History is not to be absent but to become absent; to be someone and then go away, leaving traces. A relic, any relic, is a will, we are present at its coronation. The will is where the dead are most alive; a functional autobiography, immortality secured in the greed of others. 

Some deaths are mere slips or illusions. Do I need conclusive evidence that history existed? Do I need conclusive evidence that art is what it is? I don't doubt my own sense of history's existence, but I clearly feel that I need to prove it to others. The evidence for this past's reality is the fondness and specificity of the art itself: conclusive. But the near-death of Iraq's art, its rescue at the hands of memory and patience, are alarming brushes with the brutal violence of history, reminders of the appalling variety of ways in which real treasures can be lost.

I start with these mementoes because I am about to talk about what was to become a short while later, a fictional and a metaphorical death, and I want to give physical death its due-a mark of piety towards what is actually irreplaceable, untransferable in those artifactual lives now gone. In art as in science there is no delight without the detail.

There is another possibility: that the real life of prehistoric figures, as of anyone who has succumbed to what I call the "strange habit of human death", is just the "life" we shall never see again, the life that was once secret and is now lost. I wonder if the "individual" is wholly subordinate to the larger pattern of history. History in this sense is not a quest for truth but a refusal of death. The refusal is vain in the literal sense, since nothing will bring these antiques back. Beyond all easy spiritualism, antiques do speak, they counsel us through memory, through our late but often luminous understanding of what they would have said.

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In the scheme of things, concerns about artifacts and shrines may seem marginal. But religion and history are intricately woven into military action in the Middle East. Amid the plumes and uniforms and the calm paraphernalia of a tyrant-states going to hell in a bucket, there is a widening sense of history lost.

According to reports, Iraqi prized treasures have been looted in the most despicable, negligent and obfuscated fashion. Some of the world's most important ancient finds chronicling the achievements of the Uruk, Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian and early Islamic civilizations were there. Included were mankind's earliest written documents, ancient mathematical texts, ancient sculptures and other works of art. Also the riches from the royal death pits at Ur from the late third millennium BC and tablets of the Gilgamesh Epic describing a great flood with many elements similar to those of Noah's Flood. At Nuzi, about 3,500 tablets were found dating from 1600 to 1400 BC. Many of the tablets deal with laws and customs and provide some of the best available evidence for the common social, economic and legal practices in the ancient world. Such things as a childless couple adopting a slave to be their heir, having children by proxy, deathbed blessings and the importance of household gods are illuminated in the texts. The absence of objects reveals the fact that art and culture is in the firing line and that the country's truly unique and internationally precious cultural treasures have suffered and have been enslaved.

Although amongst the cultured there is a sense of great love-veneration might be a better word for the astonishingly rich and ancient culture of Iraq, a widespread general hostility towards Iraq reflects a misunderstanding in the west which fails to make the connection between a modern country and ancient Mesopotamia, the "Cradle of Civilization."