FIRST CITIES.("Art of the First Cities" exhibition of Early Bronze Age art at Metropolitan Museum, New York, NY)

News of the catastrophic looting of the National Museum in Baghdad coincided, in the most heartrending way, with the countdown to a long-planned exhibition, opening on May 8th at the Metropolitan Museum, of Early Bronze Age art from the region that now includes Iraq. Called "Art of the First Cities,"the exhibition covers a wide area, all the way from the Eastern Mediterranean to Pakistan, but its focal point is Mesopotamia, the "land between the rivers"(the Tigris and the Euphrates), where, by the third millennium B.C., the Sumerian people had invented cities, writing, irrigation farming, monumental architecture, government by law, and countless other benefactions of what we call civilization. While the looters were raping the Baghdad museum's peerless collection of Sumerian gold jewelry, stone and ivory and metal sculptures, ancient cuneiform seals, and God knows what else--the losses will take weeks to assess--the Met's curators were waiting anxiously for the arrival of promised loans of similar material from forty-eight other museums around the world. Nothing was coming from Baghdad, of course, because of the trade embargo dating back to the last Gulf war. Endlessly protracted negotiations with Syria had broken down just before the United States invaded Iraq, but loans from a dozen other countries were trickling in more or less on schedule.

"This is the most complicated show I have ever been involved with,"Mahrukh Tarapor, the Met's associate director of exhibitions, said last week. An elegant and subtle woman who was born in Bombay and educated at Harvard, Tarapor has spent much of the past sixteen years travelling around the world, negotiating loans of objects the Met wants to borrow. She had been working on the "First Cities"exhibition since January, 1997, and what made things so complicated was partly the events of September 11, 2001, "which brought everything to a grinding halt,"and partly the reluctance of the museum officials in certain countries she visited--Saudi Arabia, for example--to deal on equal terms with a woman. Tarapor described how, at the National Museum in Riyadh, she kept asking to see a very large, very early stone statue of a "Standing Nude Belted Figure"which was on the most-wanted list of Joan Aruz, the curator in charge of the Met's exhibition. "There was always a little delegation taking me around, and whenever I asked about this figure they would all burst into Arabic chatter, and nothing would happen. My last day there, I said, 'Well, I think you're going to cost me my job,' and so finally they took me down three levels, to storage. The object was in a huge crate. They opened the crate, and there he was, a very noble figure, and of course I realized why they hadn't shown it to me. This was the land of Wahhabism, where statues of the human figure are forbidden. I said I understood their reluctance, but I argued that the statue was ...