DERBYSHIRE ALERT!
DERBYSHIRE ALERT!

Derb's latest: "Churning: Rethinking the Iraqi National Museum" attempts to explain away the looting at he museum. See, those antiquities didn't really belong to the current Iraqis. And, the Iraqis aren't really in a place to take care of them properly. No, their proper stewardship is with rich non-Iraqi collectors:

In what sense do these ancient artifacts belong to Iraq's heritage? The nation of Iraq has only existed since 1932. Prior to that, the "land of the two rivers" was a British colony. Before that, it belonged to the Ottoman Empire. Heading backwards through time beyond that, it belonged to the White Sheep Turks, the Black Sheep Turks, the Timurids (another variety of Turk), the Mongols, the Abassids (Arabs), the Seljuks (more Turks), the Buwayhids (Persians), the Abbasids again, the Umayyads (more Arabs), the Sassanids (Persian), the Arsacids (Parthian), the Seleucids (Macedonian-Greek), the Persians again, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Aramaeans, the Elamites, the Kassites, the Amorites, the Akkadians, and the Sumerians.

That's a considerable amount of churning. The ethnic and linguistic connections between, on the one hand, modern Iraqis, and on the other, the people of Babylon, Nimrod, Nineveh, and Ur, are tenuous, to say the least of it. In the case of the Sumerians, they are probably nonexistent. We know the ancient Sumerian language well - can even sing songs in it. It has no relationship whatever with any other known tongue...

So it will be with the Iraqi collection. Saddam Hussein owned this treasure trove for a while. He was hardly a fit person, though, and the pieces have now been scattered to new owners. I suppose that by the vagaries of fate, some will be lost or destroyed, but I am sure most will surface again in the slow churning of time. Time, after all, is what 5,000-year-old objects have plenty of.

Of course, there's that tiny matter of the interregnum where we should have protected the museum and the libraries, but whatever. Next week: Derb explains the Elgin Marbles.