 | |
| Author | Matthew Bogdanos |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury (USA) |
Publication date | 2005 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 320 |
| ISBN | 1-58234-645-3 |
| OCLC | 61724401 |
| 956.7044/31 22 | |
| LC Class | DS79.76 .B635 2005 |
Thieves of Baghdad is a non-fictional account written by Col. Matthew Bogdanos about the quest to recover over a thousand lost artifacts from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad after the country's counter-invasion.
Much of the book is an accounting of how his unit set up camp in the library of the Iraq museum in April 2003 and tried to recover lost artifacts. He developed relationships with museum staff, and, drawing on his knowledge of ancient civilizations, as well as his knowledge of police work, having been a criminal prosecutor in New York for many years, tells how he and the team were able to recover a huge amount of priceless antiquities which had been looted from the museum in the past days, and even years.
He goes into great detail about the theme that the US let the museum be looted while it protected the oil ministry... a version of events that was widely reported.
Bogdanos goes into great detail about why this story is not very accurate. First there are basic differences in the two sites. The oil ministry was a single building, which was bombed and had no occupants by the time US troops arrived.
The museum, on the other hand, was an 11-acre (45,000 m2) compound, full of various buildings, full of Iraqi army troops, fortified with sniper and gun positions, when a small group of Americans was first sent to check it out. The only way to have 'protected' the museum at that point in time, initially, would have been to attack it, and drive out the Iraqi army .... destroying the museum in a horrific firefight. This is roughly Bogdanos' argument.
After this, there is a small window when the US failed to protect the museum, something he says was caused by planners not thinking that the museum would be looted. . . . they figured the looters would go after symbols of the Ba'ath party, like palaces.
But the US finally did get there... Bogdanos had managed to find a sympathetic person in the military brass, thanks in part to press coverage, who supported his mission, despite opposition from many people in the military, and eventually, also despite a lack of interest or caring on the part of many civilian bureaucrats, even from the UN.
A great deal of the end of the book is spent discussing and analyzing the problems of stopping the illegal trade in antiquities. He talks about how the problem is not just smugglers, it goes into the dealers, the brokers, the buyers, the historians and professors who authenticate stolen antiquities for buyers, museum staffs, and even governments that look the other way, while collecting import tariffs.
Another problem is lack of support for law enforcement involvement in the problem. He points out that many governments have donated millions of dollars to the museum, but very little money has been given to the investigative work needed to track down and recover stolen antiquities that belong in the museum. Interpol, the FBI, and other agencies that could do the work have very few people assigned to the task, and those people have almost no budget to work with.
He talks about his efforts to 'bridge the gap' between law enforcement culture and academic culture, and some of his successes. He also lays out a plan for how he would reform the system... One part of his plan includes having a single binding agreement, somewhat like the ABA code, that standardizes what constitutes 'legal' provenance for antiquities, to be used amongst archaeologists, collectors, dealers, museums, academics, law enforcement, customs, etc.
Looting is the act of stealing, or the taking of goods by force, typically in the midst of a military, political, or other social crisis, such as war, natural disasters, or rioting. The proceeds of all these activities can be described as booty, loot, plunder, spoils, or pillage.
The Iraq Museum is the national museum of Iraq, located in Baghdad. It is sometimes informally called the National Museum of Iraq, a recent phenomenon influenced by other nations' naming of their national museums; The Iraq Museum's name is inspired by the name of the British Museum, however. The Iraq Museum contains precious relics from the Mesopotamian, Abbasid and Persian civilizations. It was looted during and after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. Despite international efforts, only some of the stolen artifacts have been returned. After being closed for many years while being refurbished, and rarely open for public viewing, the museum was officially reopened in February 2015.
Art theft, sometimes called artnapping, is the stealing of paintings, sculptures, or other forms of visual art from galleries, museums or other public and private locations. Stolen art is often resold or used by criminals as collateral to secure loans. Only a small percentage of stolen art is recovered—an estimated 10%. Many nations operate police squads to investigate art theft and illegal trade in stolen art and antiquities.
Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., formerly Hobby Lobby Creative Centers, is an American retail company. It owns a chain of arts and crafts stores with a volume of over $5 billion in 2018. The chain has 1,001 stores in 48 U.S. states. The Green family founded Hobby Lobby to express their Christian beliefs and the chain incorporates American conservative values and Christian media.
Repatriation is the return of the cultural property, often referring to ancient or looted art, to their country of origin or former owners.
Archaeological looting in Iraq took place since at least the late 19th century. The chaos following war provided the opportunity to pillage everything that was not nailed down. There were also attempts to protect the sites such as the period between April 9, 2003, when the staff vacated the Iraq Museum and April 15, 2003, when US forces arrived in sufficient numbers to "restore some semblance of order." Some 15,000 cultural artifacts disappeared in that time. Over the years approximately 14,800 were recovered from within and outside Iraq and taken under the protection of the Iraqi government.
