AMY GOODMAN: It emerged over the weekend that 170,000 ancient artifacts housed in the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad have been destroyed or looted. The New York Times reports the destruction of the museum is likely to be reckoned as one of the greatest cultural disasters in recent Middle Eastern history. The National Museum recorded a history of civilizations that began to flourish in the fertile plains of Mesopotamia more than 7,000 years ago.

Among the treasures lost or destroyed, the world’s first written words. After surviving for more than 5,000 years, distinctive clay tablets from the Royal Tombs of Ur are gone. The tablets have cuneiform writing and are recognized as the root of all mankind’s written communication. The world’s earliest examples of mathematics, including calculations that have led to the modern system of timekeeping, using hours, minutes and seconds, based on the number six.

Museum officials are outraged at U.S. troops for failing to protect the museum. For weeks before the war, archaeologists and scholars from around the world had warned the Pentagon about postwar looting. They reminded the Pentagon that after the 1991 Gulf War, nine of Iraq’s 13 regional museums were plundered.

We’re joined on the line right now by Eleanor Robson. She is a fellow of All Souls Oxford and a council member of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Eleanor Robson.

ELEANOR ROBSON: Hello. Thanks for having me.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, why don’t you tell us about the museum and what has been destroyed?

ELEANOR ROBSON: Oh, it’s difficult to describe, in some ways, because there is so much in it. It’s the largest — world’s largest collection of Iraqi antiquities. And although you rightly state that civilization — cities’ writing began 5,000 years ago in Iraq, the first human inhabitants of Iraq go back to 100,000 BC. And so, the museum contains objects 100,000 years old, right up to medieval and Ottoman Iraq, manuscripts, Qur’ans, Torahs, beautiful furniture, jewelry. So it’s impossible to encapsulate just how much is there, except to say that if you can imagine, say, one of the big museums on the Mall in Washington being completely destroyed and wiped out, that is the sort of scale of loss that we’re looking at. Absolutely irreplaceable.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined right now by Philip Smucker from The Christian Science Monitor. He is at the museum. Welcome to Democracy Now!

PHILIP SMUCKER: Yeah, hi.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us where you are right now?

PHILIP SMUCKER: Well, actually, we’ve been by there again today, but we had a story in the paper today basically detailing the mass looting. We figured out — I’ve been in to see how the thieves got in. But even more dramatic is the story about the people who tried to defend it, people who had worked there, archaeologists. One very short little man had taken off his underwear and put it on a white stick and run down the street waving it and begging the Americans to come and, you know, defend these artifacts as they were being stolen. That was Thursday morning. And he didn’t get a response, because the Americans were — you know, they were still engaged, and they had no orders to put a guard on the museum. So, as the Americans answered, the looters fell upon these treasures and carted them off one by one. And if you’re inside, you can see the 20, 30% of what remains. They’re all the giant, heavy slabs that they couldn’t take out themselves. So, the only thing that saved them is they were too big to move. But a good 60, 70% of these objects have been looted, and they’re in the hands of people that don’t even know probably what they’re worth or how to get them on the art market.

AMY GOODMAN: You begin your piece, Phil Smucker, in The Christian Science Monitor with Mohsin Kadun. Can you describe what he told you?

PHILIP SMUCKER: Well, yeah. I mean, he was the gentleman who tore off his underwear and put them on a stick. But he had worked there 30 years, and, you know, he could see it coming. And when the Americans came into the city, there was, of course, a lot of chaos, but the looting hadn’t yet begun. And, in fact, well, it began almost as the Americans came in. And then he was able to see a Marine amphibious vehicle right down the road and run to them and ask for help. Of course, you know, these are 22-year-old kids sitting on an armored vehicle, and they had no orders to protect the museum. So everything was looted. And, you know, it will go down in history, of course, as one of the great losses, you know, and maybe one — well, probably one that could have been prevented.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Phil Smucker in Baghdad right now. You talk about Kadun. You also talk about how he had been in charge of moving these artifacts into two giant vaults to prevent them from crashing off the pedestals when the U.S. bombs fell.

PHILIP SMUCKER: Yeah, that’s correct. There had been a lot of talk among the journalists who were in Baghdad. We were coming up from Kuwait, through, you know, with U.S. troops. But the journalists in Baghdad had heard that, you know, objects were going to be protected. And the Iraqis had talked about that, quite frankly. In fact, what had happened is a lot of — originally, they had planned to at least sandbag a lot of the walls to prevent reverberations from cracking very important items. And if you saw the bombing, you know how intense it was. So, you know, it was cracking walls all over the city. And then they decided, well, it would be safer, you know, because they didn’t know what was going to happen, to put these things in vaults.

The vaults were broken open. The thieves got in. You know, it’s a high-security museum, just like you’d see on the Mall in Washington. But, you know, there are also vents for — vents for heating, air conditioning. The route that we noted which looked like a lot of the loot had gone out was right up out the roof, that people would come down through some doors that opened from the roof. And it may have been an inside job. There could have been people who helped. But as far as this gentleman was concerned, this was a mob of thousands — you know, hundreds, rather, but maybe even a thousand, who descended on the museum. These people didn’t necessarily know exactly what everything was worth, but they knew — they clearly knew that there were valuable things inside this high-security building. So they came in, and it was gone in 48 hours, Thursday and Friday. And I expect that — well, they hope that it’ll show up on the art market, you know, and then they can retrieve it. But it’s not even clear that will happen, because there’s gold items that they just might be melted down.

