Death and Afterlife
131
sensational finds in the popular magazine The Illustrated News. Then, as noted in Chapter 1, Agatha Christie published her Murder in Mesopotamia, which was widely believed to be based on her visits to Ur, first as the guest of Woolley and then later as the wife of Max Mallowan, who was the longest-serving of Woolley’s assistants. All this publicity increased public interest, which was further boosted when some of the magnificent finds were displayed in the British Museum. No further archaeological work was carried out at Ur by the British Museum after Woolley’s last season in 1934, although he continued to work on the publications until his death. Some restoration work was carried out later by Iraqi archaeologists. The site next came to public attention in a much less agreeable way. The human tragedy of the two Gulf Wars in 1991 and 2003 is well documented, as is the damage to Iraq’s irreplaceable heritage. After the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein in 1990, punitive sanctions were imposed on Iraq and real poverty gripped small farmers and labourers, who were in some cases unable to feed their families. The failed uprising by the Shia of the south in the aftermath of the invasion of 1991 led to brutal repression by Saddam and to even greater hardship. The uprising also led to a rash of looting in thirteen provincial museums and the spoils were quickly smuggled out of the country and sold on, in some cases raising large sums of money. The possibility of making quick and relatively easy money with which to feed their families led many farmers to visit their local archaeological sites and to dig for anything saleable. As the Iraqi Antiquities service was being increasingly starved of funds by the government, there were few guards present to protect the sites; the looting began in earnest between the two Gulf Wars and continued unabated for fifteen years or more. Looting became a business, and gangs of looters armed with guns as well as shovels would chase off any guards there were, descend on a site and rip the guts out of it. The most high-profile looting of the second Gulf War was that of the National Museum in Baghdad in 2003. In spite of repeated requests to the Ministry of Defence and the Pentagon to secure the museum before and during the invasion, the looting seems to have continued unchecked for three days, leaving behind a scene of devastation. It is still not known exactly how many artefacts were stolen, as many of them were still waiting to be accessioned and so had not been added to the museum’s inventory, but the total may have been as high as 15,000. In addition, offices were vandalized with doors stoved in, papers ripped from cabinets, card indices thrown to the floor and everything movable taken. The wall that disguised the entrance to a secure storeroom was