This document discusses the destruction, looting, and restitution of art and cultural heritage. It provides examples of iconoclasm by ISIS destroying ancient sites in Iraq and Syria, the Taliban destroying the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, and iconoclasm during the Byzantine Empire and Protestant Reformation. It also discusses looting by Napoleon who took treasures from countries he conquered and by ISIS and thieves after the 2003 Iraq war. Efforts to restore damaged heritage include the Monuments Men recovering art looted by the Nazis and the reopening of the Iraq Museum after being closed due to damage and looting.

1. ART & CULTURAL HERITAGE:
Destruction/Looting/Restitution
I. Destruction, Iconoclasm & the
Erasure of Culture
II. Looting & the Appropriation of
Objects
III. Restitution, Repatriation,
Reconstruction, & Artistic
Interventions

3. I. DESTRUCTION, ICONOCLASM, &
THE ERASURE OF CULTURE
WHY?
Ideology, neglect, or disregard.
A man takes a sledgehammer to a Neo-Assyrian relief in a video released by
ISIS on April 11, 2015.

4. For a period of months last year, news of ISIS’ destruction of ancient
cultural heritage sites in Iraq played widely in western media outlets.
 Between February 26 and April 11, 2015, the group
released three videos showing men carrying out the
destruction of ancient artifacts and architecture at the
Mosul Museum, Hatra, and the Northwest Palace at
Nimrud (ancient Kalhu).

5. This campaign culminated over the summer with the drawn-
out demolition of sites in the ancient city of Palmyra.

6.  The UNESCO World Heritage Site
also served as a backdrop for the
public executions of ISIS prisoners
including the site’s lead
archaeologist, Khaled al-
Asaad.
 The videos ISIS has
released to document and
celebrate these exploits
have revealed the role
that art plays in
contemporary
discourses of identity
and power.

7. Early in the video, the camera captures men unwrapping sculptures from their
protective dust cloths. The video then cuts to shots lingering on the statue of
a seated woman, a wall of plaques, and a case of artifacts. These shots
recalled nothing more strongly than the shots of a slasher movie
showing future murder victims in their final moments of ignorant
happiness.
These stagey shots, meant to heighten the tension of the video,
instead called my attention to its constructed nature. While the
video was presented as documentation of destruction, viewing it as
an art historian I could also see that this film, like all media, was
produced to manipulate its viewers. I had to wonder: what was it
trying to achieve?

8. Explosives were laid at the site and then detonated,
according to the video
Ancient friezes were smashed, the video shows
 Samuel Hardy of the conflict
antiquities blog calls these
films “B-Movies,” and indeed
it’s what they are: low-budget
flicks reveling in wanton
violence and destruction in
order to attract a maximum
return on viewership.
 While ISIS had been releasing
videos for some time, it
finally tapped in to a wider
audience with its February 26
video showing the
destruction of objects in the
Mosul Museum’s Assyrian
Collection and artifacts from
Hatra and the Nergal Gate at
Nineveh.
 Clips from the video played
on the BBC, CNN, and on the
website of The New York
Times, among other news
outlets

9. April 11 video of Nimrud destruction: originally published on YouTube, now
removed.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3035534/Video-Islamic-State-group-
destroys-ancient-ruins-Nimrud.html
IS THIS ART?

10. An action shot from ISIS’s April 11, 2015 video:
men in military gear break through a wall.
Filmed from the other side of the wall—a framing element meant to heighten the
drama of the action, but which simultaneously reveals its gratuitousness.
Is this art, or propaganda? How do we draw a line between the two?

11. The videos created a global uproar, and deepened western animosity towards the Islamic State.
However, according to recent reports the whole thing was a hoax, and the ancient statues and relics
were exact replicas of the real thing.
The suspicions were confirmed by Baghdad’s museum director who says that the originals are all
safe and sound in the museum.

13. The human-headed winged beast or LAMASSU at the end
of the clip showing the destruction of the Mosul Museum
and Nergal Gate was among the few left in situ in Iraq.
 The lamassu were located across the river from Mosul, guarding the
Palace of Sennacherib’s Nergal Gate (c. 700 BCE) for the past 2700 years
in ancient Nineveh, once the world’s largest city.
 There are other lamassu that were removed from the country in the mid-
and late-nineteenth centuries that are now in the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, the British
Museum, and the Louvre.

