C u r r e n t A n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 3, June 2004
䉷 2004 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2004/4503-0003$3.00
Ancient Mesopotamia
and Modern Iraq in
the British Press,
1980–2003 1 struction of identities in resistance or opposition to the
by Michael Seymour
This paper addresses the relationship between the representation
in British newspapers of Iraq’s present and that of its ancient
past. Using a database of articles drawn from 23 years of cover-
age, it aims to demonstrate a strong and highly politicized ten-
dency to link the ancient past to the present through metaphor
and allegory. This connection is discussed in terms of its impli-
cations for the popular representation of ancient Mesopotamia
and for coverage of contemporary politics in three contexts: the
Iran-Iraq War, the 1990–91 Gulf War and associated sanctions,
and the build-up to war in 2001–3. The paper examines the roles
of heritage in building perceptions of modern Iraq through the
media and calls for a broader recognition of the dangers and po-
tentials of heritage as a tool in the representation of interna-
tional conflict.
m i c h a e l s e y m o u r is an M. Phil./Ph.D. candidate at the In-
stitute of Archaeology, University College London (31-34 Gordon
Square, London WC1H 0PY, U.K. [m.seymour@ucl.ac.uk]). Born
in 1979, he received his B.A. (2000) and M.A. (2002) from the
University of Southhampton. His dissertation is tentatively titled
“Approaches to the Mesopotamian Past in the History of Archae-
ological Thought: Babylon in Modern Representation, Reception,
and Cultural Consumption.” He was published (with Stephanie
Moser and others) “Transforming Archaeology through Practice:
Strategies for Collaborative Archaeology and the Community Ar-
chaeology Project at Quseir, Egypt” (World Archaeology 34:
220–48). The present paper was submitted 9 vii 03 and accepted
29 x 03.
[Supplementary material appears in the electronic edition of this
issue on the journal’s web page (http://www.journals.uchicago.
edu/CA/home.html).]
1. I thank Stephanie Moser and Yannis Hamilakis of the Depart-
ment of Archaeology, University of Southampton, Roger Matthews
and Jack Green of the Institute of Archaeology, University College
London, and John Curtis of the British Museum for a wide range
of advice, information, and support. I also thank the six anonymous
reviewers for their careful attention and useful suggestions. Re-
maining errors and omissions remain entirely my own. For funding
I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Board, U.K.,
whose support of my postgraduate studies at the University of
Southampton and University College London allowed me to con-
duct this research.
The political value of the past is well recognized, and
the politicized use of archaeology in modern contexts
now receives serious academic consideration (Gather-
cole and Lowenthal 1989, Kohl and Fawcett 1995a, Dı́az-
Andreu and Champion 1996). In particular, archaeology’s
roles in nationalist and imperialist culture have received
much attention, while the resurgence of sub-state-level
nationalist movements in Europe has provoked studies
more concerned with the role of the past in the con-
state. Despite Meskell’s (1998) bold attempt to open up
debate in this field, Iraq, in common with much of the
Middle East, has still not received the same level of at-
tention as many European and New World contexts in
this respect. This lack does not reflect a want of subject
matter—as demonstrated below, Iraq’s past has been em-
ployed in a variety of highly politicized forms in recent
years—but perhaps has more to do with the sensitivity
of what have generally been very difficult political con-
texts. Disciplinary anxiety is understandable: the polit-
ical questions concerned lie far beyond the reach of tra-
ditional archaeological practice and bring the weight of
present-day political responsibility to bear on specialists
trained primarily to deal with the ancient past. The en-
gagement may also cost a scholar access to material or
even a country and in some cases an entire career (Kohl
and Fawcett 1995b:16). I agree with Durrans (1989:70),
however, that the political uses of the past present chal-
lenges that archaeologists cannot detach from their own
work. Highly politicized uses of the Mesopotamian past
exist and affect us, and therefore we need to acknowledge
and address them.
The aim of this study is to examine the relationships
between cultural heritage and modern identity in British
newspaper coverage of Iraq. Following a review of rele-
vant existing research and a discussion of British news-
papers as research material, the article is divided into
three chronological sections: 1980–90, 1990–2001, and
2001–3, corresponding to the Iran-Iraq War and its after-
math, the first Gulf War and sanctions, and Iraq’s re-
newed position as a U.S. military focus after September
11, 2001, leading eventually to the war of 2003. These
periods will be shown to correspond with three distinct
phases in the representation of Iraqi heritage in the Brit-
ish press. The relationships between coverage of the an-
cient past and of current affairs in each period will be
discussed, with a particular focus on the political roles
of cultural heritage.
At the outset, it is worth briefly emphasizing the
unique archaeological and historic wealth of Iraq. An-
cient Mesopotamia (largely ancient Iraq) is of prime im-
portance in studying the origins of farming, writing, and
urban society. The ancient cities of Ur, Uruk, Babylon,
Nineveh, and many more lie here. Iraq can boast the seat
of the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, the Shicite holy
cities of Najaf and Karbala, and some of the world’s most
important historic monasteries. Despite this, only two
sites, the Assyrian capital of Ashur and the Nabatean
city of Hatra, are currently inscribed on the United
Nations World Heritage list. Perhaps most fundamental
351
352 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 3, June 2004
from the point of view of Western scholarship, the im-
portance of ancient Mesopotamian culture to the history
of modern Western thought, a history once considered
to begin only in fourth-century Greece, is increasingly
recognized (Parpola 2000:30):
In comparison with Greek and Hellenistic cultures,
Mesopotamian culture at first sight, undeniably,
seems alien and strange. The better one has learned
to understand it, however, the more it has come to
resemble our own culture. Its strange and exotic fea-
tures conceal within themselves an invisible world
of ideas more familiar to us, which resurfaces in
new garments but largely identical in content in
classical antiquity.
Britain has a long history of involvement in Iraq, in-
cluding a leading role in the formation of the state itself.
The World War I British occupation of the provinces of
Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul, completed in 1918, set the
provisional borders of modern Iraq, first as a British Man-
date and later as an independent state. As with much of
the Middle East, borders were defined on the basis of
European tactical and economic concerns, with only
minimal reference to the ethnic, religious, and tribal as-
sociations of the new states’ inhabitants. The develop-
ment of European archaeology in Iraq was not indepen-
dent of these factors, and the continued heavy involve-
ment of European archaeologists in studying the region’s
past can be seen in part as a legacy of these political and
economic ties.
Many of the most famous archaeologists of the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries made their careers at Me-
sopotamian sites or through the decipherment of the
area’s ancient languages. As a result, the British Museum
today holds one of the largest and most-studied collec-
tions of Iraqi antiquities in the world, ranging from the
winged bull colossi of Nimrud to tablets from the library
of Ashurbanipal that are fundamental to the study of
ancient Mesopotamian languages. A further legacy is the
British School of Archaeology in Iraq, developed in close
cooperation with the country’s British administration
(Lloyd 1982:7; Matthews 1997:59) and still active al-
though without a permanent presence in Iraq since 1990.
From the earliest Assyrian excavations of Paul Emile
Botta and Austen Henry Layard, who commenced work
in Iraq in 1842 and 1845 respectively (Larsen 1996:12,
68), antiquarian and archaeological work in the region
has been influenced by international and imperial com-
petition motivated by the desire for a claim to the great
cultural inheritance that the area’s ancient history rep-
resents in Western thought and culture. The place of
ancient Mesopotamia in nineteenth-century European
models of the ascent to civilization, however, built on
Old Testament and classical sources, is ambiguous (Rus-
sell 1997:27). The imperial successes of Assyrian and
Babylonian kings are mixed with notions of “Eastern
despotism” inspired by biblical allegories and reinforced
by the rise of Orientalist imagery in romanticist art and
literature. This contradiction, never satisfactorily re-
solved, remains important for understandings of the rep-
resentation of ancient Mesopotamia in the present.
Although research into the politicized use of Meso-
potamian archaeology outside Iraq is a recent develop-
ment (Bahrani 1998:161), substantial attention is now
being paid to the role of European imperialism in the
early history of Mesopotamian archaeology and Assyri-
ology (Larsen 1996, Bohrer 1998, McCall 1998), and
awareness of the historical context of Mesopotamian ar-
chaeology is now widely recognized as important to its
practice today (Matthews 2003a:199; Pollock 1999:27).
It remains true, however, that little work exists on the
contemporary political context of the subject. Bahrani
(1998) has addressed the construction of time and space
in modern treatments of ancient Mesopotamia, while
others have commented on the representation of Saddam
Hussein as an Oriental despot (Pollock and Lutz 1994,
Meskell 1998).
One paper does provide a direct precedent for this
study, focusing specifically on the relationship between
archaeology and modern politics in U.S. newspaper rep-
resentation of the Gulf War. In “Archaeology Deployed
for the Gulf War” (1994), Pollock and Lutz form their
database from a selection of American newspapers (the
New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles
Times, and the Chicago Tribune) between August 1990
and February 1992 (p. 264). Their database consists of 22
articles “in which archaeology was discussed in connec-
tion with the war” (p. 266), material largely concerned
with damage to sites. They note a substantial increase
in coverage during the six weeks of the war itself (7 ar-
ticles, as opposed to 5 in the five and a half months before
and 10 in the year after) and describe a “dearth of pre-
war reporting on archaeology,” posing the question
“Why did the print media suddenly ‘discover’ the exis-
tence of Iraq’s archaeological past?” (p. 267).
Pollock and Lutz identify a number of parallels in the
representation of Iraq’s archaeology. Noting the exclu-
sive focus on famous rulers and elite objects, they ob-
serve a similarity in the reduction of Iraqi identities to
the single personality of Saddam Hussein (1994:268).
They also highlight a parallel with oil in the treatment
of archaeological resources as a global commodity (p.
270): “Both oil and archaeological artefacts are portrayed
as resources with international owners. . . . Neither can
be the exclusive purview of modern Iraqis. The United
States has the right to purchase Iraqi oil (the Iraqis may
not choose to refuse to sell, or try to do so at very high
prices), just as Western archaeologists have the right
(even the duty) to explore and interpret Iraq’s past.”
Other common themes include the comparison of Amer-
ican and Iraqi attitudes to archaeological sites, repre-
sented as protective and exploitative, respectively (p.
278), and the tendency to endow archaeology with an-
thropomorphic qualities at the expense of covering ac-
tual human loss of life (p. 280). Coverage of Islamic ar-
chaeology and heritage is, they find, conspicuous by its
absence.

Data
The database employed here consists of all articles re-
lating to Iraqi heritage, broadly conceived, between Jan-
uary 1980 and March 2003 in U.K. national newspapers.
