Saving Iraq's heritage

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Neil MacGregor in the British Museum's Assyrian gallery

The director of the British Museum is visibly agitated. Today, his legendary calm and courteous manner cannot hide exasperation.

Moments before we meet, and after three days of scandalised headlines on the looting in Iraq, Neil MacGregor has learned that the ransacked Baghdad Museum still has no American soldiers protecting it.

"Not one, can you believe it?" His colleague John Curtis, a world authority on Iraqi archaeology, had just managed, after weeks of silence, to make contact with his Baghdad counterpart, who has been living in the devastated building, trying manfully to protect it from further damage.

The human aspect is as vital as the artistic and cultural. These museum people in Baghdad, MacGregor points out, are friends, close associates, with whom his staff have been in regular contact over long-term shared projects. Only weeks ago, while the coalition plotted air attacks, British Museum scholars were still exchanging prized information on the decipherment of precious cuneiform tablets. Many of these writings on clay, having survived 5,000 years, now lie smashed.

"You need scholarship of the highest quality to put together these ancient fragments, to know what's missing, which order they go in, what they mean. We have that expertise because of the collective body of quiet scholarship built up over decades. In this area the British Museum has long been a world leader. Suddenly these skills stop being academic and become indispensable."

Events are moving fast for MacGregor. He heard about the catastrophe when in Tehran on museum business barely 48 hours earlier. "When I got home on Sunday evening, the first thing I did was telephone the Secretary of State [Tessa Jowell] to explain what the BM could do to help, and what the Government must do to prevent further disaster. On Monday, the Prime Minister made a statement pledging to protect this heritage."

On the same day, MacGregor secured funding from a private donor to enable six of his conservators and three curators to go to Iraq and work there for as long as necessary.

Mesopotamian scholars from all over the world will gather at the British Museum on 29 April and a website is being set up with the Art Newspaper to list missing items.

"The BM will answer any inquiries anyone brings us concerning items which have appeared, without proper provenance, on the antiquities market. Unesco has a key role to play in persuading other governments to follow Britain in making the trading of all looted Iraqi goods illegal, if not criminal. This is vital, and urgent."

MacGregor, 56, a wiry, mild-mannered and intense Glaswegian with an almost Calvinistic inner fervour, is living on adrenaline. But, though he has praised the Government's swift response to the crisis, isn't he angry, given the months of warning by the British Museum, that these events have come to pass as a direct result of coalition action?

He chooses his words with care. As a young man he was called to the Scottish Bar and his legal training protects him from being led into emotive harangues. "Everybody here feels dismayed, to put it at its lowest, that it was not possible for America to provide-troops to keep things safe, that America is apparently not doing anything to protect the shared patrimony of mankind. Of course hospitals and human life come first.

But after comes property, and these objects are of prime importance. They represent the birth of urban civilisation, not only for Iraqis but for every person in the world. British troops in Basra, we have learned today, are protecting the museum there" - which, he implies, is one small mercy.

One of the perverse things is that the Iraqis had very good preservation and archival systems," he says. "What is more vexing is that it derived from the British mandate. A marvellous generation of British archaeologists - including Agatha Christie's husband - established the method of protecting antiquities and sites. So we must respond to the priorities set by the Iraqis because they're equipped to assess the situation."

MacGregor's plan this week was to celebrate the launch of the British Museum's 250th anniversary season.

The first national public museum in the world, it was founded by an Act of Parliament in 1753 for all "studious and curious" people, regardless of rank or status, free of charge. He would love to talk about forthcoming shows: London 1753, Finding Our Past (based on treasures found by members of the public) and an important panoptic show on the theme of medicine as culture. But Iraq has hijacked the occasion and thrust the museum, and MacGregor, into a harsher limelight than he could have foreseen. He has only agreed to an interview now, his first since taking over as director last August, because he has something important to say.

"These events are a vindication, if any were needed, of the long, scholarly tradition of an institution such as this. What the original founders of the BM wanted, and what we still want, is to give every citizen the tools to begin to understand the world we live in. It's the world in a box, a laboratory for global citizenship."

The crucial question, MacGregor says, is how the museum should reflect the changing face of London, two-and-a-half centuries on. "In the past 50 years, London has become the most cosmopolitan city in the world.

"Its inhabitants speak 300 mother tongues and the museum must reflect that. Such a thing was inconceivable in 1753, though even then it was the most international city. Never has it been more important for London, and Britain, to have a universal museum.

Half of the five million people who come here each year are from outside the UK. And the Korean galleries are the only place in the world where the governments of North and South Korea have cooperated. The number of Korean exiles who come here to see these pieces of their heritage is immensely moving."

His views on the still controversial Parthenon sculptures have, if anything, hardened. He is suddenly crisp. "The key question we must always ask ourselves, as guardians of acquired objects, is what are our responsibilities towards them? Our duty is to look after them, and to add to the reservoir of knowledge about them by researching them further.

"The British Museum can say it has honoured its obligations. It seems to me, and the past few days have proved this, that the question of whether the Parthenon sculptures should be in this European museum or that is really secondary. I know some Greeks feel deeply about this. But the lesson of this episode is that we must deal with the real, urgent issues and this cannot be said to be one."

The day after our interview, MacGregor is flying to Paris to attend a crisis Unesco meeting. The perpetual motion in which he finds himself is unlikely to stop. In our remaining minutes, he offers a galloping résumé of the other tasks facing him, which in quieter times would have been top of our agenda: staffing, financial constraints, gallery closures. "We are learning to live within our income," he says carefully. "Next year we will be in balance. That equilibrium will allow us to run the museum we want.

"We could run it very much better on more [than the £30 million annual grant] and I believe the Government understands that. When people comment on gallery closures I must point out that about 60,000 items are on show each year. And another 200,000 are made available on request to anyone who asks."

For his elegant Georgian office, MacGregor has chosen items from each part of the collection to underline his belief in the museum's universality: a throwing-knife from West Africa, Islamic calligraphy done by Chinese Muslims, pieces from India, Bali and Britain. "The British Museum is one of the great cultural achievements of humanity. It shows that mankind is one, that we're more alike than different. That's what the 18th-century founders believed and it's an ideal that still shapes the place."

Beneath the propriety and sobersuited correctness, MacGregor gives all the signs of having a welldeveloped sense of fun. Would he, I ask, were he still in his old job at the National Gallery, have put the same energy as his successor into saving the Raphael Madonna of the Pinks? "I cannot possibly comment," he says, amid high-pitched gales of laughter. "And you'll never know." Outside, in the hot, swarming courtyard, a small United Nations of tourists and schoolchildren is heading into the museum through Smirke's imposing neoclassical portal whose pediment sculptures illustrate the Progress of Civilisation. MacGregor has his work cut out in these dark times to stop it slipping backwards.

 

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