Archaeologist helped to restore National Museum of Iraq after the US invasion
Lamia Al-Gailani, who has died aged 80, was an archaeologist and 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, looted after the United States-led invasion of 2003.
The museum, founded in 1926 by Gertrude Bell, was once the showcase for 7000 years of history in Mesopotamia, home to a succession of major civilisations, including the Sumerian,
Babylonian and
Assyrian, through to a flourishing
Islamic empire.
The wrecking and looting began the day after Baghdad fell to US troops on April 10, 2003. The following month, Al-Gailani described events to Antiquity magazine: ‘‘The looting 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 . . . The looters gained access to the locked vaults, where the extent of the loss and damage has yet to be evaluated.
‘‘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 tragedy left her not only grief-stricken but furious at the way the occupation forces 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 the museum would be protected, and I feel particular anger 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, vandalising numerous archaeological sites. ‘‘There are not one or two sites that have been looted, but hundreds,’’ she 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’’ archaeological sites, sending its bulldozers into Nimrud and Hatra and releasing a video showing men attacking the artefacts in the Mosul Museum with sledgehammers and drills. ‘‘They are erasing our history,’’ AlGailani told the BBC. ‘‘I wish it was a nightmare and I could wake up.’’
Work on restoring the National Museum was frustratingly slow, but it grew into a huge effort that included a campaign to track down missing items. By some estimates, about 15,000 pieces, including 5000 valuable cylinder seals, were stolen, about a third of which have been recovered.
Al-Gailani was an adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Culture and was involved in the museum’s gradual 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.
Lamia Al-Gailani was born in Baghdad into a distinguished Iraqi family. She recalled that some of her older relatives had been on friendly terms with Gertrude Bell, one of the key creators of Iraq after World War I.
As a student in the 1950s, she was among those who demonstrated against the Britishbacked monarchy and celebrated the July 1958 revolution that overthrew the king. Yet she credited 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 read archaeology at Baghdad University before continuing her studies 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 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’ theorem more than 1000 years before the Greek mathematician.
She 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, though she returned to her homeland every year. In 1999, with the Iraqi archaeologist Salim al-Alusi, she published about the archaeology of early Arab culture in Mesopotamia.
Her first marriage, to Abd al-Rahman AlGailani, 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. –