14. The most devastating losses from the Mosul Museum attack
are the sculptures of the kings from Hatra since the majority of
Hatrene work is still in Iraq, and the four destroyed here constitute roughly
one-sixth of the known works. In addition, this period has been studied very
little, and now we have lost much valuable information. Some artifacts that
may have survived may be destined for the illicit antiquities market, because
ISIS is funding many of their operations through such sales.

15. The DESTRUCTION of NIMRUD
(Show the short video of ISIS at Ashurnasirpal II’s Palace in Nimrud.)
In what has been called one of the most egregious cases of
deliberate destruction of cultural patrimony since WWII,
ISIS members annihilated the physical history of Nimrud,
one of the greatest cities of the 9th century BCE.

16. ISIS used bulldozers to tear down walls, then detonated
barrel bombs.
Four tombs only discovered in 1991 were destroyed, raising questions about
what else remained that might have been found in the future.

17. The Met’s reconstruction of the palace gives some idea of the grand size,
location, and color of the lamassu and reliefs.
https://youtu.be/5VCldg1TdHc

18. WHY are these sites being targeted?
 ISIS’s ideological claim for demolishing cultural heritage, especially
sculpture, is toward THE PROHIBITION OF IDOLATRY.
 ISIS endeavors to ERASE A PRE-ISLAMIC PAST and any other belief
system except its own to try and bring into being a world where, with no
visual records or historical texts, the past is forgotten and only ISIS’s own
interpretation of it exists.
 The group also BRINGS ATTENTION TO THEIR CAUSE, so they can
recruit more members.
 The objects they loot, rather than destroy, are economic goods given even
more value for their new scarcity in the market, where they can SELL
THOSE OBJECTS TO FINANCE THEIR EXTREMIST ACTIVITIES.

19. The Destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas
 These two colossal
Buddhas were placed
along the Silk Road.
 Travelers could ascend
a staircase to the level
of the shoulders of the
smaller of the two and
follow a ledge allowing
for circumambulation of
the Buddha’s head.
 Inside the niche that
enclosed the head was
a painting of a sun.

21. Why were they
destroyed?
 A Taliban commander, Abdul Wahed,
announced his intention to blow up
the Buddhas in 1997 prior to taking
control of the valley.
 Once he was in control of Bamiyan,
he drilled holes in the Buddhas’s
head for explosives.
 He was prevented from moving his
plan along, however, by a direct
order from Mullah Omar.
 In 1999, Mullah Mohammed Omar
issued a decree in favor of
preserving the Buddhas.
 He recognized that although the
Afghans were no longer Buddhist,
the statues could be a potential
source of income from international
visitors.

22. However, the radical
clerics began a
campaign to crack down
on “un-Islamic”
segments in society and
soon banned all form of
imagery, music, etc. in
accordance with their
strict interpretation of
Sharia.
Some reported that the
statues were destroyed
in retaliation for the
economic sanctions
imposed upon
Afghanistan when the
Taliban took control.

23. The statues were destroyed by artillery fire, guns, and
dynamite over a series of several weeks staring on March 2,
2001.

24. A Taliban envoy said
the Islamic government
made its decision in a
rage after a foreign
delegation offered
money to preserve the
ancient works while a
million Afghans faced
starvation.
"When your
children are dying
in front of you,
then you don't
care about a piece
of art," Sayed
Rahmatullah Hashimi,
the envoy, said in an
interview.
Taliban commander, Abdul Wahed

25. A holographic Bamiyan Buddha monument projected into the niche where the
stone one once stood.

26. Iconoclasm in the Byzantine Empire
An historical ideological debate about images that led to their
widespread destruction was the Iconoclastic Controversy
between 726–843 CE in the Byzantine Empire.
At the heart of the argument was the concern that images of Christ
and the saints might displease God, due to their potential to be
misused as idols.

27. Images were
destroyed in vast
numbers during the
Iconoclastic
Controversy.
Paintings and
mosaics were
whitewashed, others
were chiseled away,
and new, approved
iconography, like
crosses, were
inserted, as in the
apse mosaic in
Saint Irene, Istanbul
(c. 740 CE).