Tabloid coverage of ancient Mesopotamia is virtually
nonexistent prior to 2003, and therefore the database can-
not reflect the full social or political spectrum of the
British press. Because of limitations in indexing, only
articles from the Times and the Guardian are available
for the first two years of the database. After this, all
national newspapers are included.2 The database consists
of 605 articles, distributed unevenly from 1980 to 2003.
These are supplemented by further collections relating
to political context and to coverage of Iranian heritage
during the Iran-Iraq War.
Several catalogues and databases were used to collect
and check the data used in this project. The Times Index,
the Guardian Editor’s Index, the Clover Newspaper In-
dex (later the Newspaper Index), and Lexis Nexis Pro-
fessional were all essential tools. In all cases, including
paper and microfilm forms (the Guardian Editor’s Index
consists of a card-file scanned onto microfilm and can
be consulted at the British Newspaper Library, Colindale,
London), searches were term-based, but the results re-
turned were not automatically included in the database.
Not all terms searched for were relevant to all three pe-
riods covered in the newspaper (e.g., “Canford,” as ex-
pected, returned relevant results only for 1994, while
references to the Iraq Museum are extremely scarce prior
to 2003). Where possible, searches were repeated using
at least two databases (in most cases the Clover News-
paper Index and Lexis Nexis Professional). Articles
which had used the terms in contexts unrelated to Iraq
(references to Babel and Babylon in particular often occur
without any intentional reference to Iraq, ancient or
modern—the currency of this ancient name in so many
modern contexts is interesting in itself but far beyond
the remit of this article), and television listings (except-
ing relevant substantial reviews) were then excluded to
give the totals used here. Although the data are generally
treated as qualitative for the purposes of this article, the
large number of articles does allow some crude quanti-
tative analysis. [Tables and charts illustrating some
broad trends in the data and supporting some general
statements in my argument appear in the electronic edi-
tion of this issue on the journal’s web page.]
2. U.K. national newspapers included in this study are as follows:
the Daily Mail, the Daily Star,∗ the Daily Telegraph, the Express,
the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Independent, the Indepen-
dent on Sunday, the Mail on Sunday, the Mirror, the Morning Star,
the News of the World,∗ the Observer, People, the Sun, the Sunday
Express, the Sunday Mirror, the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday
Times, and the Times. Not all of these newspapers run throughout
the 23 years of the database, and those marked ∗ contributed no
articles to the database. The vast majority of articles included in
the database come from the major broadsheet (quality) newspapers:
the Times and Sunday Times, the Daily Telegraph and Telegraph
on Sunday, the Independent and Independent on Sunday, the
Guardian, the Observer (the Sunday newspaper of Guardian News-
papers Limited), and the Financial Times.
s e y m o u r Mesopotamia and Iraq in the Press F 353
The database is intended to include a broader range of
material than that of Pollock and Lutz. While the latter
concentrated on discussion of archaeology in direct re-
lation to the 1990–91 war, this study is concerned with
the relationships between archaeology, current affairs,
and political comment in the press. In addition to articles
that directly relate Mesopotamian archaeology to current
affairs, therefore, the database also includes uses of his-
torical and biblical references in discussion of current
affairs, articles in which heritage and archaeology are
included but are not primary themes, and coverage of
archaeology and cultural heritage not explicitly related
to modern politics.
the newspapers
“British political journalism,” according to Turnstall
(1996:234) “shares many common characteristics with
other democratic countries, but also has its full share of
national idiosyncrasies. Not least of these are the ex-
treme age and continuity of highly competitive political
journalism in London. No other city in the world has
such a long and uninterrupted history of such compet-
itive political journalism.” The press’s long and auspi-
cious history is often cited in support of the quality of
today’s British media. U.K. media legislation is among
the least restrictive in the world, and many cases can be
cited in support of a governmental commitment to rel-
ative press independence (Lawrenson and Barber 1985:6;
Brown 1985). The mechanics of this freedom, however,
are often poorly understood. British newspapers are free
in a classically liberal sense: they are free to publish,
within fairly unobjectionable legal limits, whatever ma-
terial they see fit. They are free to use this right to com-
pete for readers and advertising revenue. In fact, they
have to, as their freedom is inspired by the very same
political and economic principles that lie behind argu-
ments for free-market economics. For this reason, the
substantial constraints of commercial operation have
rarely been considered an infringement on the freedom
of the press, despite their phenomenal effectiveness in
eliminating the left-wing radical press during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Curran 1991:
35). Today it is no longer possible to cover broadsheet
production costs from the cover price alone or to start
up a new publication without substantial financial back-
ing. In short, a British broadsheet newspaper needs to be
compatible with the interests of large advertisers to sur-
vive (Murdock 1982:142). The current political spectrum
of Britain’s broadsheet press ranges from the relatively
liberal, centre-left Guardian to the more conservative
Daily Telegraph. The London Times, first published in
1785, is the world’s oldest surviving daily newspaper.
Tabloids, with higher circulation and less reliance on
advertising revenue, tend strongly toward the political
right, with more explicitly nationalist content than the
broadsheets. They are far less likely than the broadsheets
to cover archaeology or history and as a result are un-
derrepresented in this project.
354 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 3, June 2004
production and consumption of news
Communications research is complicated by the ephem-
erality not only of media coverage itself but also of the
processes of media production and consumption. To an-
alyse the production of news in the present is no simple
matter, and much work has been devoted to developing
effective participant-observer methodologies for re-
searchers working in newsrooms (e.g., Hallin 1986, Er-
icson, Baranek, and Chan 1989). To analyse consumption
of news is more difficult still. The readers’ role in ne-
gotiating and eventually consenting to the validity of
British news is vital, however. Not only does it check
some of the more obvious excesses evident in central-
ized, restricted state media around the world but also it
lends the news that is produced a legitimacy that can
only come with the belief in a free press and one which
can be called to account for misinforming the public.
The paradoxical result, however, is that when readers
disagree with the content of a British newspaper they
find themselves opposing not only the expertise and re-
search of a very large media organization but also what
would appear to be public consensus. This process is not
one of irresistible, unconstrained indoctrination, how-
ever. Coverage must remain plausible for consumers, as
must the impression of consensus they are presented
with. If the public substantially and vocally resists, the
impression of consensus—and by extension the legiti-
macy of coverage—is quickly undermined.
1980–90: The Iran-Iraq War and Its Aftermath
political context: the iran-iraq war and
british interests
British commitments and concerns during the early
stages of the Iran-Iraq War were unique among the major
external powers. While less directly affected by the in-
stability with which the conflict threatened global oil
markets than the United States (because of the U.K.’s
lower rate of consumption and the ownership of signif-
icant North Sea oil reserves) or by the financial concerns
which led France to support Iraq (whose huge debts to
the former made its survival essential), the British po-
sition was arguably as tightly constrained diplomatically
as those of either of these powers or that of the U.S.S.R.
On the one hand, close relations with the United States
meant that, while British Foreign and Commonwealth
Office (FCO) statements were careful to emphasize the
autonomy of British policy on the war, this policy could
in reality deviate significantly from that of the United
States only with difficulty. On the other, a legacy of co-
lonial rule in the Middle East meant that intervention
from the far less powerful British government of the
1980s “would be at best embarrassing and at worst coun-
terproductive” (Chipman 1989:219). The FCO’s initial
priority, therefore, became the maintenance of diplo-
matic relations, insofar as was possible, with both bel-
ligerents. Britain declared neutrality and prohibited the
sale of arms to either country. In the face of Iranian hos-
tility to the West, however, and particularly the United
States, Britain’s channels of communication with Tehran
broke down. The failure of diplomacy was uncomforta-
bly public, accompanied by the expulsion of many Brit-
ish diplomats from Iran and Iranian students and activ-
ists from the U.K. The 1980 embassy siege was
particularly significant as a media event, bringing home
as it did the extent to which a conflict in the Middle
East could resonate in London (Guardian, May 1, 1980).
Ultimately, a lack of confidence in predicting the be-
haviours of the combatants, and particularly of Iran
(Abrahamian 1993), hindered the development of a co-
herent foreign policy. In practice British approaches, like
those of other European states, developed on an ad hoc
basis and in general can be better understood as a series
of pragmatic responses to events than as adherence to a
single “British position” on the war (Chipman 1989:216).
As the war progressed and the possibility of an Iranian
victory became increasingly real, the attitudes of outside
powers began to focus on the prevention, primarily
through provision of resources to Iraq, of an outright vic-
tory for either side (Rubin 1983, Wright 1983). This goal
was rooted in fears of regional instability, whether
brought about through the spread of revolutionary fun-
damentalist Islam beyond Iran or by the action of an
aggressively hegemonic secular Iraqi state employing the
powerful rhetoric of pan-Arabism. Moreover, the oil price
incentive for ending the conflict had, by 1983, all but
vanished (Long 1984:39): “Almost immediately after the
war broke out, the spot market began to rise. Oil traders
prepared for the worst. Yet the worst never happened.
Almost three years passed and, far from having an ad-
verse effect on the oil market, the war was actually seen
by some as a godsend, easing what has become one of
the greatest international oil gluts in recent years.”
Although this assessment is cruel, giving no consid-
eration to the massive human cost of continued violence
or to the economic ruin of both Iran and Iraq and even
going so far as to refer to these disasters as a “godsend,”
it does reflect the position oil traders during the early
1980s were employed to hold and to base their decisions
on. A Western government position, while not as exclu-
sively based on economics, could not afford to treat the
oil markets as less than a major factor in policy making.
Oil was of particular importance to the United States,
its biggest consumer. The Reagan government could ill
afford to repeat the Johnson and Carter administrations’
disastrous relations with the Organisation of Petroleum
Exporting Countries (OPEC) and Organisation of Arab
Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) during the
1970s.
iranian and iraqi perspectives on ancient
mesopotamian and persian heritage
Since achieving formal independence with the signing of
the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty in June 1930, Iraq has struggled to
gain a sense of national identity. The alien political form
of the nation-state was imposed, largely by foreign powers,

on an ethnically, religiously, and culturally very diverse
population in the wake of the disintegration of the Ot-
toman Empire. Since that time the government of Iraq has
been subject to many episodes of violent upheaval, not
least in the rise of the Bacth party, coming to power
through a military coup in 1968. For Saddam Hussein,
whose own rise to power was marked by terror, coercion,
and purges of Bacth party members, ancient history pro-
vided a cultural resource emphasizing unity, continuity,
and stability (Tripp 2000:225). In a state whose ethnically,
religiously, and linguistically diverse population was
united by British mandate rather than any cultural affin-
ity, the assertion of ancient Mesopotamia as a common
Iraqi heritage is an obvious and essential tool in the con-
struction of Iraqi national identity. Mesopotamian-in-
spired festivals, art, theatre, and poetry all received en-
couragement under the Bacth party’s rule, and cultural and
religious differences were to a large extent transcended by
placing an emphasis on ancient Assyria and Babylon
(Baram 1991:55). Ancient Mesopotamia also provides a
rich visual resource, the importance of which cannot be
overemphasized (Wallis 1994:266): “Visual representa-
tions are a key element in symbolising and sustaining
national communal bonds. Such representations are not
just reactive (that is, depicting an existing state of being),
they are also purposefully creative and they can generate
new social and political formations.”
