Severed Spaces: Documenting Cultural Heritage at Risk in Iran

For scholars residing far from the Middle East — in North America, where ASOR is based, and elsewhere — whose work centers on Middle Eastern cultural heritage, the war being waged across the region feels both a world away and overwhelmingly close to home. As civilians endure death, injury, displacement, and the prospect of long-term trauma, the destruction of historic landmarks, museums, markets, schools, and neighborhoods also reveals how war tears apart the physical fabric of communal life. Some of these sites are the direct target of strikes; a greater share of the damage is collateral — the result of shockwaves and shrapnel. Watching the continuous dismantling of the beating hearts of so many urban communities — places where many of us have walked, studied, lived, and built lasting relationships—is devastating beyond words. And with all of this comes the added feeling of futility — of calling for the protection of cultural heritage, of invoking international agreements that exist precisely for moments like this one, and watching them go unheeded. To speak of cultural heritage in wartime is not to look away from human suffering, but to recognize its loss as another form of that same suffering.

View from the Ali Qapu Palace across Naqsh-e Jahan Square toward the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque, Isfahan, 2016. © Kiersten Neumann.

Such grief is felt differently, and more acutely, by diasporic communities for whom these landmarks, cities, and landscapes are their ancestral identity, and for whom the people moving through these brutally disrupted spaces are family and friends. Even greater still is what those presently living in the region experience — today and also the day after, when the conflict is over, the war is said to have been won, when the buildings lie in ruin and the fabric that bound those spaces together remains severed and frayed. In those instances where, after untold years and unquantifiable energy, these places are restored and rebuilt, they nevertheless stand as surrogates of what once was.

In April 2003, the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad was looted during the U.S.-led invasion. That moment of cultural loss was the catalyst for the creation of the Lost Treasures from Iraq information webpage by the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC, formerly the Oriental Institute) of the University of Chicago. One of ISAC’s archaeologists, Professor McGuire Gibson, had, in the months prior, already provided the Pentagon with the location of thousands of the country’s archaeological sites and standing monuments — a vast collection that together testifies to millennia of human history — to be put on a “no-strike” list.

The webpage’s database, launched on April 15, focused instead on portable heritage — objects from the Iraq Museum’s galleries and storerooms that were damaged, destroyed, or of unknown status following the looting, with an estimated 15,000 objects taken. Object records were compiled from photographs and descriptions drawn from publications and archives worldwide — including ISAC’s early twentieth-century expedition records — and from the knowledge of Iraqi colleagues and international scholars, making the database a crucial publicly accessible resource for tracking Iraq’s displaced heritage. In doing so, it gave the world a way to reckon with something that might otherwise have remained abstract — the sheer scale of what was lost. While still documenting that loss, Iraqi museum staff and cultural heritage professionals took up with remarkable determination the painstaking work of recovering and restoring what was returned.