AMY GOODMAN: You describe, though, not only the stealing of some of this from the museum, but the smashing of it. How did people, Iraqis who were trying to keep guard of the museum, explain that?

PHILIP SMUCKER: Well, they just said the mob was too big to control. And, you know, people were trying to drag things out. And, you know, it was falling over. And, I mean, some things were so big that they had to tip them over just to drag them out, and then they just shattered right there on the floor. And as your earlier guest noted, yeah, it wasn’t 5,000 years of history; there were objects, prehistory objects, you know, things that man used, you know, 100,000 years ago. So, it was a very fascinating mix. Everybody knows that the Tigris and Euphrates rivers produced the earliest civilizations. And so you had a kind of catalog of these early civilizations. The best and the most interesting items were in the museum.

AMY GOODMAN: Eleanor Robson, Philip Smucker, who’s speaking to us from Baghdad right now, quotes Paul Zimansky, professor of Near Eastern archaeology at Boston University, saying, “It reflects badly on us as Americans. We’ve behaved like absolute barbarians. OK, you can blame a mob, but they looted because law and order was broken down, and we broke it down. Then we stood by and watched.” Your response?

ELEANOR ROBSON: I can only agree with that, I’m afraid. I have contacts in the U.S. military who concur exactly with your other correspondent’s report that the Marines just stood by and watched this happen. And the tragic irony of this is this is in a country which has the first codified laws known in the world. Many of your listeners, I’m sure, will have heard of Hammurabi’s law code from 4,000 years ago. In fact, written laws go back in Iraq another 500 years before that. So here we are at the very birthplace of legality, witnessing the breakdown of law and order and, I’m afraid to say, the breaking of international conventions, such as the 1970 Paris Convention and the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property During Armed Conflict. And the U.S. military has either deliberately or negligently broken many articles under both of those conventions.

AMY GOODMAN: Philip Smucker, you are in Baghdad right now. You have been traveling through this last week, these last weeks. Can you describe what else you are seeing?

PHILIP SMUCKER: Well, you’ve got a lot of looting going on just across the board. It’s now coming under some control, because once they loot these giant ministries, they’re setting them alight. Somebody is. And, of course, the true Iraqis believe that these are — these must be foreign elements that are setting things on fire. Who knows, really? But there’s a lot of anger in the streets, especially from educated people who think that the Americans could have put down guards, because the resistance kind of vanished pretty quickly. We’ve had, you know, guerrilla-style attacks since then. But this is a war. One would expect that. But that some of these magnificent modern buildings were destroyed is going to obviously put the — it’s two steps back in terms of forming a government and having administrators in a position to, you know, write things up properly. So, there’s been a lot lost here, not least of which, obviously, is the cultural heritage, which will go down in history as one of the great losses.

AMY GOODMAN: What about electricity and water?

PHILIP SMUCKER: Well, that’s coming back, but the people are very anxious to get it back. And there’s already, you know, a certain mood in the streets: “Well, you know, you’re here. You liberated us. It doesn’t seem much better.” But I think that will fade a bit in the coming few weeks. And we’ll know — we’ll know in two or three months, really, where this is headed in terms of the commitment. I mean, the commitment — well, first of all, we said we invaded because they had chemical weapons. We still have to find them. But short of that, the president obviously made very bold predictions about, you know, trying to implement democracy, in a part of the world that, frankly, has been ignored by the Americans in terms of democracy for a very long time. So, there’s a lot of — there’s a lot of anticipation. There’s a lot of anxiety, expectation and hope, as well, about what might be ahead.

AMY GOODMAN: Philip Smucker, you made news a few weeks ago when you became the first reporter to be expelled from Iraq by the U.S. military. Can you talk about what happened?

PHILIP SMUCKER: Yeah, I can talk about that briefly. I’m on a deadline. But yeah, that was a — that was kind of a misunderstanding. Well, in my view, it was a large mistake, because I was between the Tigris and Euphrates River, and I said — I estimated how far I was. And there was somebody in the Pentagon who saw a report I did on CNN. They said, “Oh, he gave away our position!” So, immediately, I was picked up and kind of, you know, under the rules, expelled, at which point I was given a new press credential. And then, when I got back in the country, they said, “Oh, we didn’t — we didn’t mean to give you a new press credential.” And so they tried to expel me again, but I made it to Baghdad anyway. And then they finally said, “Well, since he’s in Baghdad, we won’t go after him. We’ll relent.” And so, at the moment, everything’s resolved, but it was a bit of a hassle, obviously.

AMY GOODMAN: You were an unembedded reporter.

PHILIP SMUCKER: Correct, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us. We have been joined by Philip Smucker, who is talking to us from Baghdad, as well as Eleanor Robson of Oxford, speaking to us about the loss at the museum of Baghdad. Thank you very much.

You are listening to Democracy Now! When we come back, we’ll talk about the invasion and other issues with Arundhati Roy. Stay with us.