28. Iconoclasm and the Protestant Reformation in The
Netherlands
Iconoclasm has not been confined to the Middle East, nor is it the province
only of the Jewish or Islamic faiths or the Christian Byzantine Empire.
Across Europe, including in the Netherlands and England, many Protestant
reformers in the 1500s were not only concerned about the same abuses
associated with imagery as the Byzantine Iconoclasts had been, but they were
also appalled at the money spent on furnishing Catholic churches that could
have gone instead to feeding and clothing the poor.
The Heidelberg Catechism of 1562 both codified and disseminated the widely
held belief that God did not want Christianity taught by “dumb images” but by
the “lively preaching of His word.

29. Hieronymus Bosch:
During the iconoclastic
outbreaks, many of his works
were destroyed, leaving us
poorer for this gaping hole in
his artistic body of work.

30. II. LOOTING & THE APPROPRIATION
OF OBJECTS
WHY?
For purposes of propaganda & economic gain.

31. LOOTING AND THE APPROPRIATION OF OBJECTS
While iconoclasts have destroyed images due to distrust or fear based
around the idea that they are imbued with the power of what they depict, or
because they are associated with a hated or repressive regime, other
ideological stances have led people to take objects of
material culture by force, stealth, or through suspect legal
machinations.

32. The reasons for this are numerous:
 “spoils of war”
 sell or trade for economic reasons
 enhance the prestige of their owner
 perpetuate cultural genocide on other groups
The contestation of images is ultimately about power &
control.

33. LOOTING the Iraq Museum, Baghdad, 2003
The Warka
Vase stands as the
earliest known
example of pictorial
narrative and
expresses the
ordering of Sumerian
society.
It and approximately 15,000 other objects were looted from the Iraq Museum in
Baghdad during the Invasion of Iraq in 2003.

34. U.S. Marine Colonel Matthew Bogdanos
Secured nearly 10,000 items through community outreach, international
cooperation, raids, seizures, and amnesty for looters with no questions asked
and no payments given.

35. The irreplaceable Warka Vase, wrapped in a blanket, was brought in by three
young men and handed to the museum guards in June of 2003.
Tips from locals resulted in discovering another work, the Warka Mask, buried
on a farm, and many other items were located this way.

36. After being closed for
12 years for
reconstruction and
reinstallation of
returned objects, the
Iraq Museum reopened
on February 28, 2015,
earlier than planned,
directly as a result of
and as a symbol of
opposition to ISIS’s
destruction of the
Mosul Museum and the
cultural patrimony of
the country’s and
world’s citizens.

37. Looting in Ancient Rome
Looting of cultural objects has a history going back millennia, but the
Romans were particularly avaricious. They plundered important heritage
objects from other cultures that they subdued and assimilated, for example
the Jews in Jerusalem. A sculptural panel on the Arch of Titus entitled The
Spoils of the Temple of Jerusalem (81 CE) depicts the Triumph accorded to
Vespasian and Titus in 71 CE upon their successful return from putting
down the Jewish Revolt in 70 CE.

39. In his Italian campaign, Napoléon
determined to “have everything
that is beautiful in Italy.”
To this end, he forced the Treaty
of Tolentino onto the Pope,
which stipulated, among other
things, that the French
Commission would select 100
masterworks from the Vatican
collections, 500 manuscripts
from their library, and, from the
Papal States, the art treasures of
Ravenna, Rimini, Pesaro,
Ancona, Perugia, and Loreto.
Looting in Napoleon’s First French Empire

40. In Venice, French forces removed statues of the winged lion of Saint Mark
and its four bronze horses.

41. The art from the Vatican was loaded on ships and taken over sea, canal, and
land to its final journey, a triumphal public parade to the Altar of the
Revolution in the Champ de Mars in Paris. The only unpacked crates were
the four bronze horses (themselves looted by the Venetians from the Turks
in Constantinople in the twelfth century, now destined for a triumphal arch in
the Tuileries),

42. Looting and Destruction in the Third Reich
Napoléon’s disruption to the cultural patrimony of countries he invaded
had important ramifications in the twentieth century. It not only set a
precedent and served as an example for looting and controlling visual art
as part of the strategy for empire-building but also played a role in Hitler
and the Nazi party’s agenda to retrieve works that had not been
repatriated to Germany.
This is addressed in the 2006 film The Rape of Europa, available online
through Hulu.