In Iran the iconography of ancient Persia had long been
part of the shah’s political repertoire. Emphasizing a break
not so much from the ancient past (although, as a pre-
Islamic past, this was also significant) as from the recently
ousted regime, Khomeini’s Iran focused only on Islamic
history, itself rich with material for a Shicite theocratic
state opposed to a Sunni Muslim aggressor (this being the
case in effect, despite Iraq’s large Shicite population). In
particular, the very beginning of Shicite history saw the
murder of cAli at Kufa and the martyrdom of Husayn ibn
c
Ali and his followers at Karbala, both in what is now Iraq.
Here, the conscious effort to eschew the ancient past in
favour of Muslim history is significant. From the point of
view of Islamic history, Iran certainly aimed to garner
international attention, infamously through causing dis-
turbances at Mecca (Taheri 1982). All of this affected Iraq,
heightening the need for its national identity, in opposi-
tion, to appear relatively secular. Clearly there was an
incentive to avoid emphasizing the conflict of interests
between faith and state produced by the war for Iraqi Shi-
c
ites. During the Iran-Iraq War, therefore, Iraqi propaganda
emphasized continuity with the ancient past and not least
the reputed military prowess of Assyrian kings. Despite
the economic pressures of a decade of war, efforts to re-
build Babylon continued. Only in later years did Saddam
Hussein publicly embrace religion in government, a shift
well illustrated by the redirection of resources into con-
struction of the world’s largest mosque (Cockburn 1995).3
3. Although by 1989 Saddam Hussein was already claiming descent
from the Hashemite dynasty and by extension the Prophet, this
assertion had as much to do with the Iraqi leader’s rehabilitation
of the once-disgraced Hashemite monarchy as with nationalist he-
roes in Iraqi culture (Thurgood 1989, Walker 1989).
s e y m o u r Mesopotamia and Iraq in the Press F 355
iraq and the antiquation of iran
One striking characteristic of Western coverage of the
Middle East generally has been a tendency for war to
draw attention to religious extremism in the hostile ar-
eas/groups (Said 1997 [1981]:65). In the case of early
1980s Iran, whose cultural shift away from Westerni-
zation was sudden, extreme, and very recent and whose
own government had set out to eliminate what it saw
as an unacceptable secularization of Iranian life (Wright
1990), this phenomenon was inevitably acute and be-
came a dominant force in coverage of the Iran-Iraq War.
Just as Saddam Hussein aimed to promote a secular na-
tional identity distinct from that of Iran, so in order to
render the conflict intelligible the Western media needed
something more familiar against which to depict an Ira-
nian Other whose difference was epitomized in the im-
age of Ayatollah Khomeini. Coverage of alien or extreme
behaviour in the name of Islam took Iran or Iranians as
their examples in the vast majority of stories throughout
the 1980s. In emphasizing cultural difference such cov-
erage serves to alienate and reduce empathy—how can
the readers sympathize with people whose behaviour
they simply do not understand? Occasional articles even
reflected on this alienation: “To much of the Western
public . . . it is all simply another senseless episode be-
tween strange and no doubt irrational peoples from
whom the West’s civilising hand was lifted prematurely”
(Bushkoff 1984).
Coverage regularly came close to explicit ridicule. Jux-
taposition, for example, with banal, familiar London set-
tings, most obviously in the case of a goat sacrificed in
a London street (Guardian, September 25, 1984; Clough
1984), was one important method through which this
was achieved. The meaning of such representations had
much to do with historical illegitimacy. Shown to appear
strange and awkward in a Western (i.e., de facto modern)
setting, it was not only Iran but Islam as a (much reduced,
monolithic, caricatured) whole that was presented as an
aberration and, through its difference in light of the leg-
acy of Orientalist literature, art, and thought (Said 1978,
1993; Rodinson 1988), as antiquated.
All this left a contradiction, however. On the one hand,
readers were asked to see the Iranian theocracy as stuck
in the past (articles frequently cite “Islamic tradition”
as a cover-all explanation when describing alien customs
or laws in Iran; after 1988, a similar treatment is applied
to Iraq). On the other, they were asked to believe that it
was a historically illegitimate aberration of the present.
To reconcile the conflict of antiquation and illegitimacy,
the reader must employ the logic of Victorian progress
narratives and, more specifically, of the idea that history
(in the “rise of civilization” sense) in the Middle East
“progressed” to a certain point before stopping dead, at
which point the West took up the “torch of civilization”
(Childe 1925) and progressed far more (Trigger 1996:625).
The implication was that Khomeini’s Iran represented
a way of life that not only was backward but had failed
in history and was simply unable to grasp the advances
of modernity. A striking example can be seen in a story
356 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 3, June 2004
showing a new Iranian machine for performing a tradi-
tional punishment (“New Machine Used for Cutting Off
Thieves’ Fingers,” Times, February 8, 1985). We are
shown that backward Eastern despots, even when pre-
sented with all the advantages of “our” technology, can-
not rise above their cruel, brutal “nature”—in the sim-
plest terms, the colonialist notion that it may be
impossible to “reform the savages.” Social evolution be-
ing the unstated mainstay of such thinking, we should
not be surprised when some political commentators,
even after the 1979 revolution, predicted that religious
fundamentalism of all kinds (at a time when the Shicite
Islamic fundamentalism of Iran was the only kind high-
lighted in the media) would eventually be completely
displaced by more “modern” values—specifically, free-
market capitalism and democracy.
For an observer following the line of thinking de-
scribed above, the Iran-Iraq War comes to have every-
thing to do with the past. If Iran is the antiquated Other,
Bacthist Iraq’s explicitly territorial concerns are far more
familiar to us, even on occasion embodying “our” resis-
tance to Khomeini’s revolution and the attack on “our”
historical narratives that it comes to represent. Even
without the knowledge that the Shatt al-Arab border was
originally set up (in Iraq’s favour) by the British, it is easy
to see how Iraq’s state territorialism, consistent, at least
in appearance, with the classical European forms of na-
tion-state nationalism described by Kedourie (1961),
Gellner (1983), or Smith (1986),4 lends itself well to read-
ings opposed to the new and alien theocratic model of
revolutionary Iran. As a battle of competing ideologies
the story is made all the more compelling by the idea
that the reader has something, however slight, in com-
mon with the Iraqi attitude to the war, as well as some-
thing to fear from the Iranians and their implied ability
to “plunge us back into the dark ages” (home, in English
popular history, to the Iranian torture devices high-
lighted by the newspapers).
1990–2001: The Gulf War and Sanctions
political context: build-up to the 1990–91
gulf war
By late August 1988, with both belligerents exhausted,
the Iran-Iraq War had effectively come to a close. UN
monitors began observing what was to be a lasting
ceasefire on August 20, with peace talks in Geneva be-
ginning five days later. Iran gained the important border
agreements it had originally sought, but Ayatollah Kho-
meini’s public regret at his inability to depose Saddam
Hussein’s regime, combined with the string of Iraqi mil-
itary victories which preceded the peace settlement, al-
c
4. The similarity would not bear close scrutiny, however. The Ba th-
ists had from the start employed pan-Arabism as a unifying concept,
more reliant on familial and kinship bonds than on the investment
of identity in territory (i.e., the creation of a “motherland”) and
certainly not wholly secular in its driving forces or cultural potency
(Makiya 1998:198).
lowed Iraq to declare victory. In reality neither regime
was victorious beyond its own survival, itself more than
was expected of Khomeini’s regime in 1980 or of Saddam
Hussein’s in 1986 (Hirst 1986). The human costs were
staggering, including large numbers of civilians from
both sides (Herzog 1989:255), and exacerbated by eco-
nomic disaster. Lost oil revenues and the costs of actu-
ally waging the long war left both countries financially
drained and economically isolated. On top of this, the
ideological zeal of the Iranian government had been seen
to be blunted by pragmatism (Wright 1990:186), while
Iraq had lost its leverage with Western governments that
no longer feared the spread of Khomeini’s revolution
(Karsh 1989:5). The real victors were those outside the
war, Gulf states whose economic and military stability
had been maintained to a remarkable degree throughout
and countries outside the Middle East, simply relieved
that the feared escalation of the conflict into superpower
confrontation which apparently threatened during the
early years of the war (Sabin 1989:293) had not materi-
alized.
With Iraq no longer as important to Western security,
the relatively scant coverage Iraqi human rights abuses
had received prior to 1988 (usually limited to coverage
of annual pleas from Amnesty International, often not
included in the database of this study because they rarely
contained the antiquating references more commonly in-
cluded in coverage of torture in Iran) began to swell.
Given the scale and extreme severity of Saddam Hus-
sein’s repression of Shicite and Kurdish uprisings within
Iraq at this time, including the 1988 gassing of thousands
of Kurdish civilians at Halabja, there was no shortage of
atrocities to report as coverage turned against him. As a
weakened Iran faded from view in the U.K. newspapers,
Iraq’s prominence began to increase. In March 1990 the
execution in Baghdad of the Iranian-born Observer jour-
nalist Farzad Bazoft on charges of spying prompted out-
rage in the U.K. media (Mallet 1990; Sunday Times,
March 18, 1990). The real turning point, however, did
not come until July 1990, as Iraq began to threaten neigh-
bouring Kuwait, accusing the latter of oil theft to the
value of US$2.4 billion from the Rumayla oil fields early
in the Iran-Iraq War and demanding reparations. By ef-
fectively threatening force to influence Arab oil produc-
tion quotas, Saddam Hussein put external and particularly
U.S. economic interests in the Middle East at risk. With
the invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, Iraq contra-
vened international law in the abrogation of existing bor-
ders and in the denial of Kuwait’s sovereign status—a
status that the UN exists to defend (Matthews 1993:132).
