Le Monde report on Iraq National Museum

A new article in Le Monde retraces mostly already covered ground, but does shed a little additional light on the Iraq National Museum's pathetically underfunded and understaffed initiative to recover its stolen antiquities:

Au premier étage, nous montons voir Abbas K. Abbas, patron du département de recherche des antiquités disparues. Le sympathique quinquagénaire moustachu ne cache pas son désarroi. Il est chargé de scanner la presse mondiale et le maximum de catalogues des salles d'enchères pour essayer de repérer les ventes d'objets volés dans son pays. Pour effectuer ce travail de titan, il a trois employés (un seul lit l'anglais), deux ordinateurs antédiluviens et "pas de budget" pour se rendre sur le lieu d'une vente suspecte.

The Iraqi government should be funding this (as they should be funding the antiquities police), of course, and it is just one more sign of the government's negligence, incompetence, or perhaps corruption with regard to its own cultural patrimony. But in the case of the museum, the largest source of funding in the past few years was not the Iraqi government but the Bush administration's last-minute $17 million. Presumably those delivering the money were also helping the museum officials figure out how to use it best. One can only wonder why it is that so little of that funding was allocated to Abbas' department that he cannot afford even up-to-date computers, much less to fly to London or New York to examine artifacts that may be showing up at Christie's or Sotheby's. 

New al Jazeera Report from Iraq National Museum

http://www.headlinertube.com/?p=6292

Who Stole the Iraqi Torah, and How Did It Get Out of Iraq in the Middle of an Invasion?

One worth watching. This investigation (who, exactly, in the US is going to do the investigation is an important question) may yield some interesting insights into what was going on behind the scenes before and during the invasion to facilitate the taking of the scroll by US troops (or other authorized personnel) during a period when, we are told by defenders of the military, there were not enough troops to secure the Iraq National Museum.

Crime-scene training helps protect artifacts, archaeological sites

Crime-scene training helps protect artifacts, archaeological sites

We often think of archaeological site looting as a problem plaguing other countries that are too poor to afford to protect their sites, or lacking in the kind of cultural awareness that makes us superior to the less civilized peoples of the world. As this article makes clear, though, sites in America are being looted and we spend almost nothing to protect them. Here's the money quote from the article:

Vance, who traveled across the country for the session, said his job is hindered by a lack of manpower; he and two other officers are responsible for watching over about 3 million acres.

U.S. Returns Iraqi Artifacts Without Thinking Much About Who Takes Them

Yet one more piece of evidence, if that were required, that the State Department dropped the ball completely by focusing its efforts on restoring the museum rather than on helping the Iraqis get their cultural policy infrastructure set up properly:

While Iraqi officials celebrated the repatriation of what they called invaluable relics — “the return of Iraq’s heritage to our house,” as the state minister of tourism and antiquities, Qahtan al-Jibouri, put it — the fate of those previously returned raised questions about the country’s readiness to preserve and protect its own treasures.

Appearing at a ceremony displaying the artifacts at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Iraq’s ambassador to the United States, Samir Sumaidaie, pointedly said a previous shipment of antiquities had been returned to Iraq last year aboard an American military aircraft authorized by Gen. David H. Petraeus, only to end up missing.

“They went to the prime minister’s office, and that was the last time they were seen,” said Mr. Sumaidaie, who has worked fervently with American law enforcement officials in recent years to track down loot that had found its way into the United States.

It was not immediately clear what happened, and Mr. Sumaidaie said he had tried and failed to find out. He did not directly accuse Mr. Maliki’s government of malfeasance, but he expressed frustration that the efforts to repatriate works of art and antiquities had resulted in such confusion and mystery.

Ali al-Mousawi, a government spokesman, demanded that the American government account for the artifacts since an American military aircraft delivered them. “We didn’t receive anything,” he said in a telephone interview.

Mr. Jibouri, one of Mr. Maliki’s advisers, said that if the relics were not somewhere in the prime minister’s custody, then they would probably be with the Ministry of Culture, which oversees the country’s museums. Its spokesman declined to comment.

Amira Edan, the director of the National Museum, said none of the objects had been returned to her collection, which is where, she said, they all belonged.

How do earrings from one of the most spectacular archaeological finds of the 20th c. end up on the auction block at Christie's?

