Comment on 'Ancient Mesopotamia and modern Iraq in the British press '

364 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 3, June 2004eleanor robson product but syndicated in the Guardian newspaper) ranDepartment of History and Philosophy of Science, alongstoryabouttheadventuresofastolenartefactfromUniversity of Cambridge, Free School Lane, the Iraq Museum, but, bemusingly, it featured a scroll,Cambridge CB23RH, U.K. (er264@cam.ac.uk). 20 i 04 that most atypical of ancient Mesopotamianobjects.(Pa-pyrus, leather, and other organic materials survive onlyI welcome Seymour’s timely observations on the im- exceptionally in the archaeological record of Iraq.)agery of ancient Iraq in British newspaper accounts of But the reportage was not all dismally Orientalist,andmodern conflict in the country. My comments here are the overall outcome was mostly positive. The best of thethose of a participant-observer (albeit trained as neither) journalists listened and discussed and gave us space toin the international media furore that erupted after the write our own pieces. Donny George Youkhanna, re-looting of the Iraq Museum in mid-April 2003. They search director of the Iraq Museum, was interviewed atshould be considered an addendum to the article rather length and rightly portrayed as hero rather than villainthan a critique. (Gibbons 2003) (though one suspects that his name,British archaeologistsandhistoriansofancientIraqare Christianity, and impressive fluency in English allnot, on the whole, trained to deal with the media, for helped to ...