From Babylon to Baghdad: Cultural Heritage and Constitutional Law in the Republic of Iraq

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INTRODUCTION

Few places are more linked to the law than Babylon, the stronghold of King Hammurabi, whose eponymous code is one of the oldest, and arguably most famous, known to history. Dating back to the 18th century bce, the Code of Hammurabi controlled all aspects of Babylonian life, from business and trade to the household to crime and punishment. Hammurabi promulgated his code throughout Mesopotamia, inscribing its provisions on public monuments, one of which--a stele larger than a grown man--can still be admired at the Louvre Museum today.¹

Now, several millennia after Hammurabi's Code, the laws governing ancient Mesopotamia no longer fit on a single slab. The Republic of Iraq--a distant successor to Hammurabi's kingdom--is struggling to preserve its past through a legal framework that includes international treaties, domestic legislation, and even constitutional provisions. Laws criminalize the looting of archaeological sites and trafficking of antiquities as well as regulate their study and management. Within the past decade, the country has overhauled many of these protections, even in times of invasion, occupation, and civil war.²

The history of these recent measures is intertwined with that of Iraq itself (as is true of the country's heritage law throughout the past century). On 18 November 2002, the same day United Nations weapons inspectors returned to Baghdad, Antiquities and Heritage Law Number 55 of 2002 took effect and modernized the country's preservation mandate.³The next year, on 29 October 2003--not six months into the Iraq occupation by the Coalition Provisional Authority--the Ministry of Culture proposed that Babylon and the Marshlands of Mesopotamia be added to the Tentative List of the World Heritage Convention. These were the first of six postwar submissions, a "forecast" of sites to eventually be nominated for World Heritage Status.⁴Finally on 15 October 2005, the new Constitution of the Republic of Iraq came into force, pledging state backing for "cultural activities and institutions."⁵More importantly, in Article 113 it also placed such "national treasures" as "antiquities, archeological sites, cultural buildings, manuscripts, and coins" under federal jurisdiction, but to be "managed in cooperation with the regions and governorates."

Article 113 may not immediately appear significant, or contentious, but it is both. Federalism remains a heated...