The story in yesterday's papers about the return of artifacts to Iraq has more facets than the Hope Diamond. One is noted in Jane Arraf's Christian Science Monitor story:

The earrings were found after they offered for sale at auction at Christie’s in New York last December. The catalog listed them as having been acquired by the owner before 1969, the year before a UNESCO convention made it more difficult to trade in antiquities.

The earrings were recognized by Iraqi archaeologists as part of the treasures of Nimrud, excavated in 1989 when an Iraqi team discovered a royal tomb overlooked by previous British excavations. They were believed stolen from the Baghdad Museum before the collection was put into safekeeping in bank vaults before the 1991 war with the US over Mr. Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.

Christie’s, which had put opening bids at $45,000 to $65,000 for the earrings, withdrew them after the Iraq Embassy launched a formal claim.

As Arraf notes, the Nimrud treasures are "considered one of the most spectacular finds of the 20th century, on a scale of the gold found in King Tut’s tomb." One would think such objects would be easily recognized by experts. And yet, somehow, they appear at auction at Christie's with a phony provenance. Either Christie's authenticators are incompetent, or Christie's is simply leaving the task of spotting illegitimate antiquities to the archaeologists. Either way, it is disgraceful.

Frank Kermode: a remembrance

Frank Kermode was a gentle, kindly, slightly sad mentor-figure for me and other grad students at Columbia in the early 1980s. By then he was already turning against theory, at a moment when post-structuralism was beginning to flower into what became cultural studies. He was averse to intellectual hurlyburly. In a seminar attended, if memory serves me right, by (among lots of other really smart people) Max Rudin (now the publisher of Library of America) and future documentary-maker Ric Burns, Kermode appeared taken aback to hear the argument made by one of us that Heidegger's Origin of the Work of Art, assigned for the class, was deeply compromised by Nazism, as Meyer Schapiro had shown. But he was a true, pure man of letters. I remember walking through campus with him on the way to class. I told him I was writing an article on the great nineteenth-century French critic Sainte-Beuve, and Kermode said, with an air of ineffable pathos, he had memorized a line from one of Sainte-Beuve's diaries:"De jour en jour je suis devenu de plus en plus triste." A real smoothie, he also taught me a big lesson at what might have been my first panel presentation, something cooked up at Columbia. I had slaved over my five minute talk, of course. Kermode was to speak second, before me, and he had his paper folded in his hand. When it was his turn to speak he moved to the lectern, unfolded the paper, and spoke eloquently, about what I cannot recall. How am I going to follow that, I thought despairingly. As Kermode sat down, I glanced over at the pages he had been reading from. They were blank.

Donny George speaks out on the evacuation of the Kuwait Museum in 1991

Donny George released a statement, via Looting Matters, detailing what happened to the contents of the Kuwait Museum during the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. his account is a fuller version of what he described to me when I interviewed him for my book, The Rape of Mesopotamia, and is corroborated in the following sources, noted in the footnotes to that book: Jonathan M. Bloom and Lark Ellen Gould, “Patient Restoration: The Kuwait National Museum,” Saudi Aramco World, September/October 2000, http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200005/patient.restoration-the.kuwait.national.museum.htm. Kirsty Norman, “The Invasion of Kuwait, and the Subsequent Recovery of its National Museum: A Conservator’s View,” Museum Management and Curatorship 16, no. 2 (1997): 180-191; Selma Al-Radi, “War and Cultural Heritage: Lessons from Lebanon, Kuwait and Iraq” (lecture, Cultural Emergency Response, Prinsenhof Museum, Delft, The Netherlands, September 26, 2003), De Kracht Van Cultuur, October 2003, cached text of Web site retrieved by Google, July 25, 2007, http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:U9M2HK2MjlYJ:www.powerofculture.nl/nl/artikelen/war_and_cultural_heritage.html (accessed September 21, 2007); and, authoritatively, McGuire Gibson and Augusta McMahon, Lost Heritage: Antiquities Stolen from Iraq's Regional Museums, fasc. 1 (Chicago: American Association for Research in Baghdad, 1992). See also Gibson's 1991-92 Annual Report on the Nippur Expedition.

