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Letters, November 03, 2006
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Editor,
I have just had an exchange of emails with my friend and fellow Atención contributor Joseph Dispenza. I read with pleasure his contributions but had to take strong exception to facts misstated in his column of October 20.
Joseph stated that “Baghdad’s National Museum of Antiquities was virtually destroyed, and 170,000 artifacts … burned, smashed to pieces or carried off by looters.” While this is in fact what was reported in the news of April 2003, those early reports were later found to be utterly false.
Many Western media outlets quoted Dr. Donnie George, Director of Research, Iraq Museum. The left-leaning news media was quick to take advantage of a climate in which any anti-American stories would be automatically believed. Dr. George turns out to be a member of Saddam Hussein’s Baath party, and after examining a number of misleading statements attributed to him it starts to appear he might be nothing more than a mouthpiece for the previous regime’s propaganda engine.
It is now known that museum curators were able to remove large parts of the collection to places of safety prior to the Iraq war, and we can hope they will keep those items hidden away from the foreign armies now in their country. One report has it that the museum’s numismatic collection and other objects were placed in a subterranean bank vault that was flooded to deter looters.
The treasure of Nimrud and thousands of other valuables were found to be safe and sound. While the destruction that did take place at the museum was an atrocity, a more accurate accounting estimates that some 2,000 irreplaceable artifacts are lost, not the 170,000 initially reported.
Of the artifacts missing from the museum, there is some evidence to the effect that items might have been gone for years. Financial transactions show that Saddam’s son Udi profited from the sale of certain antiquities of unknown provenance. It is not known for sure where he would have obtained such valuable artifacts, but I have a hunch.
Western news media reporters arriving at the Iraq Museum of Antiquities in April 2003 and finding it empty jumped to the conclusion the museum had been looted. At the time it appeared that is what had happened. The truth, as it came out later, has received much less attention from the media than the sensational stories of the museum’s alleged destruction.
Charles Miller
Editor,
The main article in this week’s [October 27] issue reads:
“According to Félix Luna, an expert on local traditions, current practices can be traced back to the time of the Virreinato (sixth, seventh and eighth centuries), when the pre-Hispanic cult of the dead was mixed with Spanish traditions and Catholicism. “Spaniards would place oranges and sugarcane as offerings, and also wheat, which the native Mexicans transformed into bone- and skull-shaped bread. The bread figures, also made of corn and honey, were decorated with seeds and consumed with atole (a drink made from ground corn). They offered to the spirits of their dead the fruits of their harvests.”…
The time of the Virreinato didn’t happen until the fifteenth century. The Spaniards came to Mexico in 1452 and didn’t come to San Miguel until 1492.
Rene Martínez
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