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Saving the cradle of civilisation from an early grave
16 January 2007
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Professor Roger Matthews looks solemn. In the week when George Bush decided to send 21,500 new troops to Iraq and the United Nations launched a $60 million appeal for the country in the light of unremitting violence and mass displacement, Professor Matthews is trying to devise ways to support its shattered higher education sector.
He hopes to tackle the vast problem on a one-to-one basis, by matching students and staff from the UCL Institute of Archaeology with counterparts in archaeology departments in Iraqi universities to exchange news, views and resources over email.
"It's a very simple idea that costs nothing, but it could be a useful way to help overcome the enormous impact of the last fifteen years of sanctions - and in building morale in the universities that are somehow still managing to function. I know many students are keen to do something 'concrete' to help, and this is a very personal, meaningful way of making a difference to a disaster of huge proportions."
Professor Matthews plans to build the first partnership with Qadissiya University, which lies 200km south of Baghdad and has a strong archaeology department. The university's former main library, where students once swotted for exams, is now Camp Edson, a US marine base.
The destruction of higher education in Iraq
As an expert in ancient Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq), Professor Matthews is appalled by the state of the country's archaeology and higher education overall. Eighty-four per cent of higher education institutions have been burnt, looted or destroyed in the past three years. The dearth of books resulting from sanctions imposed after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1991 means that libraries are fifteen years out of date.
The devastation and obsolescence of communications technology since then means that academics have been largely cut off from developments in their fields, and far more seriously, are in danger of their lives for the crime of being educated and outward-looking. In a context where simply being able to speak English is viewed as suspicious, 473 academics have been killed since 2003. No one has been brought to justice for any of these killings.
Alongside the partnership scheme, Professor Matthews hopes to attract Iraqi students at Masters level to UCL to gain expertise in conservation and museum studies so that they can return at a later date with the skills to protect the country's ancient sites. He hopes to raise funding to cover the fees for these courses, although funds to support the Iraqi cultural and educational sectors appear to be falling away just when they are most needed.
After the 2003 looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad the UK government promised financial support that failed to materialise. Nevertheless, four Iraqis have been brought to the UK so far to attend university and museum courses through the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, of which Professor Matthews became Chair in December 2006. The same month however, the British Academy (the independent national academy for the humanities and the social sciences) announced it would halve funding to the School in 2007 and cut it entirely thereafter, claiming its aims are too narrow in geographical and disciplinary terms.
"The UK government has shown a disgraceful lack of support in terms of expertise and funding with regards to rebuilding Iraq," confirms Professor Matthews. "It has done very little to protect the country's cultural heritage, and has been put to shame by countries such as Japan and Italy, which have done more to support this field despite their minimal involvement in the war."
Home of world firsts
This lack of interest is astonishing given the number of world 'firsts' notched up in Iraq. A little way up the road from Qadissiya University is a village called Sumer, a namesake of the society that can lay claim to inventing the wheel around 3,500 BC and the first system of writing three hundred years later. At the end of the Ice Age, northern Iraq became home to some of the world's first settled communities, who went on to develop farming and some of the first cities.
"Imagine the uproar there would be if the Egyptian pyramids were torn down. The ongoing looting and destruction of Iraqi archaeological sites is just as terrible a loss to our knowledge of the roots of civilisation," says Professor Matthews.
The situation may have been allowed to continue partly due to our hazy notions of the historical importance of the region. At most, children in UK schools today learn that the town of Ur, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, was 'the birthplace of civilisation' - but how many can tell you that it lies in modern-day Iraq, or anything about its people?
"You can't move in the British Museum for all the educational resources on the Egyptians and the Romans," observes Professor Matthews. "For all its global significance, Mesopotamia has fallen off the curriculum due to a lack of teaching aids and a failure of imagination all round, including in academe." He is doing his own small part to rectify the situation, having advised a publisher on a series of children's books on Mesopotamian life.
Drawing a line in the sand
It's not only Western children and archaeologists who would benefit from preserving and cherishing Iraq's ancient heritage. Through time the Iraqi people themselves have seen colonialists ransack their sites, Western academics exploit them, and Saddam Hussein co-opt them for his own glorification (he notoriously rebuilt the ancient city of Babylon, reconstructing Nebuchadnezzar's palace in the process).
The current crisis at least provides the academic community with an opportunity to rethink its approach to archaeology in Iraq. The ideal resurrection and development of the discipline would see Iraqis re-examining their own history on their own terms. While the security situation rules this out for the foreseeable future, one precedent gives cause for hope. At the 'Archaeology in Conflict' conference held at UCL in November 2006, delegates learned how academics in partnership with government are putting cultural heritage back on its feet in Lebanon. How long it will be before Iraq reaches a similar stage is anyone's guess. "In Lebanon it seems they just got tired of fighting - Iraq may have a way to go before that happens," says Professor Matthews.
To find out more about supporting Iraqi higher education, follow the links at the top of this article.
Image 1: Roger Matthews (centre) excavating at Abu Salabikh in south Iraq with local colleagues in 1985
Image 2: The Warka Vase, dating from around 3200 BC, was looted from the Iraq Museum in April 2003 and subsequently recovered
Image 3: Aerial view of excavations at the city of Zabalam dating from 2500 BC. In the foreground and middle distance are mud-brick walls excavated by Iraqi archaeologists. All around them are pits dug by looters looking for pots and cuneiform tablets to sell to dealers for smuggling out of Iraq and onto the international antiquities market
By Lara Carim, UCL Communications
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