British and American collusion in the pillaging of Iraq's heritage is a scandal that will outlive any passing conflict.

Fly into the American air base of Tallil outside Nasiriya in central Iraq and the flight path is over the great ziggurat of Ur, reputedly the earliest city on earth. Seen from the base in the desert haze or the sand-filled gloom of dusk, the structure is indistinguishable from the mounds of fuel dumps, stores and hangars. Ur is safe within the base compound. But its walls are pockmarked with wartime shrapnel and a blockhouse is being built over an adjacent archaeological site. When the head of Iraq's supposedly sovereign board of antiquities and heritage, Abbas al-Hussaini, tried to inspect the site recently, the Americans refused him access to his own most important monument.

Yesterday Hussaini reported to the British Museum on his struggles to protect his work in a state of anarchy. It was a heart breaking presentation. Under Saddam you were likely to be tortured and shot if you let someone steal an antiquity; in today's Iraq you are likely to be tortured and shot if you don't. The tragic fate of the national museum in Baghdad in April 2003 was as if federal troops had invaded New York city, sacked the police and told the criminal community that the Metropolitan was at their disposal. The local tank commander was told specifically not to protect the museum for a full two weeks after the invasion. Even the Nazis protected the Louvre...

Today the picture is transformed. Donny George fled for his life last August after death threats. The national museum is not open but shut. Nor is it just shut. Its doors are bricked up, it is surrounded by concrete walls and its exhibits are sandbagged. Even the staff cannot get inside. There is no prospect of reopening.

Hussaini confirmed a report two years ago by John Curtis, of the British Museum, on America's conversion of Nebuchadnezzar's great city of Babylon into the hanging gardens of Halliburton. This meant a 150-hectare camp for 2,000 troops. In the process the 2,500-year-old brick pavement to the Ishtar Gate was smashed by tanks and the gate itself damaged...

In Iraq's four-year looting frenzy, the allies have become the vandals, Simon Jenkins, The Guardian, UK, June 08, 2007.

Many thanks to Jacques Kinnaer of The Ancient Egypt Site for sending me this one.

The answer to this one seems to be to send the troops some playing cards.

Troops Get Archaeological Playing Cards

Some 40,000 new decks of playing cards will be sent to troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan as part of an awareness program so troops can help preserve the heritage of those countries, said Laurie Rush, archaeologist at Fort Drum in New York.

It's aimed at making troops aware they shouldn't pick up and bring home artefacts and also to avoid causing damage to sites such as an incident after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when U.S. troops built a helicopter pad on the ruins of Babylon and filled their sandbags with archaeological fragments from the ancient city...

Troops Get Archaeological Playing Cards, Pauline Jelinek, AP via Fox News, USA, June 18, 2007.

cf. Desert Solitaire, Victoria Schlesinger, Archaeology Magazine, Archaeological Institute of America, New York, USA, Volume 60, Number 4, July / August 2007.

The British Museum plans to build an enormous exhibition centre in London that will enable it to stage the biggest shows from all over the world, it announced yesterday.

It has already had to turn down the chance to show 130 spectacular treasures — the largest collection of Tutankhamun artefacts assembled in the West, which will instead be exhibited in the O2, formerly the Dome, in Greenwich, southeast London.

It is now drawing up ambitious plans to construct a centre at the back of its historic building. Lord Rogers of Riverside, the architect celebrated for the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Lloyd’s building in London, has been commissioned to take control of a project that may cost £70 million.

The museum realised that it needed more space after last year’s exhibition of Michelangelo drawings drew more than 160,000 visitors. It was one of the museum’s most popular exhibitions. Neil MacGregor, the director of the museum, said that even though it opened until midnight every Saturday it could not accommodate everybody who wanted to see it and could have sold tickets “many times over”...

Museum thinks big after Tutankhamun loss, Dalya Alberge, The Times, UK, July 05, 2007.

The Nile River Valley of 6,000 years ago is not a time nor a place easily understood by Northerners. Luckily for residents of North Bay and surrounding area, learning about ancient Egypt is about to get a whole lot easier.

Discovery North Bay, in the former CPR station at 100 Ferguson St., will display a Royal Ontario Museum exhibit through to the end of August — Egypt: Gift of the Nile.

The various displays, delivered Thursday from one of Canada's premier museums, cover all aspects of ancient Egyptian life — clothing, food, households, buildings, family life, education, religion, death and the afterlife.

According to Jennifer Buell, director of Discovery North Bay, the exhibit, which will be on display at Discovery North Bay from July 10 until August 24, is rich in actual artefacts from the period, including jewellery, religious statuettes and other things...

Ancient Egypt on display in North Bay, The North Bay Nugget, Ontario, Canada, July 06, 2007.

Forget walking like an Egyptian, you might want to run. The 'Temples and Tombs' exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art ends Sunday. The exhibit includes a guide geared toward families that points out objects from ancient Egypt and makes connections with modern objects used today. Tickets are $10 for general admission, $8 for students and seniors. Children 6 and younger are admitted free. Strollers are not permitted. It's best to get tickets in advance...

'Tombs' about to close, The News & Observer, North Carolina, USA, July 06, 2007.

