Iraq Museum

Listen for a moment. The traffic of Baghdad fades behind the museum walls, and the air inside turns cool and still. Your footsteps sound on stone floors. Ahead of you, in soft light, stand objects made by human hands more than five thousand years ago. Some were carved before writing existed. Others carry some of the oldest writing ever found. Welcome to the Iraq Museum, home to one of the most important collections of the ancient world.

To understand this place, it helps to remember where you are. The land between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers was once called Mesopotamia, a Greek word meaning the land between rivers. Here, people built some of the first cities. They developed early forms of writing, law, mathematics and astronomy. Sumer, Akkad, Babylon and Assyria all rose on this soil. Almost every object in these galleries was found in Iraq itself, not shipped in from somewhere else.

The museum began modestly in the 1920s, in the years after the First World War. The British writer and archaeologist Gertrude Bell played a central role. She helped draft a law that kept a share of excavated finds inside the country, instead of sending everything abroad. The first collection was shown in a small space in central Baghdad. Over the following decades, the collection grew far too large for its rooms. The museum moved to its present building, on the western Karkh side of the city, in the 1960s.

As you walk, notice how the galleries follow time. Many visitors start with the prehistoric rooms, with stone tools, simple pottery and small clay figures. Then come the Sumerian halls. Here you will see cylinder seals, small stone rollers carved with tiny scenes. When a seal was rolled across wet clay, it left a picture like a signature. Lean close to the cases. The detail on some seals is so fine that it is hard to believe it was cut by hand.

Now a story most visitors already know, but only in pieces. In April 2003, during the American-led invasion, the museum was looted. For several days, the building was left unprotected. Thieves broke into storerooms and galleries. Museum officials and international investigators later estimated that around fifteen thousand objects were taken. The news shocked archaeologists around the world. For many people, this museum became a symbol of how quickly cultural memory can be lost in war.

But the story did not end there. Iraqi staff, police, and international teams worked for years to bring objects home. Many thousands have been recovered, some from Baghdad itself, others from markets and collectors abroad. Here is something many visitors miss. Before the looting, staff quietly moved many of the most precious pieces to secret storage. Their quiet decisions protected a great deal. The full count of what is still missing remains uncertain, and the search continues today.

One of the most famous returns is the Warka Vase, a tall alabaster vessel from the ancient city of Uruk, known locally as Warka. Its carved bands show a procession. At the bottom are water and plants, then animals, then men carrying offerings, and at the top a scene linked to the goddess Inanna. It is one of the earliest surviving examples of narrative carving. The vase was stolen in 2003 and returned some weeks later, damaged but repairable.

From the same ancient city comes another treasure, often called the Mask of Warka, or the Lady of Warka. It is a carved stone face of a woman, more than five thousand years old. Her eyes and eyebrows were once filled with inlay, and her hair may have been covered with precious material. Today the stone is bare, but the face still looks calm and alert. This piece was also stolen in 2003, and it was later found buried on a farm and returned.

Now walk toward the Assyrian halls, and the scale changes completely. Here stand huge stone guardians called lamassu, winged bulls with human heads. The Assyrians placed them at palace gates to protect the king. Look at the legs. Many lamassu have five legs, not four. From the front, the figure stands still. From the side, it walks forward. The sculptors wanted the guardian to look correct from both angles, so they simply added a leg.

Around these giants, look at the large stone wall panels. They come from the palaces of Assyrian kings in the north of Iraq, near modern Mosul. The carvings show hunts, battles, captives and court ceremonies. The lines of cuneiform text running across them are records of royal deeds. Cuneiform is the wedge-shaped writing of ancient Mesopotamia, pressed into clay or cut into stone. The panels were designed as propaganda as much as art. They told visitors exactly how powerful the king was.

Here is a second surprise. In the late 1980s, Iraqi archaeologists found royal tombs at Nimrud, an Assyrian capital. Inside were gold crowns, jewellery and ornaments of extraordinary quality, often compared with the treasures of Tutankhamun. During the troubles of 1991 and 2003, these treasures were kept in a bank vault in Baghdad. For years, rumours said they had been lost. In fact, they had survived. In 2015, the museum reopened after a long closure. That same year, the militant group known as ISIS was destroying ancient sites in northern Iraq. The reopening was a clear message that this heritage still belonged to Iraq.

The story of the collection does not stop with the ancient empires. Later galleries cover the Islamic centuries, when Baghdad was a great centre of learning and trade. Here you may see coins, glazed ceramics, carved wood and inscriptions in Arabic calligraphy. Baghdad itself was founded in the eighth century as a round city, and for a time it was one of the largest cities in the world. These rooms connect the old empires with the city outside these walls.

As you finish, stop in one gallery and stand still for a minute. Notice the small marks left by human hands. A thumbprint pressed into clay. A tool line on stone. A crack carefully repaired by modern conservators. Every object here has survived floods, wars, burial and theft. When you walk back out into the warm light and the noise of Baghdad, remember that the people who made these things lived on this same ground, by these same rivers.