Abstract
It was not long after the Ba‘th advent to power before it emerged that the new regime entertained a particular weakness for archeology. A comparison between the sums made available to the Administration of Antiquities under the ‘Arif regime, and the funding provided by his Ba‘th successors, shows a significant increase significantly in excess of the rise in cost of living. During three years under ‘Arif (1964/65, 1965/66, 1967/68) the Administration’s average annual budget was 417,263 dinars; this increased to 757,526 dinars during the first four full budgetary years of Ba‘th rule (1969/70; 1970/71; 1971/72; 1972/73),1 marking an increment of 81 percent, while the cost of living index rose by no more than 35 percent from 1964 to 1973.2
Antiques are the most precious relics the Iraqis possess, showing the world that our country, which today is undergoing an extraordinary renaissance, is the [legitimate] offspring of previous civilizations which offered up a great contribution to humanity.
Saddam Husayn at a convention of Iraqi archeologists (Sumer, 1979, p. 9)
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Notes
‘Isa Salman, Sumer vol. 26, 1970, pp. e–g, and see also Jum, 2 February 1971, p. 4.
Sumer, vol. 34, 1978, pp. 8–9; vol. 35, 1979, pp. 9, 16–20, 30–93, 249–294; and Resolutions of the International Symposium on Babylon, Assur, and Himrin, ibid., pp. 601–2. Joseph Craft, The New York Times, 2 January 1980; Jum, 25 February 1980; Th, 13, 15, April, 31 May 1980. The New Yorker, 20 October 1980, pp. 151–3.
Interview with the projects director by the Washington Post News Service, as quoted in The Jerusalem Post, 16 November 1979. And see also Dr Mahdi, Sumer, vol. 35, 1979, p. 19.
Dr Zaku, al-Fikr al-Jadid, 14 May 1977; see also below, the section on art.
See, for example, Sati‘ al-Husri’s story on the great Iraqi-Arab poet of the 1st half of the 20th century, Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri from Najaf, who soon after the establishment of the monarchy in Iraq requested a position as teacher in the Ministry of Education but resisted demand that he would give up his Iranian citizenship and apply for Iraqi citizenship. Ultimately, he gave in to the pressure but published an anti-Iraqi poem in a newspaper to explain that, were it not for his family, he would not have chosen Iraq, preferring Iran, ‘its air … and sky’. See Sati‘ al-Husri, Mudhakkirati fi al-‘iraq (Beirut, 1967), vol. 1, pp. 588–90. And see also, ibid., pp. 323–7; 419–21; 585–8, 591–9.
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© 1991 Amatzia Baram
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Baram, A. (1991). A Passion for Archeology. In: Culture, History and Ideology in the Formation of Ba‘thist Iraq, 1968–89. St Antony’s/Macmillan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21243-9_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21243-9_4
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