The invasion rapidly led to war, and Iraq subsequently
dominated the British press for several months.
from orientalism to new militarism
Coverage of the 1990–91 war bore little obvious relation
to that of its predecessor. Keeble (1997:8) argues that the
presentation of a short, “clean” war allows states to en-
gage the public “in a form of glamorised, substitute war-
fare . . . [in which] . . . people are mobilised through their

consumption of heavily censored media (much of the
censorship being self-imposed by journalists) whose job
is to manufacture the spectacle of warfare.” Gone was
Saddam Hussein, necessary evil and sometime ally
against the dangers of Iran. In his place had arisen a global
threat of demonic proportions. Gone, too, were the
bloodbaths and chemical-weapons horrors of Iran-Iraq.
Instead, on-board cameras tracked smart bombs through
the doors of carefully selected military targets. The ter-
minology, too, had been suitably adjusted. “Deterrence,”
“surgical strikes,” and the notion of a “clean war” arose
to describe this very different conflict. To many, the war
appeared to exist primarily as a media event detached
from (a) the “series of massacres” of which the conflict
consisted (Keeble 1997:5), (b) civilian casualties, reduced
in coverage to the status of rare accidents, and (c) the
specific tactical reasons for the war, political and eco-
nomic (Wilcken 1994:33). So apparent was the influence
of media coverage on our understanding of the conflict
that Baudrillard (1991) questioned the very reality of the
war, provoking, unsurprisingly, passionate responses
(Adair 1991, Jarrett 1991).
In the years since the Gulf War, many writers respon-
sible for this coverage have substantially changed their
attitudes. Military leaders have been accused of supply-
ing misinformation to the media and of taking pains to
withhold information that did not fit with the war’s pos-
itive public image (Henderson 1992, Lubow 1992), most
significantly the Iraqi death toll (Norris 1991). These cri-
tiques, however, appeared in academic books after the
war’s disappearance from the public eye (coverage of the
large continued and active military presence in Iraq dur-
ing the 1990s was, by comparison with coverage of op-
erations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, extremely low-
key), and the image of a just, clean, and mercifully short
conflict has stuck until recently, with the less popular
2003 war provoking a major public reassessment of
1990–91.
The image of this war was of extreme importance to
its Western belligerents. For the U.S. Bush administra-
tion, keen to redress the loss of face the American mil-
itary still felt over Vietnam, the objective was to be seen
as ready and able to put down foreign opposition swiftly
and effectively. Britain, America’s closest ally in the han-
dling of a UN response to the invasion of Kuwait, could
also benefit from appearing efficient and able, as well as
from nurturing the much-lauded “special relationship”
with the United States and a commitment to security
with more friendly powers in the Gulf.
arab despots and heritage
Many trends in coverage are conspicuously reversed in
1989–90 as attention shifts from Iran’s Ayatollah Kho-
meini to Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. In the build-
up to the Gulf War opposition to Saddam Hussein from
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states received a great deal of
coverage and was unsurprisingly portrayed positively.
The military regalia of Saddam Hussein was now placed
on the side of wrong, the less Westernized fashions of
s e y m o u r Mesopotamia and Iraq in the Press F 357
Kuwait and Saudi Arabia on that of right. The shift would
appear to contradict the traditions of representation of
the past decade, and, insofar as Saddam Hussein is rap-
idly transformed from the lesser to the greater of two
evils, it does. Such a contradiction is not as unusual as
might be assumed, however, and once again precedent
can be found in Victorian attitudes to race and social
evolution. Specifically, representations of the noble and
barbaric savage in ethnography and prehistory show a
similar contradiction. With little more dignity or respect,
Arab Muslim leaders criticizing Saddam Hussein are cast
in the “noble savage” role. Their judgment is seen as
impeccable through their agreement with Western pow-
ers, yet the logic behind it is represented as simple fear,
in contrast with the measured strategies and noble aims
of the United States and Britain (Keeble 1997, Hassan
1999). Moreover, their diplomatic and military roles are
played down; Middle Eastern leaders are represented as
unable to bring about change in the same way as their
Western allies.
Saddam Hussein, meanwhile, becomes a “barbaric sav-
age” (or, in a parallel schema, a cruel, selfish Eastern
despot)—a savage, moreover, who has found a white
man’s rifle. He can be presented as a threat to the West
but with the caveat that his weapons are not of his own
making. They, along with his costume, are presented in
a manner not dissimilar to the Iranian finger-cutting ma-
chine, as “gifts” of Western modernity that he knew no
better than to abuse.5 This in turn helps support claims
that he does not understand his own destructive power
and that his military decisions are therefore inherently
irrational.
The changing attitude of the British press is easily dis-
cernible in the database. Prior to 1988, all references to
“Islamic tradition” (a term almost exclusively invoked
in negative or alienating contexts) and to “barbarism,”
“savagery,” and “despotism” refer to Iran. Between 1988
and 2001 all such references refer to Iraq. Acceptance of
the revised identity of Saddam Hussein was not univer-
sal, and a positive identity for the Iraqi leader, primarily
representing Muslim resistance to a bullying West, found
support in a variety of communities worldwide and even
in Britain, where “British Pakistanis, a small, socially
vulnerable and relatively new ethnic minority, chose to
cast Saddam Hussein in a hero’s role against the over-
whelming British interpretive consensus” (Werbner
1994:214). This resistance, however, did not translate
into any national debate, was not recognized in press or
television coverage, and in short was given no oppor-
tunity to undermine the dominant construction of Sad-
dam Hussein’s identity as a despot. Although a pro-Sad-
dam view could not have been expected to win
5. This is not to deny or to play down the role of Western powers
in arming Saddam Hussein covered in depth by Timmerman (1992).
The Iraqi leader’s decision to build up this military capability and
his success in doing so, however, were obviously his own. While
guilt certainly does lie with those who supplied arms to Iraq, to
remove culpability from Saddam Hussein himself on this basis,
regarding him simply as the helpless tool of larger powers, would
clearly be absurd.
358 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 3, June 2004
substantial support in a hypothetical open public forum,
the important point is that this stage was never
reached—the pro-Saddam position was effectively stifled
by total media consensus.
saddam hussein and nebuchadnezzar
The use in British newspapers of an analogy between
Saddam Hussein and the Babylonian king Nebuchad-
nezzar6 is complicated by the Iraqi president’s own con-
stant use of the ancient past and, specifically, the mili-
tant kings of the Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires
in legitimating his rule.7 Nonetheless, in the Western
context it is now Nebuchadnezzar’s position as a clas-
sically styled “Eastern despot” that is used repeatedly
against Saddam Hussein, and it is this element of rep-
resentation that has received comment from Meskell
(1998:3) and Bahrani (1998). Early articles use the analogy
in producing arguments for Western intervention in the
Gulf (Guardian, August 7, 1990; Adams and Ellis 1990),
while material from the late 1990s focuses on the arro-
gance of Hussein in playing up to the analogy (Guardian,
January 4, 1999). Nebuchadnezzar the despot is still Neb-
uchadnezzar the ruler of an empire; more important, that
empire does have a place, if an early one, in the classical
metanarrative of Western civilization’s development.
Conversely, Bahrani (1998) has argued that the concept
of “despotism” has been a vital element in the Western
construction of an Oriental Other—that setting present-
day rulers up as throwbacks to a past Western politics
has long since succeeded. Indeed, this may be a causal
element in Hassan’s (1999) frustration about American
assumptions of “irrational” decision-making processes
in Middle Eastern politics.
rebuilding babylon
Babylon is by far the most commonly mentioned site/
ancient city in the database. A story covered regularly is
Saddam Hussein’s attempt to rebuild Babylon as a centre
for culture and, at least initially, for tourism. Earlier ar-
ticles, few as they are, show admiration for the attempt
(Guardian, October 6, 1986), as well as an awareness of
the symbolic value of rebuilding a famous city once
sacked by Persian invaders, albeit in 539 b.c. (Guardian,
August 3, 1987). The project is described as aiming to
bolster national pride in the war effort against Iran but
also as an attempt to create a major city for tourism (and
particularly Western tourism) once the Iran-Iraq War was
over. In the event the end of the war was accompanied
6. The Anglicized version of the real name, used by Mesopotamian
archaeologists and Assyriologists, is Nebuchadrezzar (itself short-
hand for the more accurate Nabu-Kudurri-usur). Popular writing
and all articles in the database use the Anglicized biblical form
Nebuchadnezzar, however, and the latter is therefore used in this
article.
7. The key role of heritage for the Iraqi Bacthists in consolidating
political authority and legitimacy is well demonstrated by Baram
(1991). The 1990s saw a further escalation of Saddam Hussein’s
attempts to associate himself with the ancient past.
by a rapid deterioration in Iraq’s relations with the West,
and attitudes toward Babylon quickly altered. At a tech-
nical level, the rebuilding project was accused of being
archaeologically unsound, damaging the original site
(Vallely 1989). These claims proved greatly exaggerated
(John Curtis, personal communication, 2003) but meshed
well with the main criticism levelled in articles: the idea
of the project as a reflection of Saddam Hussein’s self-
ishness, showing disregard for the ancient site and for
the economic plight of his people.
By 1988 the treatment is already sceptical (Boseley
1998). The cultural aims of the project are still noted but
are overshadowed by comments on Saddam Hussein’s
self-aggrandisement and criticisms of the half-built Bab-
ylon (Vallely 1988). With the build-up to the Gulf War
Babylon became a symbol for vanity and the decadence
of a despotic leader. The biblical morality lessons of the
ancient city were resurrected, leading eventually to ref-
erences to modern Baghdad as a “city of sin” (Daily Tel-
egraph, November 28, 1990). Articles mention the bricks
bearing Saddam Hussein’s name included in the struc-
ture, continuing the tradition of earlier builders at Bab-
ylon of including dedications, naming themselves and
honouring gods, on bricks at regular intervals (Miller and
Mylroie 1991). The wider context of this coverage af-
fected its message significantly. At this time Iraq was
synonymous in the Western media with the identity of
Saddam Hussein—a consequence of legitimating the
bombing of Iraq through the demonization of the Iraqi
president. As a result, stories such as these appeared to
question not only the legitimacy and worth of their in-
tended target Saddam Hussein, who was literally rep-
resented as a pretender to the throne of Nebuchadnezzar
and Hammurabi, but of modern Iraq as a state and Iraqis
as its inhabitants. In the context of war coverage that
rendered ordinary Iraqis virtually invisible, articles un-
dermining their cultural worth in history now appear
disturbingly complicit.
