by Nancy Moses
“Let me show you an example,” he offered, leading Faust and me down a corridor. We passed a room in which conservation students sat at brightly lit workstations reassembling crushed light bulbs, one tiny shard of glass at a time. “Students must restore crushed light bulbs,” Müller-Karpe explained, “before they are allowed to move on to antiquities.” We walked into another room and approached a glass display case. He opened it and removed a golden vessel no more than an inch high and about three inches around, with a spout too tiny to insert a single buttercup stem. The object was intact—but its sides were folded in, as if they had been squeezed by tiny fingers.
“This is a replica, but so exacting that only an expert could tell the difference,” he said proudly. “The original comes from lower Mesopotamia in southern Iraq at the time of the Sumerians. We know it was looted from an archaeological site there.” He handed me a little booklet titled “Kriminalarchäologie,” from the museum’s 2011 exhibit on trafficking in stolen antiquities. He pointed out the pages that explained how the vessel was discovered, recovered, and returned to the Iraqi people.
The catalog was in German, so when I returned home to Philadelphia, I had it translated. The tiny Sumerian vessel appeared on three pages. One featured a map tracing its odyssey from Iraq to Munich by way of Beirut and Geneva. Another showed photographs of the terrorists who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. I recognized Mohamed Atta, the leader of the attack, his defiant, black eyes glaring at the camera.
Why were the 9/11 terrorists in this German exhibition catalog? What was the connection between 9/11 and criminal archaeology? How did the Sumerian vessel fit in? And what exactly was Müller-Karpe’s role? I decided to search for the answers, knowing it might take me into some dark places.
My first stop was the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, a historic private lending library and architectural archive with a particularly rich collection of books on obscure topics, including the Sumerians.
The Sumerians, I learned, were one in a succession of cultures that lived in the flat valley between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in lower Mesopotamia, now southern Iraq. The area had been continuously occupied since 7000 BCE and the Sumerians appeared around 4500 BCE, though their heyday was 3500 to 1000 BCE. For many of those years, they shared the river valley with a Semitic people who eventually became the Arabs and the Hebrews, and many Sumerian myths became theirs as well. Over time, the Sumerians transformed their arid land into what the great Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer called “a veritable Garden of Eden” and “developed what was probably the first high civilization in the history of man.”[1]
Sumerian farmers harnessed the rivers for irrigation and used the water to cultivate beans, chickpeas, cucumber, garlic, leeks, coriander, mint, juniper berries, wheat, and barley. They raised chickens, brewed beer, and consumed it while celebrating with drinking songs.[2] The Sumerians built grand city-states—Ur, Eridu, Uruk, Lagash, Nippur, and Kish—that boasted elaborate temples known as ziggurats, elegant homes for the wealthy, and shops selling local crafts and imported goods. Sumerians were buried with their possessions, in case they needed to use them in the afterlife. This meant that royal graves were filled with jewelry made from shells, lapis lazuli, carnelian, and gold, as well as musical instruments, pottery, and other elegant accoutrements.
Compared with their contemporaries, the Sumerians were especially well situated. Some of them even attained the greatest luxury of all: leisure time to ponder their world. I soon fell in love with the Sumerians because of their wild creativity. They originated myriad concepts and invented a multitude of items that one wouldn’t have known had to be conceived until the Sumerians conceived them.[3] The Sumerians invented the first schools and pharmacopoeia and the first experiment in shade tree gardening. They were the first to conceive of moral ideas and to write the first proverbs and sayings. They were the first to imagine “Paradise, “Moses,” “Job,” and “Noah’s Ark,” all of which later turned up in the Hebrew Bible. Once on a roll—the Sumerians invented the wheel—they went on to invent the first love song, historian, legal precedent, and, to keep track of it all, the first library catalog.
