Over the next 36 hours, these thieves ransacked the institution, which was founded in 1923 and dedicated to preserving the country’s vast heritage.
The New York Times called the looting of the museum and its invaluable collection of archaeological artefacts - many of which dated to the early days of human culture and civilisation - “one of the greatest cultural disasters in recent Middle Eastern history".
Photographs taken during the frenzied looting show devastating scenes of wreckage and carelessness, as a glorious past was trampled over and broken.
Thieves - individuals as well as more organised networks, a distinction difficult to measure – used rifles, hammers, clubs, and crowbars to break lockers and protective glass. They stuffed boxes and wheelbarrows and filled their pockets with priceless objects.
Amongst the objects that disappeared were a Sumerian seal representing the Golden Lyre of Ur (smashed in the museum’s car park and later restored), as well as the Vase of Warka and the Mask of Warka, respectively two of the earliest representations of narrative relief and a human figure. Fortunately, both were later returned.
As reports of this inaction spread, scholars worldwide voiced their outrage. Many had previously advised the military to actively guarantee the museum’s safety.
“At the urging of an Iraqi archaeologist, a group of marines with a tank opened fire above looters' heads and drove them away. But instead of staying to protect the building, the marines left, and the looters returned,” Human Rights Watch reported at the time.
The incident was at first minimised by the US administration. "Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?" Donald Rumsfeld, then defence secretary, told reporters shortly after news of the museum’s looting broke.
These vases were unique; their loss cannot be replaced.
“Events seemed to be moving so quickly that the depth of the looting did not register then,” she said. “Any feelings of rage and sorrow were replaced by helplessness. Iraqis were preoccupied with their dead or disappeared – a mother’s child, a brother, a father – these were the emotions of Iraqis then, my father says, most were not thinking of the museum.”
Outside Baghdad, other cultural sites were being neglected and destroyed.
During the 1991 Gulf War, as government forces lost control of southern territories, looters attacked nine regional museums, which hosted their own local collections as well as those from the National Museum that had been moved out of Baghdad for safety.
Around 4,000 objects were estimated to have been stolen or destroyed at this time, including the 3,500-year-old Gilgamesh Tablet, a Sumerian version of the great epic.
This practice is strictly illegal. While forgery sometimes happens, trafficked objects were often sold for quite meagre sums.
Even in wartime, countries are held to international commitments, a principle that defines our international legal system.
The 1954 Hague Convention spells out the obligations and responsibilities of occupying forces to guarantee the safety and integrity of cultural property.
The question of cultural heritage was largely absent from the pre-invasion discussions of US-based policy-makers, notes Lawrence Rothfield, author of The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum.
Detailed plans to protect Iraq’s oil fields did exist though and the oil ministry's buildings were left untouched in the chaos of Baghdad's fall.
Professor Elizabeth Stone, an archaeologist at the Department of Anthropology at Stony Brook University, used satellite-based imagery to estimate that over 40 percent of nearly 1,500 sites surveyed in southern Iraq demonstrated evidence of devastation by December 2003.
From the images, Stone identified a large number of illegal excavations through the presence of pits or dug holes, a tragedy that was enabled as sites were mostly left unprotected during the early years of conflict.
The question of cultural heritage was largely absent from the pre-invasion discussions of US-based policy-makers, notes Lawrence Rothfield, author of The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum.
Detailed plans to protect Iraq’s oil fields did exist though and the oil ministry's buildings were left untouched in the chaos of Baghdad's fall.
Professor Elizabeth Stone, an archaeologist at the Department of Anthropology at Stony Brook University, used satellite-based imagery to estimate that over 40 percent of nearly 1,500 sites surveyed in southern Iraq demonstrated evidence of devastation by December 2003.
From the images, Stone identified a large number of illegal excavations through the presence of pits or dug holes, a tragedy that was enabled as sites were mostly left unprotected during the early years of conflict.
In response, Iraqi and international partners organised to catalogue, number, and recover the missing items. It was a necessary task as many of the spoils were taken from the museum’s storage, where objects had not yet been properly recorded.
Chicago’s Oriental Institute immediately launched the “Lost Treasures of Iraq,” an online information page and database to record, visualise, and report objects missing from Iraq’s collections.
To keep their memory alive, US-based artist of Iraqi descent Michael Rakowitz has recreated several of the lost objects under his project “The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist” (2007-ongoing) using data from the Oriental Institute’s database.
In papier-mache sculptures, Rakowitz has reconstructed reliefs from Nimrud’s ancient palace and votive clay statuettes that serve as surrogates of exile, cultural dispossession, and a lost home.
The artwork reinterprets a 2,700-year-old object that once guarded the gates of ancient Nineveh, which was destroyed by Islamic State in 2015.
His efforts have helped to keep the issue of the theft and destruction of Iraq’s cultural treasures alive in the public consciousness, which is vital if looted artefacts are ever to be returned.
For instance, through an international investigation, a broken statue of Sumerian King Entemena of Lagash was recovered in New York in 2006, and other restitutions have periodically been announced since.
Around 17,000 antiquities were returned to Iraq in 2021, most of which were ancient clay tablets held by a young US-based, evangelical-leaning institution, the Museum of the Bible, as well as by Cornell University.
The artwork reinterprets a 2,700-year-old object that once guarded the gates of ancient Nineveh, which was destroyed by Islamic State in 2015.
His efforts have helped to keep the issue of the theft and destruction of Iraq’s cultural treasures alive in the public consciousness, which is vital if looted artefacts are ever to be returned.
For instance, through an international investigation, a broken statue of Sumerian King Entemena of Lagash was recovered in New York in 2006, and other restitutions have periodically been announced since.
Around 17,000 antiquities were returned to Iraq in 2021, most of which were ancient clay tablets held by a young US-based, evangelical-leaning institution, the Museum of the Bible, as well as by Cornell University.