Following the 1990–91 war, Babylon continues to be
represented primarily as a monument to Saddam Hus-
sein’s vanity and to his neglect of the basic needs of his
population under sanctions (Barkho 1994; Times, March
13, 1995). Finally, the unfinished site serves as testimony
to the poverty of Iraq after a decade of sanctions (O’Kane
1998). The message conveyed—arrogance and decadence
leading to self-destruction—is reminiscent of the biblical
destruction of Babylon or Nineveh or of nineteenth-cen-
tury romanticist treatments of the same subject matter.
The implication of the message is that, as did the ancient
cities, Iraq has brought suffering upon itself through ar-
rogance and decadence. In the place of God in the anal-
ogy, this suffering is administered by more powerful
nations. The sensitive politics of economic sanctions
make an explicit statement along these lines unaccept-
able, yet through the analogy of Babylon it is almost
possible to assert that Iraq’s poverty-stricken population
are being punished for the war in a way which is some-
how just and preordained. Such an uncritical use of the
analogy on issues as politically sensitive as the economic
sanctions against Iraq is dangerous. While making for

engaging copy, its reductionism, as well as the inappro-
priate and insensitive use of a moralizing biblical anal-
ogy, represent an irresponsible treatment of the sanctions
question.
destruction of archaeology in iraq under
sanctions
One of the great tragedies for world heritage in the 1990s
was the rapid destruction of Iraq’s ancient sites and mu-
seums through robbery, theft, and looting (Russell 1998).
This loss, however, was greatly overshadowed by the hu-
man tragedy that precipitated the destruction. Iraq’s her-
itage was being lost through poverty and desperation, as
ordinary Iraqis risked hand amputation and, from 1994,
forehead branding for theft (Makiya 1998:ix) in their at-
tempts to make relatively small amounts of money
through the vast sums that Assyrian, Sumerian, and Bab-
ylonian artefacts could eventually command on illegal
Western art markets. The representation of this problem
was relatively sensitive to the situation of the Iraqis in-
volved in the thefts themselves, acknowledging the hard-
ship that led to the destruction of sites and looting of
artefacts. Beyond this the apportioning of blame varied
considerably. Although Western art collectors received
partial or full blame in almost all coverage, partly as a
result of the campaigning of Renfrew (2000) and the
McDonald Institute, Cambridge, responsibility is also at
times attributed to Western governments and the UN
(Daily Telegraph, October 17, 1995) or to Saddam Hus-
sein in his disregard for the welfare of his population
(Kiley 1998). Inevitably, each of these positions also con-
tributed to a far larger argument on the value of the
sanctions themselves. Respected positions in Western
academia and often sensational subject matter afforded
archaeologists a surprisingly significant voice in media
coverage, despite the very low priority of archaeology as
a factor in political discussions of sanctions, and it is for
this reason that archaeologists entering the debate over
the problem of looted antiquities had also to consider
the wider implications of sanctions legislation.
the canford relief
Apparently a far cry from the personalized identity pol-
itics of the Gulf War, the story of the Canford relief is a
romantic one of lost treasure recovered in the most un-
likely place—a school dining room. Articles (Daily Tel-
egraph, July 7, 1994; Shaw and Kennedy 1994) fail to
mention that the tuck shop in question is in fact the
Nineveh porch at Canford Manor, built and stocked for
Sir Austen Henry Layard’s patrons Sir John and Lady
Charlotte Guest (Russell 1997:53–72). What is invariably
covered is the auction sale price of the relief.
The tuck-shop discovery is an obvious hook on which
to hang the story. Nonetheless, it substantially affects
the meaning of articles, as it establishes the point of
origin of the relief in England (specifically upper-class
England—what point of origin could be more appropriate
than a public school tuck shop?). One Times article (July
s e y m o u r Mesopotamia and Iraq in the Press F 359
8, 1994) does cover the Iraqi government’s attempt to
block the sale. This is countered, however, by a far more
upbeat article one day later celebrating the “discovery”
of a document establishing Layard and England as the
relief’s rightful owners (Kennedy 1994). It would be hard
to imagine such a positive take on a failed repatriation
claim in a less mutually aggressive political context.
Moreover, the negligible legality of Layard’s work in Iraq,
which eventually led Sir Stratford Canning, then British
ambassador to Constantinople, to beg the Ottoman Sul-
tan for a retroactive permission for Layard’s excavation
(Bohrer 1998:342) (the legal proof cited in the article), is
not mentioned.
2001–3
The past two years have seen many changes. The World
Trade Centre disaster of September 11, 2001, heralded a
seismic shift not only in U.S. foreign policy but also in
Western media approaches to the Middle East. In practice
the two are difficult to disentangle, the consequences of
the first phenomenon being the prime subject matter of
the second. Beyond the unique nature of coverage of Sep-
tember 11 itself, coverage of U.S. international conflict
(in Afghanistan and Iraq) since this event has set many
precedents.
One surprising feature of this great upheaval is the
speed with which international sympathy for the U.S.
position, global and unequivocal in the immediate af-
termath of the attacks on the World Trade Centre and
the Pentagon, dried up. This loss of support was so great
that, by the eve of war in Iraq in March 2003, the global
popularity of the U.S. government was at a demonstrable
low. The failure of the United States and Britain to build
consensus on Iraq in the UN left the two countries al-
ienated from long-standing European allies and severely
damaged the credibility of the UN itself. Enormous
antiwar protests around the world received substantial
media coverage and, more remarkably, support.8 When
compared with the Gulf War of 1990–91, where patriotic
support for a war whose causes were assumed to be just
ran through almost all of the national media in Britain,
the situation as of 2003 seems shocking in its difference.
What was the impact of these developments on cov-
erage of Iraqi heritage? The most obvious change has
been in sheer quantity; 252 articles mentioning or fo-
cused on ancient Mesopotamia and/or the archaeology
of Iraq appeared in the first six months of 2003, compared
with 209 articles during the entire 1990s. This increase
does not appear to be purely an artefact of the necessarily
extensive coverage of the looting of the Iraq Museum in
Baghdad (although this does account for 108 of the 252
articles). Moreover, many of these articles are extended,
multipage reports (throughout most of the database
small columns represent the bulk of included articles).
8. Particularly striking was the almost unprecedented strong
antiwar stance of a tabloid, the Daily Mirror. Such a position would
almost certainly have been condemned as unpatriotic in 1990.
360 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 3, June 2004
Leading archaeologists were interviewed, and the poten-
tial threats to sites were discussed at length. Given what
we have already seen, an increase in coverage around a
war is unsurprising. But why was there so much more
material in 2003 than in 1990?
There appear to have been three factors operating in
this case: a new onus on news media to appear culturally
sensitive and aware, the fact that “Iraq” was no longer
reducible for a Western public to the image of Saddam
Hussein, and the usefulness of Iraqi heritage in lending
weight to antiwar arguments.
cultural specificity in coverage of
international affairs
One major effect of September 11, 2001, was a sudden
rise in the perceived importance of knowing about the
rest of the world. Even in the wake of the disaster, U.S.
media joined in the suggestion that America had been
“bombed into the world,” the implication being that ig-
norance of “the Rest” was no longer acceptable. When
news media sought to educate on Afghanistan, the Tal-
iban, and Al-Qacida as specific entities, the unspoken
aim was to present a West defying accusations of igno-
rance and stereotyping: knowledge of the specific politics
of Afghanistan had gained political salience. “Specific
politics” in this case does not mean an in-depth political
history of Afghanistan. The knowledge offered mainly
consisted of Afghanistan’s place on the map, the name
of Osama bin Laden (leading to some public confusion,
bin Laden being neither an Afghani nor a member of the
Taliban), and the information that the Taliban regime
was oppressive, fundamentalist, and anti-Western,
friendly to the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks
and without a legitimate claim to power. Although this
may not seem particularly ambitious, the information
was communicated effectively and now constitutes the
(much increased) bulk of Western common knowledge
of Central Asia.
In the case of Iraq, public awareness raised during the
1990–91 Gulf War provided a much stronger starting
point. Saddam Hussein and Baghdad were both familiar,
as was Iraq’s oil wealth. As we have seen, the name of
Babylon was also familiar to some extent. In the months
leading up to the 2003 war, the information that Iraq
contains ancient sites became a key part of an infor-
mation package more ambitious than that constructed
for Afghanistan and extending to the representation of
ethnic diversity. The existence of Iraq’s Kurdish and Shi-
c
ite populations, if defined only in terms of their oppo-
sition to Saddam Hussein, was much more clearly and
prominently represented than in 1990–91, for example.
The role of archaeology in this context was to verify that
Iraq was not the empty desert represented in 1990–91
and that destruction of its ancient sites would represent
an assault on world heritage and culture (Bright 2003).
This paralleled the sentiment of much antiwar writing,
depicting the war as a U.S. assault on world government
and international law.
separating iraq and saddam hussein
The first Gulf War saw Saddam Hussein as the person-
ification not only of tyranny but also of Iraq. Thanks in
large part to the trend toward showing cultural aware-
ness described above and following the precedents set in
coverage of Afghanistan, this is no longer considered ac-
ceptable. Public sympathy for the Iraqi people has been
substantial and their difference from the person of Sad-
dam Hussein recognized. As a result, where previously
the ancient past had been invoked to demonstrate as-
pects of Saddam Hussein’s character, the attempt to
move away from the now unsustainable habit of iden-
tifying the country and its inhabitants with its dictator
has allowed a different reading. That Saddam has usurped
the Iraqi heritage remains a strong message in coverage,
but the very existence and importance of the heritage for
Iraq and for the world has attracted substantial attention
in its own right.
ancient mesopotamia as antiwar device
The third and arguably most important factor in the in-
creased coverage of Iraqi heritage in the British press is
the fact that it lent itself well to the questioning of the
merits of war in Iraq (Jenkins 2003). The threat posed to
sites (usually, and inaccurately, presented prior to the
war as a threat posed primarily by bombing) was in itself
used as an argument against war. Now the “barbarians”
of the piece became those who would bomb the ziggurat
at Ur (the most popular example chosen, situated next
to an Iraqi airbase and superficially damaged by bombing
during the first Gulf War). While it is certainly true that
Iraq’s cultural heritage is of unique value, it is disheart-
ening to see archaeology prove at times the most evoc-
ative tool in antiwar arguments. The priorities implied
are reminiscent of Pollock and Lutz’s (1994:280) obser-
vation of archaeology’s being valued over human life in
some 1990–91 U.S. coverage but are much more sur-
prising in this context, where the danger to Iraqi civilians
was a major part of the antiwar case.
