Archeologist helped restore Iraqi museum
SHE WAS AN EXPERT IN ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA CYLINDER SEALS
Lamia Al-Gailani, the archeologist, who has died aged 80, was one of the first Iraqi women allowed to excavate in her own country. She was an expert in cylinder seals, which had been used to print cuneiform and pictographic impressions on to documents and surfaces in ancient Mesopotamia. In later life she helped in the rebuilding of the collections of the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad, which had been looted following the United States-led invasion of 2003.
The museum, founded in 1926 by Gertrude Bell, once was the showcase for 7,000 years of history in Mesopotamia, birthplace of some of the first cities and home to a succession of major civilizations, including the Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian, through to a flourishing Islamic empire. The wrecking and looting began the day after Baghdad fell to U.S. troops on April 10, 2003.
The following month, Lamia Al-Gailani described the subsequent events to Antiquity magazine: “The looting of the Iraq Museum lasted more than two days. Some objects, such as the Warka vase and the Bassetki statue base of Naram-Sin, were clearly stolen to order ...
“Extensive and wanton damage was caused by those who simply smashed everything in sight, including Hatra statues and the famous life-size terracotta lion from Tell Harmal ... The damage also extended to the administrative offices, where the registers and photographs were torn and scattered about. All the equipment in the museum laboratory was completely destroyed.”
The tragedy left her not only grief-stricken but furious at the way the occupation forces had stood by and let it happen: “I personally feel both cheated and angry, since I was one of the archaeologists who went to Washington to warn of the possibility of looting. We were given to understand officially that the museum would be protected, and I feel particular anger when I know that just one or two tanks would have prevented all this destruction. Even the Iraqis under Saddam, when they invaded Kuwait, protected, stored and packed away the museum.”
Looters continued to take advantage of Iraq’s bloody chaos, vandalizing numerous archaeological sites. “There are not one or two sites that have been looted, but hundreds,” Lamia AlGailani said in 2006. “You wouldn’t believe the holes. They look like the moon. It is not only the antiquities that have been lost but the scientific knowledge.”
Worse was to come in 2014, when Isil began its systematic destruction of “idolatrous” archeological sites, sending its bulldozers into Nimrud and Hatra and releasing a video showing men attacking the artifacts in the Mosul Museum with sledgehammers and drills — just when staff were trying to rebuild the collection following the looting of 2003. “They are erasing our history,” Lamia Al-Gailani told the BBC. “I wish it was a nightmare and I could wake up.”
Work on restoring the National Museum was frustratingly slow, due to ongoing violence keeping away foreign experts. Nonetheless it grew into a huge international and Iraqi effort which included a major campaign to track down missing items. By some estimates, about 15,000 pieces, including 5,000 valuable cylinder seals, were stolen, about a third of which have been recovered.
Lamia Al-Gailani was an adviser to the Iraqi ministry of culture and was involved in the museum’s renovation and resurrection. She selected items to display at the reopening of the museum in 2015 and was instrumental in the establishment of a new museum of antiquities in Basra, which opened in 2016.
Shortly before her death she expressed guarded optimism about the future, observing that increasing numbers of foreign archeologists were returning to Iraq to work on sites and train local curators.
Lamia Al-Gailani was born in Baghdad on March 8 1938 into a distinguished Iraqi family, said to be descended from Abdul-Qadir Al Gailani, the 11th century Muslim judge, scholar and founder of the Qadiriyya Sufi order, whose mosque in Baghdad is still a place of pilgrimage.
Her father was a landowner; she recalled that some of her older relatives had been on friendly terms with Gertrude Bell, one of the key creators of Iraq after the First World War.
As a student in the 1950s Lamia Al-Gailani demonstrated against the Britishbacked monarchy and celebrated the July 1958 revolution that overthrew the king. Yet she credited Gertrude Bell as the saviour of Iraq’s cultural heritage in the 1920s, when she drafted the country’s first antiquities law regulating the excavation and export of treasures.
“Before that, foreign expeditions who were digging here took everything,” Lamia Al-Gailani said. “Now there she was saying: ‘I want some of it.’ Then she fought for a museum building.”
Lamia read archeology at Baghdad University before studying on a fellowship at Cambridge. Returning to Iraq in 1960, she started working at the National Museum. At the time few, if any, Iraqi women were working in the field, and the Iraqi government granted her permission to excavate only in the vicinity of Baghdad. Her first dig yielded one of the museum’s most important finds — a small cuneiform clay tablet corresponding to Pythagoras’s theorem more than 1,000 years before the Greek mathematician.
Lamia Al-Gailani returned to Britain to take a second master’s degree in Edinburgh and, in 1977, a doctorate from London University on Old Babylonian cylinder seals at the Iraq Museum. She made her home in England, becoming a researcher at the School of Oriental and African Studies, though she returned to her homeland for a few months every year, helping to maintain links between foreign academics and the Iraqi archeological community in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. In 1999, with the Iraqi archeologist Salim al-Alusi, she published The First Arabs, about the archeology of early Arab culture in Mesopotamia.
In 2009 she was awarded the Gertrude Bell Memorial Medal by the British Institute for the Study of Iraq. At the time of her death, Lamia AlGailani was helping to train Iraqi curators in a program sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and working on a history of the National Museum of Iraq from 1923-58.
Lamia Al-Gailani’s first marriage, to Abd al-Rahman Al-Gailani, a second cousin and an Islamic architecture historian, ended in divorce. Her second husband, George Werr, a Jordanian businessman, died in 2003. She is survived by three daughters.
She died in Amman, Jordan, and was interred in the Mausoleum of Abdul-Qadir Gailani in Baghdad, following a funeral procession from the National Museum.
GETTING THE DRUG APPROVED BY THE TWO COUNTRIES WITH THE TOUGHEST REGULATORY AUTHORITIES — THE U.K. AND THE U.S. — WAS A GOAL I WANTED TO ACHIEVE — STEWART ADAMS, BRITISH PHARMACIST WHO WORKED ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF IBUPROFEN
I WISH IT WAS A NIGHTMARE AND I COULD WAKE UP.