After seeing the current ROM exhibition Mesopotamia: Inventing Our World, showcasing famous artifacts from the British Museum (clay tablets with cuneiform - including Epic of Gilgamesh! - more on this later), I have been thinking more about the looting of the National Museum of Iraq during the American occupation.

Iraq National Museum in Baghdad, after looting and destruction, 2003

Iraq National Museum in Baghdad, after restoration, 2009

Many of the obejcts from the early 19th century English and US excavations in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) were divided up between the British Museum, The Penn Museum in Philadelphia, and the government of Iraq (also Berlin and Chicago). One video in the ROM exhibition talked a little about the history of the archaeology from a Western perspective. This was projected next to a vitrine with an English, Victorian necklace made from Sumerian cylinder seals and a Victorian painting of an English woman wearing similar jewelery. That was a bit chilling. I'm glad they included it. (UPDATE: VB corrects me. It was a portrait of a woman wearing the exact necklace and she was married one of the archaeologists, who made it for her.)

The exhibition at the ROM is billed as "extraordinary treasures of Sumer, Assyria and Babylon from the British Museum," but it does have objects from other museums as well including, of course, things from the ROM's collection, such as a Striding Lion from the palace of King Nebuchadnezzar. The show also has the magnificent Head of a Man from Nineveh, which belongs to the Iraq National Museum.

Head of a Man, c.2300-2200 BCE

This is probably supposed to be Sargon of Akkad, a powerful ruler. The damage to the head was inflicted intentionally thousands of years ago, probably by somebody making a political statement.