But our ancient Sumerians did not stop there: they also invented the potter’s kiln, textile loom, plough, seed drill, farm cart, wind vane, and sailing boat. They invented the harp, lyre, and lute; in technology, they invented fired bricks, the vault, and the true arch. They invented the slingshot, very useful for little folks like David to employ against giants like Goliath. The items that the Sumerians invented by 1750 BCE constitute much of the basic technology that supported human life until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s.
We know quite a bit about the Sumerians in part because they also invented the oldest known system of writing: a script called cuneiform. They employed reeds to write cuneiform on clay tablets, bricks, and walls. They scratched cuneiform on cylinders of carnelian, lapis lazuli, and shell, and then rolled these cylinders on clay to leave a continuous impression in relief. They prepared cuneiform lists of their rulers called King Lists, which archaeologists later used to establish their chronology. The Sumerians produced millions of cuneiform-covered objects, and about one hundred thousand are known today; they address a multitude of subjects and allow us to admire the Sumerians’ achievements.
Archaeologists believe the Sumerian culture ended when the rivers became too corrupted by saltwater to use for irrigation. For centuries, the area was largely unoccupied. By the mid-nineteenth century, the rich farmland between the Tigris and Euphrates had reverted to desert and the great Sumerian cities had all but disappeared. But here and there on the landscape were huge mounds of earth many meters high that began to capture the imagination of the few Europeans who journeyed by. The locals called the largest mound Tell al Muquayyr, translated as “mound of pitch.” The Sumerians had named it Ur.
To pronounce Ur properly, you must purse the lips as if preparing for a kiss. It and its neighboring mounds are actually stacks of cities, one on top of the other. For millennia, the people of Lower Mesopotamia lived in mud brick houses that tended to collapse after about fifty years. When that happened, the occupants moved their possessions out, flattened the walls, and constructed new homes on the ruins of the old. Over the centuries, the mounds grew higher and higher, usefully protecting the cities from the annual floods of the Tigris and Euphrates. Archaeologists love these mounds of stacked cities because, as Müller-Karpe says, “When you excavate them layer by layer, the deeper you go, the earlier you find—like a history book where the current page is more recent than the one before.”
In 1922, Leonard Woolley, an ambitious young archaeologist, arrived at Ur to lead an expedition jointly sponsored by his employer, the British Museum, and the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, which financed the venture. With permission from the Iraqi government, the excavation began, and it continued for the next twelve years.[4] By the end of the fourth season, the crew, which numbered as high as four hundred, had excavated the ziggurat and major public buildings. They then turned their attention to Ur’s massive cemetery. The archaeologists came to realize that there were actually two cemeteries, one above the other, belonging to different periods. They then discovered a series of graves unlike the others, constructed of walls of stone instead of mud, and filled with precious objects. Woolley called these the Royal Tombs.
In 1928, he excitedly cabled back from Iraq to his sponsors at the University of Pennsylvania—in Latin—translated, “I found the intact tomb, stone built, and vaulted over with bricks, of Queen Shubad, adorned with a dress in which gems, flower crowns, and animal figures are woven. Tomb magnificent with jewels and golden cups. Woolley.”[5] Most astonishing of all was evidence of large-scale human sacrifice, with the bodies of likely members of the Queen Shubad’s court, garbed in their finest, laid out in neat rows. The apparent lack of struggle and the tiny bowls found near the skeletons led Woolley to speculate that the courtiers had filled the bowls
with poison and willingly lain down to die. Woolley had found one of the few such tombs that was still intact—for even in the 1920s, grave robbers had arrived there first.
By the time they left in 1934, Woolley’s team had unearthed eighteen hundred burials, including sixteen royal ones. Woolley was rightly proud of the rich trove he had found of cuneiform cylinders, jewelry, pottery, armaments, musical instruments, and human remains, but he always believed his greatest find was an unusual layer of pure sediment that lay between Ur’s two cemeteries. He pondered, where did it come from? Then he had an epiphany. The odd layer of sediment could only have come from a flood, a deluge of such monumental scale that it obliterated everything in its path. It could only have come, in other words, from Noah’s flood. As Woolley later wrote, “We have proven that there really was a flood, and it is no straining of probabilities to maintain that this is the Flood of the Sumerian King-lists and therefore of the Sumerian legend and therefore of the story in the Old Testament.” Many shared his opinion.
