Small Finds, Big Values: Cylinder Seals and Coins from Iraq and Syria on the Online Market

Abstract: The Syrian civil war exacted a massive toll on the country’s population, with hundreds of thousands of children, women, and men killed, injured, or forced to flee. Part and parcel of the human suffering is the widespread loss of artistic and historical materials—the deliberate and collateral destruction of artworks and monuments, mosques and marketplaces, books, artifacts, churches, synagogues, and archaeological sites. One aspect of this destruction, in particular, has generated vigorous debate among scholars, policymakers, and art market professionals: the intensive looting of archaeological sites by insurgent groups and their possible links to the antiquities trade. The war did not introduce site looting to the region, of course, and the antiquities trade did not endorse insurgent looting. But, for several reasons, the cultural loss from this war has attracted sustained media and scholarly attention. One important outcome of this attention is research investment. In the years since the world learned of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’s (ISIS) campaign of cultural destruction, considerable efforts have been made by scholars and market professionals to separate myth from fact by prioritizing reliable data to piece together the complex components of the Syrian artifact pipeline. These efforts have already borne fruit, as numerous recent publications attest.1 Any attempt to situate the looting in the broader space of the art market, however, eventually hits the causal wall: does looting proliferate because the antiquities trade encourages it, even if inadvertently? In other words, is there something about the current structure and ethos of the trade that provides the conditions that are conducive to illegal excavation and the transfer of archaeological materials? How these questions get answered tells us about much more than one particular civil war; their answers—and the contentious grounds on which the questions are

Abstract: The Roman occupation of Northern Iraq lasted less than a hundred and seventy years, from A.D. 197 to 364, and was little more than a turbulent episode in the long struggle between Rome on the west and Persia, under her successive Parthian and Sassanian rulers, on the east. The purely military character of this frontier extension is the first of the factors controlling the nature and distribution of its material remains; the second is the high degree of civilisation which the area had attained long before the Romans came, and was to maintain with little change long after their withdrawal. The process of Romanisation, if it was ever attempted, has left no mark. New towns would hardly have been built on sites already occupied by cities far older than Rome itself, and new roads were only constructed for particular military purposes which did not coincide with the requirements of commercial traffic and were not served by the existing highways. Few western imports have been found, and only five Latin inscriptions, three dedications by Roman soldiers and two milestones, have come to light in Iraq; it is significant that there is no known inscription of this period in Greek, the koinē of civilian life in the other provinces of the Roman East. Roman historians usually refer to Mesopotamia only as the scene of eastern campaigns of which they had, with the exception of Ammianus Marcellinus in the fourth century, no personal or detailed knowledge.

Abstract: “Recruitment in Roman Armies from Justinian to Heraclius (ca. 565–615),” in Av. Cameron, ed., The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, v. 3: States, Resources and Armies [Princeton, 1995], 61–124, at 92–103). From archaeology, moreover, we probably would not know it ever had occurred (88, 95, 150, 172, 204; but see 199ff. for a pattern of abandonment in England). We have no demographic data so we are left with the literary sources, but there is no chapter on the literariness of the literary sources, only scattered observations in discussions of other topics. The volume ably fuses separate historical disciplines and regional historiography with molecular biology—a notable achievement—but has not made the Linguistic Turn. On the other hand, Rosen’s is not a scholarly book and need not be discussed at length. The introduction wants us to believe that plague was largely responsible for the end of antiquity and the “birth of Europe,” but the book explains neither what these processes mean nor how the plague contributed to them (except by killing many people). The author, a former “senior executive” at important publishing houses, succumbs to the temptation of narrating Roman history from Diocletian to Islam based on English scholarship of the 1960s and 70s and a handful of translated sources, all cited in the notes without page references (even to A.H.M. Jones’ massive Later Roman Empire!). This history is full of errors, misunderstandings, and outdated notions (there is no room in this review to list them). The narrative of Justinian’s “glory” (including irrelevant chapters on Hagia Sophia, the codifi cation of law, etc.) is interrupted by a section on the “bacterium,” which is rather more lucid. Rosen handles the scientifi c material better; his mistake was apparently to think that history in the grand style can be done competently by any educated layperson (or that it should be done at all). His feeble sensationalism and insistence on comparing ancient with modern material and throwing everything on his mind into the mix (e.g., praise of American society, arguments against intelligent design) prove that scholarly training matters. The general public deserves better.