Xaar, one of the world’s leading suppliers of inkjet modern printing technology, is sponsoring an exhibition of one of the finest examples of an ancient coloured document in the world: “The Book of the Dead of Ramose” at The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

The 3,000-year-old document is made up of papyrus sheets originally forming a 20m roll, and was unveiled on June 19 [2007]. Visitors will have the rare opportunity to view one of the finest and most recently restored Egyptian Books of the Dead in existence.

“One of the most striking features of the Ramose papyrus is the vibrancy of colours used in the painted scenes. It feels particularly appropriate that a company whose primary concern is with colour printing should be involved with this project,” said Julie Dawson, co-curator of the exhibition and Senior Assistant Keeper (Conservation) in the Antiquities Department in a statement to the press...

A passport to Ancient Egypt’s after-life, The Daily Star, Egypt, June 22, 2007.

Previously:

Fitzwilliam Museum travels back to Ancient Egypt, June 22, 2007.

Recently, staff at Bolton Museum have been attempting to identify a mystery bone that came out of bundles of Egyptian linen from Qau el-Kabir.

For 83 years the identity of the bones contained within the bundles has remained a mystery, but Tom Hardwick and David Craven, Egyptologist and Geologist respectively at Bolton Museum, recently decided to re-open the investigation, hoping to find an answer.

Images of the bone were sent to experts around the world, and several ideas were suggested. Eventually Dr Laura Bishop, Senior Lecturer in Palaeoanthropolgy at Liverpool John Moores University, and an expert in North African fossil animals, offered to come over and identify the bone in person.

David and Laura spent a morning examining the bone, trying to settle on an identification. Eventually, after looking at reference texts and comparing the specimen to bones from the museum collections, they were both happy with their answer.

The bone is [from] a large Antelope species, probably a Wildebeest; a species that would not have been present in Egypt as the time the bone was found and wrapped...

Mystery bones identified, Bolton Museum, UK, June 2007.

Previously:

Experts bone up on ancient riddle, April 25, 2007.

Karol Wight, a 22-year veteran of the J. Paul Getty Museum, was named its antiquities curator Wednesday. She succeeds her beleaguered former boss, Marion True, whose job she has held on an acting basis since True's resignation under fire in October 2005.

In a prepared statement, Michael Brand, the museum's director, praised Wight's "steadfastness and calm authority" in presiding over a collection of ancient Greek, Roman and Etruscan art that has become caught up in the turbulence sweeping the art world over antiquities of questionable provenance. At issue is whether prized works at leading museums, including the Getty, were acquired after being illegally spirited out of their countries of origin.

True and a Paris-based antiquities dealer, Robert Hecht, are the defendants in a long-running prosecution in Rome, where they are charged with a criminal conspiracy to receive stolen goods and with illegally receiving artefacts...

As antiquities curator, Wight will be in charge of programming and collections at the Getty Villa, which houses the museum's ancient art collection, and will oversee a staff of eight that includes five other curators...

Long-time Getty staffer named antiquities curator, Mike Boehm, Los Angeles Times, California, USA, June 21, 2007.

Who owns the past? There are efforts by some Kenyans to reinvent themselves and find value and meaning in a cosmopolitan world.

In an effort to make peace with the past in Africa, there has been a call for repatriation of materials held in some of the largest museums in the world. In one of the most interesting debates going on in the world of heritage, the controversy pits mainly African, Asian and Middle East institutions against some of the most prestigious museums in Europe and America.

The debate is centred on materials that include human remains, art, jewellery and objects that are and have been held in the museums for a long time.

Some of the articles are of great prestige and interest — the Egyptian mummies — while others are of outstanding monetary value such as gold pieces taken by the British in Kumasi in the then Gold Coast, present day Ghana, in 1874...

Some museums such as C Carlos at Atlanta's Emory University, US, have returned objects that were part of the heritage of the countries they belong to. The return of a 3,300-year-old mummy to Egypt in 1999, thought to be that of King Rameses I, a 13th century ruler, has set the pace...

It's Time to Return What Was Stolen, Muthoni Thang'wa, East African Standard, Nairobi, Kenya, June 27, 2007.

If the past is a foreign country, as the English writer LP Hartley suggested, that country might well be Egypt. The nation Herodotus called "the gift of the Nile" 2,500 years ago, has a long history stretching back 5,000 years, if you believe the historians, or 7,000 if you believe the politicians.

Either way, the longevity of Egyptian civilisation is beyond debate, making the Greeks look like children by comparison.

Hartley's celebrated quote about the past goes on to say: "They do things differently there." Yet travelling in Egypt today, one is struck as much, if not more, by continuity as by change.

Take Luxor. For half a millennium, from the 16th to the 11th century BC, Egyptian kings ruled their empire from what was then called Thebes. Omnipotent kings came and went in a blaze of splendidly adorned tombs and temples. The Pharaoh's power was absolute.

Most visitors to Luxor's world-famous Valley of the Kings are drawn to a handful of royal tombs, foremost among them that of the boy-king Tutankhamun...

Out of the King Tut rut, Justin Marozzi, Gulf News, Qatar, June 30, 2007.