43. Nine weeks after Adolf Hitler became
Chancellor of Germany in January of
1933, his director of the so-called
Combat League for German Culture
gave a speech explaining the new
regime’s cultural theories: “It is a
mistake to think that the national
revolution is only political and
economic. It is above all cultural.”
Formed in 1929, the Combat League’s
objective was to “enlighten the
German race about the connections
between race, art and knowledge”
and “defend German cultural values
amidst the contemporary cultural
decay,” by which the Third Reich’s
culture ministers specifically meant
modern art, including German
Expressionism (Der Blaue Reiter and
Die Brücke) , New Objectivity (Neue
Sachlichkeit), Futurism, Cubism,
Dada, and other key movements.

44. Monuments, Fine Arts & Archives
Section of the U. S. Army
(Monuments Men)
While awaiting the construction of Hitler’s
museum in the fall of 1944, the Nazis sent
the Ghent Altarpiece from Neuschwanstein
to a salt mine in Altaussee, Austria, only one
hundred miles from Linz, for safe-keeping
from Allied forces’ aerial bombing. In late
March of 1945, several members of the
Monuments, Fine Arts & Archives Section of
the U.S. Army, more commonly known as
the Monuments Men, were using Rose
Valland’s information and frantically
searching for sites where the Germans were
depositing artwork. After an American unit
secured the Neuschwanstein Castle, on May
4, 1945 two Monuments Men entered and
found a tremendous trove of French
patrimony and the meticulous records for
the 21,000 objects confiscated and removed
from France.

45. III. RESTITUTION, REPATRIATION,
RECONSTRUCTION, & ARTISTIC
INTERVENTIONS
Napoléon, Hitler, the Taliban, and
more recently ISIS have all resorted
to the theft and destruction of
meaningful objects of cultural
heritage as a means, at least in part,
of obliterating a culture’s identity and
devastating the spirit of its people.
But conversely, an object’s
repatriation, restoration, rebuilding,
or restitution can play an important
role in reconciliation and in a
culture’s resiliency.

46. In response to contemporary manmade political situations and
natural disasters, new scholarship is beginning to examine and
theorize culture as a “basic need,” and to propose that
emergency cultural aid be conceptualized, managed, and
reconciled with other “basic needs” for survival.

47. Laws respecting the return
of cultural patrimony or its
restitution evolved out of
treaties signed at
congresses or
conventions concluding
war, beginning with the
1815 Congress of
Vienna after the
Napoleonic Wars. It
was here that the idea
that cultural heritage
connects people and
territories with
significant artistic or
cultural objects first
became entwined with
laws.
Restitution & Repatriation: Laws, Treaties, Conventions

48.  Convention for the Protection of
Cultural Property in the Event of
Armed Conflict with Regulations
for the Execution for the
Convention, 1954 (Hague
Convention and Protocols of
1954)
 Convention on the Means of
Prohibiting and Preventing the
Illicit Import, Export and
Transfer of Ownership of
Cultural Property, 1970 UNESCO
(1970 Convention on Illicit
Traffic of Cultural Property)
 Convention Concerning the
Protection of the World Cultural
and Natural Heritage, 1972
UNESCO

49. Even with laws in place, new
circumstances arise that demand a
review or challenge to existing laws.
The recently released film, Woman in
Gold, based on memoirs by Maria
Altmann, an heir of Adele Bloch-Bauer,
whose portrait Klimt painted, and Randy
Schoenberg, her lawyer and the grandson of
the musician Arnold Schoenberg, presents
the legal case they brought against the
Austrian government that eventually went to
the U.S. Supreme Court and concluded in
the plaintiff’s favor through arbitration in
Austria in 2006.

50. Restitution: Hopi Tribal Council
Other groups, such as the Holocaust Art
Restitution Project (HARP), continue
efforts to reunite families and
communities with their cultural
inheritance. Recently, in 2015, they
partnered with the Hopi Tribal Council
to assist them in banning a French
auction of the sacred “Katsinam” or
“Friends.” The Hopi have been fighting
to reclaim these mask-like objects they
assert were stolen years ago, many of
which found their way to French
auctions. In 2013, the Annenberg
Foundation secretly bid on twenty-four
of the items and secured twenty-one of
them to return to the Hopi. The objects
are considered living entities with
divine spirits and are used in spiritual
ceremonies, then retired and left to
naturally disintegrate.