The role of heritage in undermining the legitimacy of
the war reached its zenith in the culmination and im-
mediate wake of the conflict. The looting of the Iraq
National Museum in Baghdad represented an enormous
cultural loss for Iraq and the world. The invading forces
had ignored warnings from several sources, notably the
International Council of Museums (ICOM), the Inter-
national Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS),
the U.S. interim civil administration-in-waiting, the Of-
fice for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance
(ORHA), and individual archaeologists invited to provide
information on the potential threat the war posed to cul-
tural heritage. Not surprisingly, their failure to act when
looting began came to symbolize for critics a broader
ignorance of Iraq’s cultural worth. The failure to heed
the warnings given was covered (Martin, Vulliamy, and
Hinsliff 2003) and blame for the cultural tragedy placed
squarely with the United States. No greater archetype of
brute ignorance could be imagined than an unashamed

apathy with regard to the loss of the most important
resource for studying the “birthplace of civilization.”9 Suc-
cessive ill-judged comments from high-ranking coalition
officials, most famously the U.S. Defense Secretary Don-
ald Rumsfeld’s offhand dismissal of the looting (“Stuff
happens,” quoted in Fiddler 2003; “Think of all the looting
that took place after the earthquake in Turkey. Remember
what happened after the riots in Los Angeles. . . . We know
what happens at a football game, a soccer game, in Eng-
land,” quoted in Bone 2003) allowed an already hostile
British press to demonstrate the coalition’s failure to un-
derstand the scale of the loss and, by extension, its failure
to understand Iraq and its needs. In a war so explicitly
concerned with “hearts and minds”—those of American,
European, and Middle Eastern governments and publics
as well as of Iraqis—this disaster became perhaps the most
damaging public relations failure in the U.S.-led coali-
tion’s campaign.
Conclusion
I have discussed the use of heritage and archaeology in
relation to three different conflicts covered in very dif-
ferent ways and representing three distinct approaches
to Iraq and its cultural heritage. During the 1980s we see
an Iraq that is modern, secular, and, if not accepted as a
signifier of Self in coverage, then certainly an effective
tool in creating and antiquating an Iranian Other. From
1990 we see Iraq re-created and reduced to the single
identity of Saddam Hussein. With this change Iraq’s past
becomes damning biblical allegory, its surviving remains
testimony to the greed and vanity of an Eastern despot.
Most recently we have seen ancient Mesopotamia mo-
bilized as part of a move to separate the identity of Iraq
from that of Saddam Hussein and to reduce the Other-
ness of the former and its people. What does this fluidity
in identity and meaning imply for the politicized rep-
resentation of the past more generally?
I have focused my criticism on conventions, stereo-
types, and relationships between heritage and current
affairs in coverage not only to address popular miscon-
ceptions regarding Iraqi history and archaeology for their
own sake but also to attack some of the prejudices which
stand in the way of our understanding people, events,
and views in more recent history and even in the present.
The power of the media to divide has alarming impli-
cations at a time of rapid globalization (Hetata 1998:283):
9. “Birthplace” and “cradle of civilization” are phrases now avoided
by most scholars, as they deceptively suggest a single point of origin
for and imply a simple linear development of what is, in any case,
a very problematic term, privileging sedentism, urbanism, the state,
and writing as markers of “civilization” in human society. The
phrase is often used by journalists during 2003, however, as a mem-
orable way of emphasizing the importance of Mesopotamian his-
tory and archaeology for the public. There was certainly a need to
highlight the importance of this heritage. Whether the benefits of
using such slogans to raise awareness in popular discourse outweigh
the cost of continuing to propagate such loaded terminology, how-
ever, is a difficult question.
s e y m o u r Mesopotamia and Iraq in the Press F 361
To unify power, economic or cultural, at the top, in
the hands of the few, it is necessary to fragment
power at the bottom. “Divide and rule” is the old
adage. To break down resistance, a monopoly on cul-
ture is necessary. A people’s culture, which would
cross over borders between people, which is human
and universal despite differences, . . . signifies the
possibility of resisting global economic and cultural
hegemony. To maintain the global economy and the
global culture, unification must exist at the top
among the few, the very few. It must not take place
at the bottom among the many, the very many.
Hetata discusses the power of states in the “North” over
those in the “South” and, more specifically, those of the
G7 (now G8) over the rest of the world. Perhaps, however,
the “very few” are fewer still. Just as the producers of
culture can exacerbate and maintain divisions in the
non-Western world, so too (with the caveats of resistance
outlined above) they can exercise this control over con-
sumers of culture in the West, preventing empathy (in
the case of the Iran-Iraq War) and even inciting hostility
(in the Gulf War). It is difficult to avoid the use of the
past as moral allegory in such cases—much of the ma-
terial in my database was made relevant to the readers
of British newspapers by the tendency of writers to draw
parallels between the past and the present or to contrast
the two. The relation of coverage of heritage to that of
current affairs is not necessarily harmful, but in the case
of British coverage of the Iran-Iraq and Gulf Wars much
negative potential has been realized. If coverage of her-
itage is intended to be understood by consumers as re-
lated to the present, the angles taken by writers on the
past are to some extent dictated by the stories of the
present. Once established, however, divisive and alien-
ating stereotypes can be difficult to displace, and the
problems created by using such links must be recog-
nized.
All this, however, does not negate the scope that exists
for a more sensitive and even constructive use of heritage
in the media. As a cultural resource, heritage is variously
used to build, support, or oppress cultural identities
through difference. By the same token, however, our
pasts, for all their diversity, have the power to unite and
to perform a very basic and very positive function of mass
culture—to remind us of our common humanity. I agree
with Hassan (1998:202) that “it is erroneous to discon-
tinue the search for universals and transcultural com-
monalities because it allegedly spreads within an intel-
lectual scheme that subverted it for the glorification of
a hegemonic West.” Recent generations of scholars have
worked to show the value of difference of all kinds and
to establish that the world cannot be reduced to a bland
homogeny, far less one whose agenda is determined by
the world’s tiny socioeconomic elite. They have been
right to do so: our world histories have been guilty of
prejudice on the basis of sex, gender, ethnicity, nation-
ality, class, religion, and language. But life is not only
difference. It is one thing to be forced into a totalitarian
homogenizing schema and quite another to celebrate
362 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 3, June 2004
common ground; the latter act holds the same liberating
potential as the affirmation of self that is the core of
theories of difference. The search for such similarities is
as dangerous as any potentially divisive objective, yet
both are well worth pursuing and need not leave us de-
fenceless. To return to Hassan (1998:202):
Although the theoretical and methodological founda-
tions of science may not answer ethical questions,
and they may even serve criminal and evil causes,
scholarly knowledge (science in the broad sense of
the word), as a mode of enquiry that in principle re-
jects dogmatism and endorses critical thinking, es-
chews pre-judicial claims in favour of collective, re-
flective judgement, subjects individual observations
and statements to cross-examination and scrutiny,
and offers a guarantee against fascist regimes, reli-
gious fanatics, intellectual tyranny and solipsistic
nihilism.
Our ability to sympathize, to understand, to reason, and
to negotiate rely on feelings of identification and em-
pathy which are all too easily lost. Heritage is often com-
plicit in the loss of empathy, but it also holds the po-
tential to rebuild it. The potential is obvious in the case
of Iran-Iraq, where the two states’ populations shared an
enormous amount culturally and historically, however
opposed the outlooks of their respective governments in
the 1980s.
In 2003, appeals for protection of Iraq’s sites, muse-
ums, and artefacts have necessarily centred on interna-
tional legislation such as the World Heritage Convention
(Hassall 2003), but the language of shared pasts is of real
importance beyond this. In terms of inheritance and of
responsibility, the balance between local and global in-
volvement in heritage is a difficult one. “World heritage”
should not mean dispossessed heritage, robbed of its
value for cultural identity and resistance at a local level.
This is by no means a necessary consequence of the con-
cept of a shared global inheritance, however, and in the
representation of Iraq we have already seen more than
enough of that which is divisive and alienating.
Postscript
At the time of writing (July 9, 2003), media coverage of
the Iraq National Museum’s looting has become a highly
contentious issue in its own right. The architectural his-
torian Dan Cruikshank’s Raiders of the Lost Art, a BBC
documentary reporting on the aftermath of the looting,
questioned the extent of the looting and the honesty of
senior museum staff and supported early coalition mil-
itary claims that the museum had been prepared in ad-
vance as an Iraqi military stronghold and not simply
taken over by Fedayeen when museum staff fled. Al-
though an accompanying report by Cruikshank later ap-
peared in the Times (Cruikshank 2003), the questions
raised by the documentary were first taken up in the
press by Aaranovitch in the Guardian (2003). The reports
substantially influenced media coverage and public per-
ception and were taken by some commentators as a bril-
liant exposé of collusion and media deception by leading
figures at the Iraq National Museum (Steyn 2003). Sev-
eral assertions, however, quickly proved ill-informed. Ar-
chaeologists immediately made public responses casting
doubt on the claims (Crawford and Robson 2003, Robson
2003) and to some extent succeeded in reopening the
debate. This effort was reinforced at a July 7 session of
the 49e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, held in
London, at which the staff of the Iraq National Museum
received support from colleagues at the British Museum
and elsewhere in refuting suggestions that it should have
been possible to produce an instant list of missing ar-
tefacts from the museum’s enormous and only partially
catalogued collection and that a military planning po-
sition existed at the museum (the misidentified building
was a police station) and in emphasizing that the removal
of all portable objects to secure locations prior to the war
had always been well known and that the presence of
empty, undamaged cases in the museum galleries there-
fore did not suggest deception as the Cruikshank and
Aaranovitch reports implied. The impact of Cruik-
shank’s documentary and Aaranovitch’s article seems
more likely to be remembered than the results of further
investigations,10 however, as these latter will inevitably
be published less prominently and long after the events
in question. They will also be remembered, at least in
the short term, more clearly than the current unprece-
dented level of destruction of Iraq’s ancient cities
through looting, which continues unreported and
unchecked.
Ultimately, the success of these sceptical reports could
be seen as part of a more general frustration at an ap-
parent lack of progress in the early stages of Iraqi recon-
struction and a lessening of Western media and public
sympathy for Iraq’s problems as a result of the increasing
hostility of Iraqis to the coalition presence and partic-
ularly the now-frequent attacks on coalition soldiers.
They need to be understood as both part-cause and effect
of this growing antipathy. Given the symbolic role cov-
erage of looting attached to the museum as representing
coalition handling of the conflict and its aftermath in
microcosm, the revelations of minimal loss and damage,
the representation of the museum’s empty cases and
staff’s inability to produce statistics on demand as evi-
dence of an “inside job,” and the suggestion of senior
museum staff’s implication in Bacath party tyranny have
had a strong impact on more general perceptions of Iraq’s
postwar state. The allegations have dried up public con-
cern over the looting of museums and set an agenda
effectively precluding coverage of the looting of sites.