Why is it necessary to provide these references? Because media misreporting back in the 1990s, probably encouraged by supporters of Kuwait, mixed up the real and inexcusable looting of private Kuwaiti collections with the entirely legal and indeed required removal of the holdings of Kuwait's National Museum by heritage professionals from Iraq. This misreporting has a long tail.

One more reason why monitoring archaeological sites aerially is worth doing

News from Italy that a large Roman-era settlement has been discovered. Nothing special about that, except that according to the report this discovery was made by analyzing aerial photos taken during a helicopter reconnaissance flight conducted by the carabinieri and officials from the Italian Ministry of Culture's archaeological service as part of their regular monitoring of archaeological sites for possible looting.

Iraqi Official Says Thousands Of Artifacts Recovered

File this under "Get out there and tell them we're doing something": following the damning front-page New York Times story of a few weeks ago pointing out that his government has funded only 100 or so of the many thousands of antiquities police needed and that as a result site looting is surging, Iraq's Tourism and Antiquities Minister announces that more than 36,000 ancient artifacts have been recovered since 2003. Radio Free Europe's crack reporter apparently failed to ask how many of these were recovered in-country (the figure seems to refer only to artifacts returned by other countries), or whether the rate of seizures abroad has increased or decreased recently, or what the Iraqi response is to the Times story, or whether the government there has any plans to fund more antiquities police.

New Ambassador to Iraq Confirmed -- No Help for Iraq's Endangered Archaeological Sites Likely

The Senate has just confirmed James Jeffrey as the new ambassador to Iraq. As part of the confirmation process, Jeffrey was posed a few questions in writing about the State Department's policies regarding the protection of archaeological sites. Here are the questions, and Jeffrey's responses:

Questions for the Record Submitted to
Ambassador - Designate James Jeffrey by
Senator John Kerry (#5)
Senate Foreign Relations Committee
July 20, 2010

A recent front-page story in the NY Times reports that looting of Mesopotamian archaeological sites is surging again, as it did in the 2003-2006 period. In 2008, the Iraqi government shifted responsibility for protecting archaeological sites from the Federal Protection Police to a new antiquities police force that was supposed to field 5000 officers. As of December 2008, however, State acknowledged that it “has no mechanisms at its disposal to provide ongoing security at archaeological sites and museums in Iraq,” and a major $13 million initiative, the Iraqi Cultural Heritage Project, announced in October 2008 by First Lady Laura Bush, did not include any funding for site security assistance.

a. What is the State Department’s policy for assisting the Iraqi government in protecting Iraqi antiquities?
b. How actively committed to the antiquities police force has the Iraqi government been? How large is the antiquities police force?
c. What personnel and what level of resources are being allocated to the specific issue of antiquities policing? Will antiquities policing be included in the police training program, when the State Department takes over next year?


Question:

a. What is the State department’s policy for assisting the Iraqi government in protecting Iraqi antiquities?

Answer:

Our policy for assisting the Iraqi government in protecting antiquities includes training and developing the capacity of the Iraqi police broadly. While the small antiquities police unit has yet to become effective, we will give this issue due attention. In addition, in the “Strategic Framework Agreement,” Section IV, Cultural Cooperation, the United States committed to “Promote Iraqi efforts and contributions to international efforts to preserve Iraqi cultural heritage and protect archeological antiquities, rehabilitate Iraqi museums, and assist Iraq in recovering and restoring its smuggled artifacts through projects such as the Future of Babylon Project and measures taken pursuant to the U.S. Emergency Protection for Iraqi Cultural Antiquities Act of 2004.” Our assistance to Iraq in the antiquities field therefore falls under the policy umbrella of the Strategic Framework Agreement.

The U.S. Embassy is playing a leadership role in helping Iraqis preserve their cultural heritage and antiquities. The $12.9 million Iraqi Cultural Heritage Project (ICHP) will upgrade the Iraqi National Museum, train Iraqi conservationists, and partner with Iraqi institutions to protect the priceless heritage of Mesopotamia.

Question:

b. How actively committed to the antiquities police force has the Iraqi government been? How large is the antiquities police force?

Answer:

The Iraqi government has established an office to address protection of archeological sites, and to our knowledge, this office has hired approximately 100 officers. The officers have not yet assumed an active role in protecting archeological sites. Iraq’s State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH) has held meetings with the Ministry of Interior (the agency responsible for Iraqi police) and other Iraqi government agencies to discuss nationwide protection of archeological sites. If confirmed, I will press for the antiquities police to play an active role, and for the SBAH to make further progress.