Woolley’s excavations were big news in the 1920s and attracted a steady stream of visitors who were willing to brave the discomforts of third world travel for a first-hand view of the treasures of Ur. One of the visitors was the famed mystery writer Agatha Christie. In 1929, fresh from a divorce and traveling alone, she boarded the Simplon-Orient Express in Calais, bound for Baghdad in search of adventure. When she learned about the fabulous excavations at Ur, she set off to see them.
“I fell in love with Ur,” she wrote in her autobiography, “with its beauty in the evenings, the ziggurat standing up, faintly shadowed, and that wide sea of sand with its lovely pale colors of apricot, rose, blue and mauve, changing every minute. . . . The lure of the past came up to grab me.”[6] Christie was also captivated by the archaeological team: the kindly scholar Leonard Woolley, his beautiful, mercurial wife Katharine, the erudite Jesuit priest, the architect, the foreman, and local tribesmen. “Leonard Woolley,” Christie wrote, “saw with the eye of imagination: the place was as real to him as it had been in 1500 BCE or a few thousand years earlier . . . it was his reconstruction of the past, and he believed in it, and anyone who listened to him believed in it also.”[7]
Ur was so romantic that Agatha Christie returned the following season at the invitation of the Woolleys—and promptly fell in love with one of the archaeologists, Max Mallowan. Despite the differences in their age—she was forty, he twenty-six—they married within the year. Later, Christie brought the excavations at Ur to life in her book Murder in Mesopotamia, which features two murders, the disappearance of priceless archaeological treasures, and their replacement by replicas so exacting that only an expert could tell the difference.
I spent a couple of years, on and off, reading about the Sumerians. During that time, I kept returning to Michael Müller-Karpe’s catalog from the “Kriminalarchäologie” exhibit, especially the pictures of Mohamed Atta and other 9/11 terrorists. What was the link between them and looted antiquities? The Athenaeum owned a copy of the official Federal 9/11 Commission Report;[8] I checked it out and was soon reliving that frightening time.
The idea for the 9/11 attacks originated with Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a terrorist entrepreneur who had played a role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. His study of the buildings led him to a bold scheme: to hijack commercial airlines and employ them as massive bombs in an attack on key symbols of America’s power and wealth. The plan required assembling a team of suicidal zealots, training some as airline pilots and others as hijackers, getting all of them into the United States, and providing the financing they needed to carry out the attack. In 1987, he proposed this idea to the leader of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, who had the money and manpower to execute such a complicated assault. Bin Laden bought into the program.
Al Qaeda had established terrorist training camps near Kabul, Afghanistan, and one of them became the training ground for the 9/11 terrorists.[9] In late 1999, four Western-educated Muslims—committed to dying for Allah, violently anti-American, and, most important, fluent in English and familiar with life in the West—arrived in the camp from Hamburg, Germany, eager to learn the techniques of terrorism. They were the perfect candidates for training as pilots for the attack. Mohamed Atta soon emerged as their leader.
In early summer of 2000, Mohamed Atta and two others from the Hamburg group arrived in the United States, and within six months they had graduated from flight school and were simulating flights on large jets.[10] In spring 2001, other suicide mission zealots joined them in the United States. These, the “muscle hijackers,” had been trained in firearms, heavy weapons, explosives, discipline and military life, and other essentials of airline hijacking.[11] Their responsibility was to storm airline cockpits and control the passengers. By this time, every man had committed himself to a suicide mission, though few knew the full details of what lay ahead.
