A summary of the antiquities of Iraq and the story of their preservation by HVF Winstone, biographer of Gertrude Bell, Woolley of Ur, and Howard Carter (discoverer of Tutankhamun's tomb in Egypt), and author of Uncovering the Ancient World

GERTRUDE BELL

Whose memory the Arabs will ever hold in reverence and affection

Created this Museum in 1923

Being the Honorary Director of Antiquities for the Iraq

With wonderful understanding and devotion

She assembled the most precious objects in it

And through the heat of the Summer

Worked on them until the day of her death

On 12th July, 1926

King Faisal and the Government of Iraq

In gratitude for her great deeds in this country

Have ordered that the Principal Wing shall bear her name

And with their permission

Her friends have erected this Tablet.

Plaque in Baghdad Museum, removed after the murder of the Iraqi royal family in 1958.

Archaeology in Iraq has its foundations in the observations of 17th century travellers such as Dr Pococke of the Lavant Company, the Italian Pietro della Valle, the Frenchmen Chardin and Tavernier, the Dane Carsten Niebuhr, the great English Political Residents in Baghdad Claudius Rich and Henry Rawlinson. Between them, they identified Babylon and Persepolis, brought to Europe the first Persian and Iraqi artefacts, and laid the basis for the translation of the world's earliest written languages. In the 19th century and early 20th centuries there were important excavations in Iraq, particularly at biblical sites such as Nineveh, Nimrud and Assur in the region known as Assyria. Englishman Sir Henry Layard and Paul-Emile Botta of France were the chief excavators of the time. Before the First World War, the Germans under Professor Koldewey of Berlin excavated Babylon. Most of the artefacts from those excavations are now in the museums of Britain, France and Germany, though some were acquired by the major American museums. In 1917, Gertrude Bell, al-Khatun, the 'Lady' of Baghdad, became Iraq's first Director of Antiquities and started the first museum in a small empty residence. In 1923 she created the present Baghdad Museum. The British School of Archaeology in Iraq, established by the British Museum, is known as the Gertrude Bell Memorial.

In 1921, Sir Leonard Woolley began his famous excavations at Ur, known biblically as Ur of the Chaldees, which resulted in the restoration of the ziggurat or heavenly stairway, and in spectacular finds in the pre-dynastic royal cemetery outside the city wall. Among the discoveries were such items as the gold embellished Ram in Thicket, the Golden Lyre and the Standard of Ur, the latter depicting War and Peace circa 2500 BC. The finds, rivalling those of Tutankhamun's tomb in importance, were divided by Gertrude Bell between the Museum of Baghdad and the sponsoring bodies, Philadelphia Museum in Pennsylvania and the British Museum. The best pieces went to Baghdad. Some, now, have almost certainly been lost forever.