Question:

c. What personnel, and what level of resources are being allocated to the specific issue of antiquities policing? Will antiquities policing be included in the police training program, when the State Department takes over next year?

Answer:

The decisions on personnel and resources for the entire Police Development Program (PDP) are currently under discussion. The PDP will include broad, multi-purpose training for investigators, but does not envision a separate component for antiquities police.

A number of prominent archeological sites, such as the world-famous ruins at Babylon, Samarra, and Ur have Iraq-supported police and army guard forces in place to protect them. Some other sites, where there is no Iraqi police presence, are protected by Iraqi army units. The State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH) has held meetings with the Ministry of Interior and other Iraqi government agencies to discuss nationwide protection of archeological sites. We are not aware of Iraqi governmental plans to include antiquities policing in future training programs, although SBAH has requested this. If confirmed, I will look into this.

I would be interested to know if any readers of this blog have a more sanguine interpretation of these remarks than I do, but to me they are very saddening. It sounds as if "due attention” to the problem of looting means jawboning the Iraqis, and that’s about it -- no targeted funding for site protection or even specialized training for antiquities police (or any other material support – walkie-talkies, vehicles, weaponry, satellite photos, gasoline, etc. -- that is also desperately needed by those few Iraqis who are now deployed). How likely is it that the Iraqi government will respond to ambassadorial pressing without any carrots? I’m glad the ambassador is at least saying he’s going to press, but unless we put our money where our mouth is, it seems very unlikely that the dysfunctional Iraqi government will move on this issue.

It is particularly galling to see the ICHP presented as having something to do with the issue of protecting sites from looting, since the introductory paragraph before the questions points out that the ICHP includes no money for site policing. And its money has almost certainly been spent already by now; this was the Bush administration's (only) initiative. But it is understandable that Jeffrey's assistants went to the well of the ICHP to defend themselves, because they were given an opening by the way the question was posed. It did not say protecting archaeological sites, just “protecting antiquities.” If you don’t specifically distinguish the policing of antiquities on sites from “protection of antiquities,” State will continue to do what it has done since 2003: disingenuously point to the good work done at the Museum, and fudge the fact that while they have been doing this good work but doing almost nothing to help secure and police archaeological sites, a huge disaster has taken place out in the countryside.

Let's tally this up: The Museum holds 170,000 pieces, and lost 15,000 in the invasion; anywhere from 200,000 to half a million artifacts are estimated to have come out of the ground (or been destroyed by diggers) since 2003. The disaster is going to accelerate again as the Obama administration pulls out. It won't be the dramatic public relations black eye that the Iraq Museum turned out to be for Bush, because the damage is not as vividly concentrated, but it is in some ways even more inexcusable.

Pace Pres. Obama, where keeping Iraq's archaeological heritage safe is concerned, we appear to be as careless getting out as we were careless getting in.

Iraq's Antiquities Police: The Bitter Fruit of US Indifference to the Looting of Iraq's Archaeological Heritage

I have been putting off posting about this front-page New York Times story. In part I've delayed because I needed to check some of its facts with colleagues; in part because I and others have been pushing the story to contacts in the US government asking them to do something (and Iraqi colleagues have been mobilizing to do the same for their government); in part because I try to make it a principle to not write when too angry to think straight.

The gist of the story is that the Iraqi antiquities police force is a miserable failure. The article focuses on the failure of the Iraqis to fund the force. But the key point is that this new force was not established until 2008 — that is, after years of unsuccessful efforts by Iraqi cultural heritage officials — in particular, Donny George Youkhanna -- to build policing capacity with almost no assistance from the US. From 2004 on, Youkhanna struggled to create a 1,400-strong antiquities police, which might have done quite a bit of good had the US provided some help even if only in the way of things like gas, trucks, walkie-talkies, etc., but Youkhanna's force was starved budgetarily until it was shut down. Of course, under Bush this was hardly surprising, given that the US military itself did almost nothing to address the problem of massive looting of archaeological sites during the occupation period.

