So, lets think about this. The Museum, full of priceless antiquities, is located in a country run by a ruthless tyrant who has treated the country and its treasures as his personal playthings. It has been closed to the public for years. War has been threatened for months, and the tyrant knows that the city will be bombed, so does the museum staff. Rumors abound that the tyrant, his henchmen and their families are stashing treasure in foreign countries against the possibility of flight. When the army of liberation arrives, the Museum is empty, its displays and vaults ransacked. The staff blames an anonymous mob of civilians.
Motive, Means, Opportunity; isnât that what Miss Marple would wonder about? The tyrant would certainly have them in spades. He would have sent some lackeys over to pick up things like the gold harp, which could easily pay for a favored mistressâ exile. But, wouldnât the staff have pointed the finger at him, hoping to curry favor with the new boss? Maybe the tyrant didnât take everything. He probably had no interest in clay cylinder seals. Tyrants are notoriously uninterested in the evolution of writing and the other elements of culture.
What about the staff of the Museum? When the allied armies approached Germany at the end of the Second World War and allied air forces stepped up their bombing attacks, the regime and the museum staffs packed up the contents of the countryâs museums and stored them in mine shafts in the mountains. Why didnât the staff of the Iraqi Museum do something like that? The Museum had "vaults with huge steel doors guarding storage chambers that descend floor after floor into unlighted darkness." Why werenât the artifacts sealed in those vaults to protect against the bombing attack that everyone knew was coming? Were the vaults not equipped with bank vault type locks? Knowing what little I do about the tyrant, I would be surprised if he had stinted on that. But even if there were no locks on those vaults, any welder from a neighborhood body shop should be able to seal those doors to the point where looters could not open them without high explosives. Why were the exterior doors and windows of the Museum not barred?
To me, the most likely scenario is that the tyrant appropriated a number of small and very obviously valuable pieces and sent them into exile or hiding. The staff of the museum, like everyone else in Iraq, took no initiative while he was alive. In the week of Monday April 7as his regime collapsed they lost their fear of his goon squads.
The staff could have sealed up the collection in the vaults and sealed the vaults, the doors and windows. But maybe they had a better idea, they took the collection home "for safekeeping." When the looters and the newspapers showed up they had a convenient excuse not to return it. And they could make the reporters happy by blaming President Bush.
So where is the collection? Expressed in the way I would invest $100 in a pari-mutuel pool; betting on the best known items in the collection: Saddamâs family members in exile -- $80, the Museum staff -- $19 and the looters -- $1; betting on the bulk of the collection: Saddamâs family members in exile -- $33, the Museum staff -- $66 and the looters -- $1. Will the collection be recovered? Eventually. The stuff is hot. It may sit private collections for a long time, but eventually it will come to light where knowledgeable scholars will see it and it will be recovered, but this process may take a long time. Fifty seven years after the end of World War II the search for lost art from that war continues.