51. The case of the Hopi “Katsinam” is not an isolated or even unusual
incident. It is estimated that over 90% of American Indian
archaeological sites have been destroyed or looted. It is, perhaps,
more likely that we will interact outside of the bounds of museums
with American Indian artifacts than other historical objects, and
so it is important to consider our ethical obligations.
James Luna, Artifact Piece, 1987

52. DIGITAL RECONSTRUCTIONS
New technology also can play a role in
digitally preserving or reconstructing
cultural heritage sites. CyArk provides
one example; it a non-profit
organization that creates 3D digital
records with the goal of saving five
hundred sites in the next five years.
CyArk has partnered with the World
Monuments Fund (WMF), the National
Endowment for the Humanities
(NEH),the National Science Foundation
(NSF), the International Centre for the
Study of Preservation and Restoration
of Cultural Property (ICCROM), and
many others. CyArk’s education tab has
some great lesson plans. For example,
one of their projects was to scan the
Assyrian Collection of the British
Museum.
This image was generated from laser scan
data collected from the Assyrian Collection at
the British Museum

53. After the destruction of the
Mosul Museum collection,
Matthew Vincent, a cyber
archaeologist, doctoral
candidate from the
University of California at
San Diego, and current
Fellow at the Initial Training
Network for Digital Cultural
Heritage, and another
Fellow, Chance
Coughenour, initiated the
digital cultural heritage
Project Mosul.

54. The project gives power back to the global community through its mission to
crowd-source photographs, digitally mesh them, and create a 3D replica of the
no-longer extant works. While a team of experts works on the software,
volunteers upload photographs, sort them, create point clouds to make a 3-D
mesh and add texture, which makes the images. Anyone, including students,
can go to this site and volunteer. Some tasks take very little technological
know-how while others require some coding skills.
Through the 3D reconstructions the public can actively counter the
violence, loss, and sense of helplessness many feel upon watching
the videos of the destruction.

55. Many contemporary
artists feel compelled to
create art that engages
with historic and
contemporary power
struggles over cultural
patrimony.
Through artistic
interventions they can
make us question our
beliefs or assumptions
or grapple with divisive
topics.
Good art can help us
contemplate a life that
is not ours and to break
down stereotypes.
These particular artists
use modern
technologies to bridge
the past and present.
Tammam Azam's version of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa

56. Tammam Azzam is a Syrian-born artist who creates interventionist art
that combines digital photograph and street art to protest the destruction
rending the fabric of Syria’s physical structures as well as its society. His
Freedom Graffiti (Syrian Museum) went viral in 2013, the image was ‘liked’
by over 20,000 people and shared 14,000 times in only 5 hours. It
superimposed Gustave Klimt’s iconic painting The Kiss on the pock-marked
and gapping structures of war-torn Damascus.

57. Francesco Goya’s Third of May, 1808
now takes place in a blitzed street,
Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night
provides the only organic and natural
spot amongst the grey wreckage of
buildings, and Henri Matisse’s Dancers
in their fiery red improbably ring a
mound of debris.

58. Tammam Azzam, 'Dali‘
Syrian Museum

59. In Azzam’s words, “the Syrian Museum series incorporates iconic subjects
from the greatest European masters, paralleling the greatest achievements
of humanity with the destruction it is also capable of inflicting.” It also draws
attention to the contrast between Syria’s world-class museums and the
regime that is obliterating its own cultural heritage.

60. Morehshin Allahyari is an Iranian-born artist
and activist who studied in Tehran and
moved to the U.S. in 2007. She is currently
an artist in residence at AutoDesk’s Pier 9
offices in San Francisco. Like the cyber
archaeologists at Project Mosul, Allahyari is
compelled to reconstruct the lost objects
using advanced technologies situated at the
edge of the future in order to repair the past
and safeguard collective memory. She uses
3D printing to create transparent scaled
versions of the sculptures of the Hatra King
Uthar and the lamassu shattered at the
Mosul Museum. Within them they contain
technological DNA (a memory card and flash
drive) imprinted with historical information,
maps, and data needed to give birth to
another Hatra King or lamassu, all without
causing destruction to the original/copy.
While ISIS attempts to rewrite history to suit
their ideological agenda, Allahyari resists
through her work, Material Speculation: ISIS.

63. CONCLUSION
“I am keenly aware that in the
context of a tragic humanitarian
crisis, the state of Syria’s cultural
heritage may seem secondary.
However, I am convinced that
each dimension of this crisis must
be addressed on its own terms
and in its own right. There is no
choice between protecting human
lives and safeguarding the dignity
of a people through its culture.
Both must be protected, as the
one and same thing—there is no
culture without people and no
society without culture.”
Irina Bokova, Director General
UNESCO 2013