Robert Emmanuel Hecht, Jr. was an American antiquities art dealer based in Paris.
Colonel Matthew Bogdanos is an Assistant District Attorney in Manhattan, author, boxer, and a retired colonel in the United States Marine Corps. Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, Bogdanos deployed to Afghanistan where he was awarded a Bronze Star for actions against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. In 2003, while on active duty in the Marine Corps, he led an investigation into the looting of Iraq's National Museum, and was subsequently awarded the National Humanities Medal for his efforts. Returning to the District Attorney’s Office in 2010, he created and still heads the Antiquities Trafficking Unit, “the only one of its kind in the world.” He had previously gained national attention for the prosecution of Sean Combs, who was acquitted of weapons and bribery charges in a 2001 trial stemming from a 1999 nightclub shootout.
Looted art has been a consequence of looting during war, natural disaster and riot for centuries. Looting of art, archaeology and other cultural property may be an opportunistic criminal act or may be a more organized case of unlawful or unethical pillage by the victor of a conflict. The term "looted art" reflects bias, and whether particular art has been taken legally or illegally is often the subject of conflicting laws and subjective interpretations of governments and people; use of the term "looted art" in reference to a particular art object implies that the art was taken illegally.
The antiquities trade is the exchange of antiquities and archaeological artifacts from around the world. This trade may be illicit or completely legal. The legal antiquities trade abides by national regulations, allowing for extraction of artifacts for scientific study whilst maintaining archaeological and anthropological context. The illicit antiquities trade involves non-scientific extraction that ignores the archaeological and anthropological context from the artifacts.
Donny George Youkhanna was an Iraqi-Assyrian archaeologist, anthropologist, author, curator, and scholar, and a visiting professor at Stony Brook University in New York.
The Association for Research into Crimes against Art (ARCA) is a nongovernmental civil society organisation (CSO) which conducts scholarly research and training within the discipline of combatting cultural property crime. Established in 2009 with the aim of exploring the gaps in the international legal framework which addresses art and antiquities crimes, ARCA was founded by Dr. Noah Charney, an art and art crime historian and author.
The Bassetki Statue is a monument from the Akkadian period in Mesopotamia. It was discovered in the 1974 during road construction near the site of the village Bassetki for military purposes. The pedestal contains an inscription in Akkadian, indicating that the statue once stood in the doorway of a palace of the Akkadian ruler Naram-Sin.
The Antiquities Law of the State of Israel of 1978 was put in place by Israel to eliminate the problem of illegal activities with artifacts. It serves the purpose of describing the rights and obligations regarding the discovery and ownership of ancient coins or other antiquities in Israel, and the possibility of export of these antiquities. The punishment for breaking this law includes imprisonment for a term of two years or a fine of 100,000 pounds. It nationalized antiquities as an attempt to protect them.
The Mask of Warka, also known as the Lady of Uruk, dating from 3100 BC, is one of the earliest known representations of the human face. The carved marble female face is probably a depiction of Inanna. It is approximately 20 cm tall, and was probably incorporated into a larger wooden cult image, though it is only a presumption that a deity is represented. It is without parallels in the period. It is in the National Museum of Iraq, having been recovered undamaged after being looted during the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The Sulaymaniyah Museum, or Slemani Museum, is an archeological museum located in Sulaymaniyah in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. It is the second largest museum in Iraq, after the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad. It houses artifacts dating from the prehistoric period to the late Islamic and Ottoman periods. Several halls of the museum have undergone renovation work and the museum was closed to the public for refurbishment from October 1, 2018, to October 2019.
John Mark Tillmann was a Canadian art thief and white supremacist who, for over two decades, stole over 10,000 antiques and art objects from museums, galleries, archives, and antique shops mainly in Atlantic Canada.
The 2011 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts theft took place in two separate incidents during September and October of that year. In both instances, the same thief took a small ancient stone piece that was openly exhibited, without a protective case, and smuggled it out of the museum. One has since been recovered; however, the thief remains unidentified and the whereabouts of the other is not known.
The Hobby Lobby smuggling scandal started in 2009 when representatives of the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores received a large number of clay bullae and tablets originating in the ancient Near East. The artifacts were intended for the Museum of the Bible, funded by the Evangelical Christian Green family, which owns the Oklahoma-based chain. Internal staff had warned superiors that the items had dubious provenance and were potentially looted from Iraq.
Douglas Arthur Joseph Latchford, "Dynamite" Doug Latchford, was a British art dealer and smuggler.