaps to some degree with the functions of the Ministry of Culture:

The agencies clashed over the reopening of the National Museum in Baghdad in February, and then as now, the tourism ministry, which favored reopening, prevailed. Its power stems not from the Constitution, but from proximity to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who has pressed for reopening historic and cultural sites as symbols of the country’s stability and progress. His government made control of ancient sites a provision in the security agreement with the United States that took effect in January. Next month, the American military will turn over the last of them, Ur, the ancient Sumerian capital in southern Iraq.

“Our goal is that these sites will be tourist attractions — to convey the real, civilized image of Iraq and to bring as many tourists as possible,” said the tourism ministry’s director, Qahtan al-Jibouri. “Iraq needs another source of funding in addition to oil.”

Mr. al-Jibouri is entirely correct. But "as many tourists as possible" will not be a sustainable source of income without good site management planning and stable political institutions to ensure it. At the moment, Iraq appears to have neither.

US Ratifies 1954 Hague Convention

Colleen at Antiquities Watch reports:

UNESCO and Mr. Charles Engelken, Charge d’Affairs of the United States for UNESCO announced that on March 13th, the United States became the 123rd country to ratify the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict.

Read the rest here.

About time. But also about six years too late for the Iraq Museum.