Beyond this, however, they have also contributed to an
10. Speaking at the 49e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale,
Col. Matthew Bogdanos, leading the investigation into the looting,
gave a report on his team’s early findings. This report represented
the extent of knowledge on the looting as of July 2003 and contra-
dicted many of the media claims that preceded it. Details of this
report can be viewed through “British Museum and the Iraq Crisis,”
http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/iraqcrisis/.

erosion of sympathy for the economic, political, and hu-
manitarian problems confronting postwar Iraq. As we
wait for further investigation of these claims, therefore,
it may already be too late to undo damage far beyond
the traditional sphere of cultural heritage.
Comments
dan potts
Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney,
Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia (danpotts@arts.usyd.
edu.au). 3 ii 04
In May 2003, I travelled to Baghdad on behalf of the
Australian government in order to present the Iraq Mu-
seum with a gift of computer equipment (laptop, scanner,
digital camera, software) and to help the staff there set
it up and begin the laborious task of resurrecting the
registration system of the museum so that they would
be in a position to know what had been looted, what
remained, what was damaged, etc. This experience was
preceded and followed by a large number of media in-
terviews in Australia, Jordan, and Iraq, affording me in-
sight into the role of the media and its reporting on the
Iraq Museum crisis and the looting of archaeological
sites in the countryside. The present study, therefore,
interests me greatly and prompts me to comment on
several points which I think may be worth considering.
When I was asked by a young Jordanian journalist in
Amman whether I believed, as she clearly did, that the
American forces in Baghdad had allowed the looting of
the Iraq Museum to occur in order to obliterate the phys-
ical evidence of Iraq’s ancient past, I confess that my
mind was less on American realpolitik than it was on
the parallel with ancient Mesopotamian rulers who rou-
tinely looted the statues of deities from defeated enemies
as a means of driving home their victory over them.
When the deities (i.e., their cult statues), in these cases,
abandoned their devotees (with the help of the invading
enemy), it was a sure sign that the people in question
had committed a sin and fallen out of favour with their
god. In many respects, I thought, the looting of the Iraq
Museum and the removal of so many of its significant
treasures would strike a Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylo-
nian, or Assyrian as a similar sign of divine disfavour
visited upon the luckless Iraqi population of our own
day.
What matters, of course, is not whether the Jordan
journalist was correct in her assessment of the situa-
tion—I for one believe that she was not—any more than
whether ancient victims of similar acts of despoliation
were correct in their assessment of the reasons behind
the loss of their cult statues. What matters is perception,
for clearly the ancients considered divine disfavour a
“rational” explanation of the looting of their temples,
just as Arabs living in the region today, like the journalist
with whom I spoke, believed that American vengeance
s e y m o u r Mesopotamia and Iraq in the Press F 363
and anti-Arab sentiment lay behind the American army’s
refusal to prevent the looting of the Iraq Museum.
How beliefs of this sort are transmitted by Western
journalists to their readers, however, is an entirely dif-
ferent matter, and it is irrelevant, in one sense, how
Western media attitudes develop. It is clearly not irrel-
evant, as Seymour shows, when those attitudes begin to
shape public opinion on matters of universal cultural
importance. I found it fascinating, therefore, to see how
the media slant on Iraqi heritage in the British press
changed through time, and this I take to be Seymour’s
main aim in engaging this topic in the first place.
Where I would have been more cautious, or perhaps
more diligent in research, is in the earlier part of the
paper, for I find the discussion of Iran and Iranian atti-
tudes apropos the Iran-Iraq War lacking in depth. Anyone
who has spent much time in Iran will, I feel sure, agree
that the national concern with the martyrdom of cAli
and Husayn is not simply a Khomeini-inspired device to
justify “a Shicite theocratic state opposed to a Sunni Mus-
lim aggressor” as Seymour implies. Rather, the entire
episode (which long predates the period in which Shicism
became a “state religion,” as this did not occur until the
Safavid period) reflects the deep-seated hatred of the Arab
conquest by an essentially different (linguistically, cul-
turally) people proud of its Achaemenid and Sasanian
Persian history. Indeed, the roots of this Arab-Iranian
enmity are even more ancient. The Elamite predecessors
of the Persians bitterly opposed the Babylonians, Assyr-
ians, and Sumerians. But it is perhaps the memory of the
defeat and destruction of the Sasanian Empire—itself
bound up mythologically with the pre-modern glory of
Iran in Ferdowsi’s national epic, the Shahnameh—at the
hands of the Arabs (still referred to colloquially in Iran
today as “lizard-eaters”) which, as much as the martyr-
dom of cAli and Husayn, evinces this difference. Little
wonder, then, that Saddam Hussein, when not reviving
memories of Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar, cast the
struggle with and vainly anticipated victory over Iran
during the Imposed War (as it is referred to officially in
Iran) in terms of the Arab victory over the Sasanian army
at Qadisiyya, a battle which was to herald the beginning
of the end for the Sasanian Empire. In recent years I have
been told on more than one occasion by both young and
older Iranians that they do not regard holidays such as
the celebration of the end of Ramadan as “real,” since
these are “Arab” (i.e., Islamic) holidays imposed on
them, not native “Persian” ones like Now-Ruz, the Ira-
nian New Year (March 21). I cannot share Seymour’s
view, therefore, that Iran and Iraq “shared an enormous
amount culturally and historically, however opposed the
outlooks of their respective governments in the 1980s.”
A visit to Iran would, I think, dispel any such idea. Be-
neath the thin veneer of a common religion, there is far
more that divides these two peoples than that unites
them, and differences in Shicite and Sunni doctrine are
only the latest manifestation of an antagonism that can
be followed for the course of at least four and a half
millennia.
364 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 3, June 2004
e l e a n o r ro b s o n
Department of History and Philosophy of Science,
University of Cambridge, Free School Lane,
Cambridge CB2 3RH, U.K. (er264@cam.ac.uk). 20 i 04
I welcome Seymour’s timely observations on the im-
agery of ancient Iraq in British newspaper accounts of
modern conflict in the country. My comments here are
those of a participant-observer (albeit trained as neither)
in the international media furore that erupted after the
looting of the Iraq Museum in mid-April 2003. They
should be considered an addendum to the article rather
than a critique.
British archaeologists and historians of ancient Iraq are
not, on the whole, trained to deal with the media, for
until this past year we had almost no expectations of
our scholarly work’s being reported in the mainstream
press, where Britain and ancient Egypt have traditionally
dominated such archaeological headlines as there were.
Consequently, in the days following April 18, when the
story broke that the Iraq Museum in Baghdad had been
looted, much of its complexity was lost through mis-
communication. The journalists and their academic in-
formants were operating on two different Kuhnian par-
adigms: “Practicing in different worlds, the two groups
of [specialists] see different things when they look from
the same point in the same direction” (Kuhn 1962:149).
In the first ten days both sides were further hampered
by the fact that each assumed that the other had better
access to information in Iraq, but as the phone lines had
been bombed out some time before we were all depen-
dent on what reporters in Baghdad chose to cover and
how accurately they managed to report it. On the one
hand I (and the close colleagues with whom I discussed
the process as it happened) wished to present the im-
possibility of knowing for the moment exactly what had
happened, the complexity of Iraq’s history and its im-
portance to world culture, and why the large-scale theft
of large numbers of small undocumented finds (whether
from the museums or, worse, straight from archaeolog-
ical sites) was in some ways just as great a loss as the
removal of several dozen well-documented major works
from the public galleries of the Iraq Museum.
The majority of the journalists, in contrast, focused
on “art,” “gold,” and “treasures” from the Iraq Museum
(to the exclusion of the looted Mosul Museum, standing
monuments, and archaeological sites) and privileged Su-
merian and other ancient artefacts over classical and Is-
lamic objects. Many of the reporters were in fact the
newspapers’ art correspondents, more used to covering
the Venice Biennale than discussing the archaeology of
brown things. The worst of the journalists typically
wanted Oriental glamour, decadence, and opulence: ide-
ally, fabulously valuable golden treasures stolen to order
for a shadowy art collector or drugs baron with the aid
of corrupt Bacathist museum curators. Around half a
dozen proposals for television documentaries along such
lines came my way in the second quarter of 2003, none
of which, I am happy to report, ever got off the ground.
The Doonesbury cartoon strip (admittedly not a British
product but syndicated in the Guardian newspaper) ran
a long story about the adventures of a stolen artefact from
the Iraq Museum, but, bemusingly, it featured a scroll,
that most atypical of ancient Mesopotamian objects. (Pa-
pyrus, leather, and other organic materials survive only
exceptionally in the archaeological record of Iraq.)
But the reportage was not all dismally Orientalist, and
the overall outcome was mostly positive. The best of the
journalists listened and discussed and gave us space to
write our own pieces. Donny George Youkhanna, re-
search director of the Iraq Museum, was interviewed at
length and rightly portrayed as hero rather than villain
(Gibbons 2003) (though one suspects that his name,
Christianity, and impressive fluency in English all
helped to domesticate him for the British market). The
British government was embarrassed into tightening up
antiquities legislation, first for artefacts of Iraqi prove-
nance and now for “tainted cultural objects” worldwide
(http://www.hmso.gov.uk/si/si2003/20031519.htm,
http://www.uk-legislation.hmso.gov.uk/acts/ acts2003/
20030027.htm). No government has yet, however, man-
aged to fund any cultural renewal projects in Iraq, though
the British heritage sector and associated NGOs have
been very generous with offers of in-kind support.
Most heartening, perhaps, there is heightened public
awareness of Iraq’s extraordinary archaeology, history,
and cultural legacy to the world. Visitor numbers to the
Mesopotamia galleries of the British Museum rose sub-
stantially last April and appear to have remained high.
