Custodian for the Fertile Crescent

"A shelf and a half in a borrowed room" is all that Oxford Archaeologist Max Mallowan remembers the Iraq Museum as being back in 1925. But the surge of Arab nationalism that made Iraq independent after World War I carried with it pride in a past that goes back 90 centuries, and included such mighty capitals as Babylon, Nineveh and Ur. In 1936 laws were passed to safeguard Iraq's antiquities, which for over a century had been filtering out to the world's great museums. And to insure that relics unearthed in the future would be properly housed and displayed, ambitious plans for a museum were drawn up by German Architect Werner March.

Allowing time out for assorted coups, uprisings, and a world war, it has taken the nation more than 30 years to complete the new $6,000,000 Iraq Museum, which was inaugurated last November by Iraq's President Abdel Rahman Aref before some 400 notables. But scholars agree that the museum, financed largely by the Gulbenkian Foundation, was worth the wait (see following color pages). Says the University of Pennsylvania's Archaeologist James B. Pritchard, a veteran of 16 years of excavations in the "Fertile Crescent": "The Iraq Museum is by far the most impressive museum in the Middle East."

25-Ton Bulls. Since before recorded history, Mesopotamia, "the land between the rivers," was the gateway between East and West; it was marched over, fought over, civilized and reduced to ashes by a dozen different peoples. The treasures contained in the Iraq Museum's five spacious, well-lit and air-conditioned buildings therefore trace an unequaled pageant of man's patient attempts to build and rebuild that ephemeral thing called civilization.

The museum's earliest crude stone implements take cavemankind back to about 100,000 B.C. More recent galleries commemorate the multifaceted Arabic culture that flourished from the 10th to the 13th centuries after Christ. In between are writings older than the Bible,* the world's oldest statuary, and 25-ton winged bulls with plaited beards and human heads that were once used to ward off evil from palaces and temples near Nineveh.

Sin & Pants. Half of the museum's galleries and halls display sculpture and artifacts unearthed by scores of U.S., British, French, German, Japanese and Iraqi archaeological teams from ruins that flourished between 6000 B.C. and A.D. 600. They prove that Iraq's prehistoric village communities were among the first to develop irrigation and contained the world's oldest granaries.

The sinfulness of ancient Babylon, together with the military prowess of Ur and Nineveh have been renowned since Biblical times. But displays from excavations conducted in the 1950s now reveal much about the little-known Parthians (one of the few ancient people who wore pants), who flourished during the 2nd and 3rd centuries after Christ, withstanding repeated attempts at conquest by Roman legions.

The Iraqis are aware that their whole country is, in fact, a vast museum waiting to be unearthed, and authorities have welcomed outside archaeologists. Under the 1936 law, Iraq's director general of antiquities gets first pick of all discoveries. Duplicates are often returned to the finders. Archaeologists believe that there are many decades of happy digs ahead. In addition to the tombs of some 500 kings, the excavators have yet to discover the ruins of Agade, referred to in cuneiform scripts as a great capital during the 24th and 23rd centuries B.C., and almost certainly buried under the silt somewhere near Babylon.

* Last week at a meeting of the American Oriental Society at Yale, Sumerologist Samuel Kramer reported that 31 clay tablets, excavated 30 years ago at the ancient Sumerian city of Kish and now at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, have been deciphered. The cuneiform writing recounts a story composed around 2000 B.C. similar to that of the Bible's Babel. It tells of the god of wisdom, Enki, who, probably jealous of a rival god, "changed the speech of man, that had until then been one."

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