Many of us had hoped that with a change in administrations, attention would now be paid, at long last to beefing up Iraq's capacity to police its sites. But the Obama administration does not look much different than the Bush administration on this issue. As reported repeatedly on this blog, it has failed to train or fund or provide logistical support for Iraqi antiquities police: the military has done next to nothing, as the article makes clear enough, and the State Department, which has money to spend on Iraqi cultural heritage, refuses to spend more than a smidgeon of it on security issues. In short, where stopping the looting of Iraq's archaeological heritage is concerned, to paraphrase Obama, we seem to be as careless getting out as we were careless getting in.

Do Fakes Poison the Market for Looted Antiquities?

A very sobering new article on tomb looting in China, making it clear that a combination of strengthening demand both domestic and international, combined with a culture of official corruption, is devastating China's archaeological sites. As Saddam did in Iraq, the response to increasing looting has been the imposition of the death penalty, but as in Iraq, Draconian measures do not deter effectively if they are not applied systematically.

Nor, apparently, does the flooding of the market with fakes, pace Charles Stanish:

China's surging interest in antiques is fueled by popular TV shows. On one, the host smashes the piece in front of startled owners if he decides it is fake. Wu blames such shows for raising prices — and false hopes.

Intact Cyprus tomb may yield Trojan hero

Intact Cyprus tomb may yield Trojan hero

So the Leon Levy Foundation holds a meeting aimed at figuring out how to get archaeologists to publish their sites. But not all sites -- only sites excavated under partage agreements (i.e., long-ago digs). How curious! Why the restriction, since surely there are many many sites that have been excavated but not published? Is the exclusive focus on partaged material meant to generate good will from countries of origin for the Levy Foundation (since the publications will certainly be of value to them)? That hardly seems likely to succeed. Or is it to show these countries, and the press, the untapped virtues of partage? That seems equally unlikely to succeed (though one can never underestimate the gullibility or sycophantism of some journalists). A third possibility seems most likely: to remind the world that partage once was practiced, and therefore might be practiced again some happy day.

Just to be clear: unlike some purist archaeologists, I have no beef whatsoever with the Levy Foundation's support for publishing digs; the backlog of unpublished information would be considered a scandal in any other discipline, archaeologists do need major help in bringing their findings into print, and if the Levy Foundation can supply that help, god love 'em. But mixing this up with the issue of restoring partage makes no sense. As the discussion at CUNY made clear (see below), it is time to give up on trying to get the countries of origin to see the virtues of partage. That is a non-starter. One can only hope that Brian Rose and Philippe de Montebello are speaking with Shelby White about other more viable policy options for protecting sites, sharing heritage, and cleaning up the antiquities trade, that she and her foundation could promote.

Who Protects Antiquity? Panel Discussion Video Now Up Online

Thanks to CUNY's crack team, led by Michael Washburn, this panel on April 7, 2010 went off well, and the video is now available. A couple of things stand out for me reviewing the tape. First, James Cuno responds positively to my suggestion that a "polluters pay" tax on antiquities purchases could be instituted to generate funds that then would be funneled to site protection efforts of various kinds. I was expecting a peremptory dismissal. Also surprising was Cuno's acceptance of the need to retire the term "partage". Second, the comments by Philippe de Montebello (unidentified and invisible in the video, he is the first questioner) showed how touchy museum directors are at any imputation that they might still be accepting dodgy antiquities, even as gifts. I was not trying to suggest that at all, as I made clear. I was, of course, disappointed that Montebello sees no benefit to taxing the trade here based on his assessment that no one buys antiquities in the US or Britain anymore. He is no doubt right that there is a lot of money in Abu Dhabi and elsewhere around the world competing for artifacts. But he still needs to explain $57 million at auction in New York for that Mesopotamian figurine; the buyer might well be non-American, but the sale is made here, and those sorts of sales though rare will certainly recur. And antiquities dealers on Madison Avenue continue to ply their trade. The tossed-off "99% of the trade is now outside of the US and Europe" reminds me of the similarly unsupported claim Montebello and John Boardman used to make that 99% of what we know about the ancient past comes from studying the objects themselves, only 1% from the findspot context.

Interview on Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Radio show Artworks

The producers on this show did a pretty nice job gathering audioclips, and the interviewer had actually read my book, which was a pleasant surprise.

