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Oriental Institute Enlists Dramatist To Help Tell Story of Looting of Iraq

By Sam Cholke | July 2, 2015 5:39am
 Researchers from the Oriental Institute traveled to Iraq in 2003 to survey the damage done to museums and historical sites by looters.
Researchers from the Oriental Institute traveled to Iraq in 2003 to survey the damage done to museums and historical sites by looters.
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Oriental Insitute

HYDE PARK — The Oriental Institute is enlisting the help of a theater expert to help tell the story of artifacts from ancient Iraq.

At 12:15 p.m. Thursday at the museum, 1155 E. 58th St., Mesopotamian expert Kiersten Neumann will team up with Maren Robinson, a dramatist for a play on the incident called “Inana,” to tell the story of efforts to save antiquities during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The pair will talk about the museum's collection of Mesopotamian artifacts and the parallels between the play and the experiences of the museum’s own researchers in Iraq during the war.

McGuire Gibson, a professor of Mesopotamian archeology from the museum, traveled to Iraq in May 2003 to survey the damage to historical sites and the Iraq Museum by mobs and professional thieves.

“The mob had been more interested in furniture, light fixtures and wiring (the copper could be sold) than in antiquities, with the exception of the group of professional thieves that made their way to the underground storerooms, lighting their path with burning wads of Styrofoam,” Gibson wrote in his diary from the time, published in 2009 by the London Review of Books.

“They headed for a specific corner, where an important collection of Islamic coins and the museum’s most precious cylinder seals were stored,” Gibson writes. “They took more than 5,000 cylinder seals and 5,000 pieces of jewelry, but dropped the keys to the safes, so that the most valuable items survived the raid.”

The play “Inana,” which runs through July 26 at the Timeline Theatre, heightens the drama considerably from Gibson’s own experiences in wartime Iraq.

The play follows a curator attempting to save a statue of the mother goddess Inana and the deals he makes to rescue the antiquities while fleeing to London.

The Oriental Institute continues its work to help the Iraq museum, compiling a database of 1,483 objects from the museum.

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