On the morning of September 11, Atta and four other hijackers met at Logan Airport in Boston and boarded American Airlines Flight 11 with nonstop service to Los Angeles, joining its seventy-one other passengers and nine flight attendants. Almost immediately, Logan Airport knew there was a serious problem: the hijackers had attempted to communicate with the passengers but, not knowing how to work the public address channel, had mistakenly sent their message to air traffic control. At 8:46 a.m., the plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, cutting through the ninety-third to ninety-ninth floors. All on board, along with an unknown number of people in the tower, were killed instantly.[12]
At 9:03 a.m., the hijacked United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, killing everyone on board and many others. At 9:37 a.m., hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the western side of the Pentagon. At 10:03 a.m., hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a field in Stonycreek Township, Pennsylvania. Its target had been the U.S. Capitol some 130 miles away, but several passengers and flight attendants had made telephone calls, learned about the other attacks, and attempted to take control of the aircraft. They were too late; everyone on board died.
By 10:28 a.m., the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center had collapsed, killing hundreds of civilians and scores of first responders. In all 2,996 people perished, including nineteen hijackers, the largest loss of life in history on U.S. soil as a result of outside assault.
Like other Americans, I lived through that day. I remember the terrifying speed with which events unfolded: the repeating televised images of airplanes crashing into tall towers, the broadcasters stunned and confused, initial disbelief that moved to chilling fear to deep despair.
I hope I never live through another like it.
How was the attack financed? Remembering the photograph of Mohamed Atta in the “Kriminalarchäologie” catalog, I combed the 9/11 Commission Report for any mention of trafficking in stolen antiquities. There was none. As of the 2004 publication date of the report, the U.S. government had not been able to determine where al Qaeda secured the funding for the attack. “Al Qaeda has many avenues of funding,” the report says. “If a particular funding source had dried up, al Qaeda could have easily tapped a different course or diverted funds from another project.”[13]
I was, however, taken aback to learn how little it had cost to murder 2,996 people and terrorize the world: between four hundred thousand and five hundred thousand dollars, one-third the price of a used helicopter.
Two years after my first visit to Germany, I returned to re-interview Michael Müller-Karpe and see the replica of the miniature Sumerian vessel.[14] This time, my questions were far more specific. What was it about this tiny antiquity that made it so important? Did Müller-Karpe believe there was a link between it and the 9/11 terrorists? What was his role in the story?
As before, we met at Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum and sat a moment to chat. I learned that Müller-Karpe came from a family of archaeologists. His field is Mesopotamian archaeology, most specifically ancient metal objects. In 197
4, he began working in Iraq and continued there until the Persian Gulf War began in 1991, and the Iraq National Museum was closed. “Hopefully I will go back soon,” he sighed.
We went down a flight of stairs into a dark room with a glass-fronted, locked case displaying replicas of famous originals, including a golden flask and the gold foil that had decorated the boots of a southern German who lived around 550 CE. There was the tiny, dented Sumerian vessel again. We peered through the glass to study it more closely.
“Originally it was perfect,” Müller-Karpe told me. “It was damaged somehow after it was made, perhaps from the collapse of the stone or brick walls of the tomb in which it was found. But the rest is presented in its original shape—which is very rare. After 4,500 years, usually objects are not all together. The fact that this vessel is complete means it was preserved in its original place, the tomb chamber.”
Müller-Karpe told me the vessel was likely robbed from an intact royal grave, because only the very rich could afford an item of such high-quality gold. He knew it to be Sumerian from the two distinctive golden handle attachments on either side of the vessel. Made from thin sheets of gold rolled into tubes, these handle attachments are another Sumerian invention, found only on objects from the early third millennium to the beginning of the second millennium.
“We know the owner was a Sumerian royal,” I said. “But who would want such a tiny vessel? What would it be used for?”
“The reason the object is so distinctive is that it’s so tiny,” he told me. “Sometimes in the graves of children, you will find miniature weapons, miniature vessels, so it could have come from a child’s grave.” A golden dagger and several tiny goblets of the same date and high-quality craftsmanship appeared on the market around the same time this little vessel arrived in Munich. Discovering one untouched royal grave is very rare, let alone two; so all of these objects likely came from the same place.
