Lamia al-Gailani, an Iraqi archeologist who lent her expertise to rebuilding the National Museum of Iraq’s collection after it was looted in 2003, has died at age 80.
Her daughter, Noorah al-Gailani, on Sunday said that her mother died on Friday in Amman, Jordan. She did not give a cause of death.
A devotee of Iraq’s heritage and its museums, al-Gailani selected artifacts to display at the reopening of the national museum in Baghdad in 2015, more than a decade after it was looted in the wake of the US invasion.
The restored collection included hundreds of cylinder seals, which had been used to print cuneiform impressions and pictographic lore onto documents and surfaces in ancient Mesopotamia. The seals were the subject of Lamia al-Gailani’s 1977 dissertation at the University of London.
“She was very keen to communicate on the popular level and make archeology accessible to ordinary people,” said Noorah al-Gailani, who is curator of the Islamic civilizations collection at the Glasgow Museum in Scotland.
Laima al-Gailani also championed a new museum for antiquities in the city of Basra, which opened in 2016.
However, she bore the grief of watching her country’s rich archeological sites being looted and destroyed in the years after the US invasion. Thousands of items are still missing from national museum’s collection.
“I wish it was a nightmare and I could wake up,” she told the BBC in 2015, when Islamic State group militants bulldozed relics at the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud near present-day Mosul.
Born in Baghdad in 1938, Laima al-Gailani was one of the first Iraqi women to excavate in her country.
Fresh from her undergraduate studies at the University of Cambridge, she was hired as a curator at the national museum in 1960, Noorah al-Gailani said.
She returned to the UK in 1970 to pursue advanced studies and she made her home there.
Still, she kept returning to Iraq, connecting foreign academics with an archeological community that was struggling under the isolation of then-Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s autocratic rule and the UN sanctions against him.
In 1999, she published The First Arabs in Arabic, with the Iraqi archeologist Salim al-Alusi, on the earliest traces of Arab culture in Mesopotamia from the 6th century to the 9th century.
She would bring copies of the book with her to Baghdad and sell them through a vendor on Mutanabbi Street, the literary heart of the capital, Noorah al-Gailani said.
At the time of her death, she was working with the Basra Museum to curate a new exhibit set to open in March, museum director Qahtan al-Abeed said, adding that she had “hand-picked the cylinder seals to display.”
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