Memo to Zahi Hawass: Museums are not the main source for buying stolen antiquities

Zahi Hawass, at a news conference at the meeting convened in Cairo on recovering looted antiquities, asserts, "Museums are the main source for buying stolen artifacts. If museums stopped not to buy artifacts, actually, the theft will be less, and we can control that." (See the BBC clip, starting around 0:55).

Um, not exactly. Where to begin? Museums are not the main source for buying stolen artifacts -- that "honor" goes to individual collectors (including, increasingly, collectors in the Gulf oil states with the wherewithal to compete against American, British, and Japanese super-rich). Museums make up only a small percentage of the buyers on the antiquities market worldwide. And most museums in the West have now already stopped buying illicit or even just dodgy antiquities. That is not going to put an end to collecting of illicit antiquities. Hawass is certainly correct to say that if museums stop buying illicit artifacts, the theft will be less, but by only a slight amount. No one believes that collectors will be much deterred by knowing they cannot donate or sell their antiquities to museums, when they can count on other collectors to buy their pieces should they need to part with them. And so long as a collector is willing to pop $57 million for a single "kosher" figurine, looters are going to try to find equivalent pieces and collectors will buy them even though they are not kosher.

So if Hawass really thinks that looting will be reduced to manageable levels by getting museums out of the market, he is badly mistaken. They have already gotten out of the market, and countries being looted continue to be unable to handle the problem with the resources they've got at their disposal. Countries suffering from antiquities looting are going to need more than just clean hands from the museum world: they are going to need money to pay for site guards, satellite monitoring, helicopters, etc. That money should come from the collectors and the dealers, and from the boards of museums as well.

Looting in Lebanon

This article has already spurred at least two responses in the blogosphere, from Derek Fincham and Larry Coben. Coben suggest that the Sustainable Preservation Initiative is designed to prevent precisely the type of looting to feed one's family that is detailed in the article -- the interviewed looter is quoted saying he does not believe he is doing anything wrong:"I have a wife and six children to support, and I do so through this business."

The SPI is a wonderful idea, but its success, if I understand correctly, depends on getting buy-ins at the local level, from community leaders, for a tourism-oriented business model. That might be a tad difficult in countries like Lebanon where tourism is difficult to arrange, and where -- if the article is accurate -- the community leaders one hopes to appeal to are acting as middlemen to consumers who include Lebanese elites:

The artifacts often wind up in the homes and gardens of Lebanese politicians and citizens and even in private collections on other continents.

In February, police confiscated a child's sarcophagus dating back to the Roman empire from the Baalbeck home of a Muslim sheikh who was trying to lure in the highest bid.

I'm not suggesting it is not worth trying the SPI approach, even in Lebanon. But it would seem more likely to succeed in countries without a strong indigenous demand for antiquities, and where the central authorities are more committed to combating the illicit trade.

Iraq Cultural Heritage Policy: The Kurdish Problem

Stuart Gibson, a longtime international consultant to museums, UNESCO, and cultural ministries in former socialist countries, shares the attached report on the conditions in museums in Kurdistan. Though the report is couched in diplomatic prose, and deals mainly with technical matters, a few policy issues stand out:

a) relations between regional antiquities authorities and national ones are problematic (and not just in Iraq -- witness the tug-of-war in England between Birmingham and the British Museum over the disposition of the recently discovered Staffordshire Hoard), but much more so in the case of Kurdistan, with its history of victimage and its aspirations towards autonomy. The report does not go into detail about "the disruption in the museum community over the past years" and why that should make it unfeasible for Kurds to send their finds to Baghdad to be registered, but it seems clear reading between the lines that what is really keeping the Kurds from doing so is less chaos within the National Museum than a desire to register items as Kurdish;

b) the priorities of tourism are clashing with those of museums and archaeologists within Kurdistan, as they do at the national level, and as at the national level, preservation is taking second place to the demands of economic development. This mess, it is important to recall, stems in large part from the failure of American postwar nation-builders early on to even think about how to help the Iraqis organize its governance of cultural heritage. The position of the State Department now is that any such issues are internal matters for the Iraqis to work out themselves, but one would hope that behind the scenes some pressure is being applied, especially since the US is pumping $13 million into conservation efforts.

c) Speaking of the State Department, it is mentioned only in passing, with a reference to the Erbil Institute's Cultural Heritage Project, whose newly-opened facilities were paid for by State. It would be interesting to learn more about this.