A recent British School of Archaeology in Iraq study day
on the Sumerians was a sellout. Responsible journalists
in print and broadcast media are now setting out to pro-
duce more thoughtful, deliberative pieces on Iraq, its peo-
ple, and its history that set out to understand rather than
gawp or condemn. Maybe there will come a time when
it is as taboo to allow the destruction the cultural her-
itage of any country in the name of war as it would be
to sanction the modern pillage of the Pyramids or the
Parthenon.
neil asher silberman
Ename Center for Public Archaeology, 13-15
Abdijstraat, B-9700 Oudenaarde, Belgium (neil.
silberman@enamecenter.org). 5 ii 04
There is a long and enlightening paper to be written
about the complex relationship between perceptions of
the past and modern geopolitics in Iraq. Yet one might
question if 605 newspaper stories over 23 years, the “vast
majority” of which, according to the author, come from
just five sources (the Times, the Daily Telegraph, the
Independent, the Guardian, and the Financial Times),
offer a broad enough sample to be revelatory about the
complex relationship between Iraq’s perceived past and
its fluid present. Indeed, we do not require a statistical
analysis of British press clippings to know that images
of the past in Iraq—as well as in Egypt, Israel, Palestine,
Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria—have been deeply entwined
with Western imperialism and local nationalisms since

the nineteenth century. Nor is it a great revelation, at
least since the publication of Said’s Orientalism in 1978,
that more pervasive Western antiquarian ideologies of
domination, demonization, and dispossession underlie
and are used to rationalize the ebb and flow of modern
political events.
The 605 examples on which this paper bases its con-
clusions might well be multiplied by the millions in
television news reports, magazine features, web sites,
cartoons, museum exhibits, and Hollywood films. In
tracing the shifting subtexts of negative historical rep-
resentations of Iraq and Iran through the events of the
past two decades, Seymour has recognized a need for
greater inclusiveness and understanding about the Mid-
dle East (and its past) in the British press and, by exten-
sion, all Western mass media. That would certainly be
welcome. But the link between politics and the past is
not a simple matter of removing journalistic bias, as if
it were a diagnosable (and curable!) intellectual disease.
Journalistic reports are the symptoms of a chronic con-
dition. The modern archaeological and historical inter-
pretations on which they are based are themselves nar-
rative genres that draw power from motifs, analogies, and
familiar story elements that resonate in the contempo-
rary cultural and political milieu.
In the case of Iraq, new post-Saddam stories about the
past are now being written, emphasizing, as Seymour
does, “the unique archaeological and historic wealth of
Iraq” and “the importance of ancient Mesopotamian cul-
ture to the history of modern Western thought.” These,
too, are reified ideological concepts, harking back to the
nineteenth-century image of the “Fertile Crescent” and
the direct connection of the ancient Mesopotamians not
to the modern Mesopotamians but primarily to the mod-
ern West. The story may change, but the relationship
between past and present remains constant. Indeed,
Western archaeologists and preservation groups—even
some who bitterly protested U.S. and U.K. actions—are
now queuing up in airport check-in lines to Baghdad as
consultants and cultural heritage experts, alongside the
other specialist teams of hydrologists, agronomists,
economists, and city planners, summoned by the Coa-
lition Provisional Authority to construct a “new” Iraq.
The new, more inclusive images advocated by Sey-
mour, along with new historical images produced by Ira-
qis, will, in time, undoubtedly find their way into the
popular press. But merely counting or deconstructing
them will bring us no closer to understanding the me-
chanics of the manipulation of the past. In the coming
years, whether Iraq’s ancient civilizations are meta-
phorically demonized, universalized, or Disneyfied by
Fleet Street, they will remain politically potent for mo-
bilizing resources and swaying public opinion about Brit-
ain’s modern role in the Middle East. And it is that
deeper relationship between past and present—the seem-
ingly inevitable exploitation of the past as a justification
for contemporary actions—that statistics and the dutiful
recording of a sequence of shifting scenarios can never
adequately explain.
s e y m o u r Mesopotamia and Iraq in the Press F 365
Reply
michael seymour
London, U.K. 13 ii 04
I am grateful to the commentators for their criticisms
and insights and for the additional material provided by
Potts and Robson. I will concentrate on answering the
criticisms here.
To begin with Potts’s critique of my discussion of Iran,
I should first stress that it was not my intention to sug-
gest that hostility toward Iraq and Arabs or the promi-
nence of the martyrdoms of cAli and Husayn in Iranian
religious life are themselves new or merely a gloss cre-
ated by Khomeini, and I apologize for not making this
sufficiently clear. I do maintain, however, that both were
mobilized politically in the Iran-Iraq War to a clear pur-
pose and that their conscious promotion by the new gov-
ernment with the intention of undermining secular au-
thority in Iraq and harnessing hostility toward an
aggressive Iraqi government can fairly be called a “Kho-
meini-inspired device.” Similarly, while the antagonism
and its historical justifications are very real, there is
much to support my statement that the populations of
Iran and Iraq “shared an enormous amount culturally
and historically”: millennia of trade and communica-
tion, interacting political formations including empires
spanning both regions and centred in both at different
times, the past and present of Shicism (surely more than
a “veneer”), and large Kurdish populations that often
claim more cultural and political affinity with one an-
other than with the leadership of either state. Equally
important, the history of conflict itself is history in com-
mon, and it is relevant here that most historians covering
wars engage in their subject not with the aim of pro-
moting further hostility but in the belief that greater
mutual understanding can lessen it. In a more explicit
use of the same principle, Scham and Yahya (2003) have
recently made an innovative attempt to develop a re-
flexive dialogue in the case of Palestinian and Israeli
pasts, relying not on the establishment of a “common
narrative” but on the ability to “acknowledge the im-
perfections of our own narratives without fully rejecting
them” (p. 399). Projects of this kind can potentially bring
both academic and social benefits. I believe that the
shared aspects of Iraqi and Iranian history are significant
and deserve prominence, the more so because I accept
Potts’s main point: the existence of substantial and long-
standing public hostility to Arabs and Iraq in Iran.
I find it harder to accept the points raised by Silberman.
Starting with the database, it is true that this could be
multiplied by using material from other countries and
media, but increasing the scale quickly makes it impos-
sible to write anything concrete about the whole, and it
was of prime importance to me in this study to be able
to work through a particular case and to point to spe-
cifics. That the newspapers of one country share some
degree of social and political context is a strength in this
366 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 3, June 2004
respect, and I offer my conclusions partly for comparison
with coverage in other countries and other media. I
would expect to find some of my observations paralleled
in a study of British television coverage and, to a lesser
extent, press coverage in the United States, but I would
be greatly surprised to find them identical or to find
strong parallels between, for example, British and French
coverage in 2001–3. My main aim in the article is not
to make these cross-media or international generaliza-
tions but to study the mechanics of the relationship be-
tween coverage of heritage and current affairs in practice,
and for this a national context is probably the largest
useful unit of analysis.
Moving to the question of removing bias, Silberman
mistakes my position: I start from the widely accepted
premise, on which we agree, that it is impossible to pro-
duce a non-situated, truly objective account of events
(“eliminating bias” is therefore a misleading phrase, and
one which I avoid) through which reportage can be sep-
arated from the “chronic condition” of its social and
political context. It does not follow from this, however,
that we cannot meaningfully critique media approaches
or that coverage cannot be improved within a set of com-
monly agreed-upon values such as certainly exist, how-
ever nebulously, for journalistic standards of accuracy
and cultural sensitivity in the U.K. press (albeit a two-
tier system in which much that is considered acceptable
in the tabloids is not in the broadsheet newspapers with
which this article is mainly concerned). What I call for
is not the impossible “unbiased” account but self-aware-
ness and responsibility with regard to the relationship
between coverage of the past and the present, an aim
that can be pursued and achieved. The metaphor of me-
dia coverage as “symptom” of a “chronic condition” fails
here, as media coverage certainly does feed back into the
thinking and views of society: the “symptom” here is
equally a cause and is worth addressing for just this
reason.
Where Silberman sees me returning to “reified nine-
teenth-century concepts” early in the article, these are
so broad as to imply that almost any active role per-
formed by Westerners in Iraq or with regard to its past
will be inherently colonialist and presumably that this
should therefore prevent all such action. Our disciplinary
structures and the associated massively uneven distri-
bution of resources are in large part a colonial legacy that
we cannot easily escape, but the assertion that “the story
may change, but the relationship between past and pre-
sent remains constant” is groundless. The “story” is that
relationship made manifest. The relationships of the pre-
sent to the past are diverse and fluid and can be seen to
change (a point demonstrated throughout this article);
therefore the responsibility that a history of colonialism
actually places upon those in privileged positions today
is not to isolationism but to reform, a process which can
be seen in the cases Silberman points to. I cited Parpola,
whose article aimed to promote the importance of pre-
classical thought in the academic life of the West, not
because he considers this the pinnacle of human intel-
lectual achievement but to challenge a key Eurocentric
premise underpinning that notion. The story has
changed, the relationship has changed, and the similar-
ity, though obvious, is in this case superficial. The cur-
rent involvement of foreign archaeologists in Iraq is a
similar case in point. The handling of aid and reconstruc-
tion issues under the Coalition Provisional Authority
has been seen by many as reinforcing imbalances of
power and wealth, at times removing not only control
but also direct involvement from Iraqis, and the ethical
decisions archaeologists have to take in terms of their
involvement in Iraq at present are very difficult, partic-
ularly for those who strongly opposed the occupation.
Now is not the time for an influx of foreign excavators
hoping to gain a foothold for future projects in Iraq, and
such exploitation and abuse of power cannot be con-
doned. However, when Iraqi archaeologists, curators, and
librarians request international support and aid in a des-
perate situation, I would be very cautious about laying
charges of colonialism on those who were in a position
to help and therefore did so (the essential work described
by Potts at the beginning of his commentary is a good
example here). The story has changed; the relationship
has changed. The caveat should be added here that I
would not claim as much for the discipline as a whole:
Mesopotamian archaeologists have only begun to deal
with the implications of their colonial inheritance. The
relationship continues to change, and this is a time of
great and necessary upheaval in the subject’s old and
often problematic structures and norms (see Matthews
2003 for a general discussion of the discipline’s state in
the present and priorities for the future).
Silberman’s most fundamental objection is to my ap-
proach itself, which he finds unhelpful because “merely
counting or deconstructing [historical images] will bring
us no closer to understanding the mechanics of the ma-
nipulation of the past”—a position with which I cannot
agree. The value of this paper lies precisely in that “the
dutiful recording of a sequence of shifting scenarios” can
adequately explain “the seemingly inevitable exploita-
tion of the past as a justification for contemporary ac-
tions” and, moreover, can weaken it. The power of ac-
ademic deconstruction and of much good journalism lies
in picking apart and exposing to criticism the “mechan-
ics of the manipulation of the past” (and the present),
bringing us closer to understanding and critically engag-
ing with them. I would accept that attempts to exploit
the past for all kinds of political ends are inevitable.
What is not inevitable is acceptance, and since critique
feeds back to affect the degree to which such exploitation
is possible and what forms media representations of the
past take, the situation is far from hopeless.
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