We all know what happened, or think we know. When American troops entered Baghdad in April 2003, hordes of looters rushed into the Iraq Museum, repository of the world's greatest collection of Mesopotamian antiquities, and stripped the place while our GIs were busily pulling down Saddam statues for CNN.

The truth, wouldn't you know it, is a bit more elusive. About 15,000 objects were stolen, not 170,000 as first reported (actually the size of the museum's entire collection), an exaggeration resulting from misunderstandings between the first journalists to reach the shattered museum and distraught Iraqi curators. Some objects were irretrievably damaged, but nearly half those stolen have since been recovered, as museum director Donny George writes in this absorbing book. Its editors aren't interested in raking over old coals or giving a definitive account of how the looting happened. Instead they offer an eloquent, moving and abundantly illustrated history of an institution housing the remains of 40,000 years of Iraqi cultural life, from Neandertals to Ottomans.

Twenty-two writers, including curators and archaeologists, tell the story in essays that evoke the excitement of digging up the world's original civilization and a wistful nostalgia for Iraq's bygone days of field research and camaraderie. The Gulf War, U.N. sanctions and, finally, the explosion of pillage on America's watch all took a devastating toll on museums and archaeology. The only artifacts being found these days in Iraq are those dug up by looters to feed the antiquities trade, and no one in this book ventures a guess as to when, or even if, fieldwork will ever happen again. But slowly, the museum is picking up the pieces.

The Iraq Museum, as it is now known, was created in a room in Baghdad in 1923 by Gertrude Bell, a British amateur archaeologist and Arabist given to rhapsodic gurgles about the objects under her care, writing: "Isn't it fantastic to be selecting pots and things four to six thousand years old!" She died three years later, succumbing in the blazing Iraqi summer at the age of 58, and it took 40 more years for the collection to reach its present location, a hulking box of brick and cement that looks like what it is, a warehouse of history. Because Iraqi law barred the export of antiquities, the place filled with objects excavated by archaeologists all over the country, among them a stunning array of gold jewelry found in 1988 in tombs at the palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud. Scholars came from around the world, and the museum became one of the Middle East's most prestigious cultural venues.

A string of disasters began in 1991, when, during the first Gulf War, a bomb hit a government building across the street and broke the museum's glass showcases. Curators hurriedly wrapped objects in cotton and rubber padding and closed the museum, and it has remained closed almost uninterruptedly since. The gold of Nimrud was packed off to underground vaults at the Central Bank, which were subsequently flooded, possibly intentionally by Iraqis intent on preventing Saddam diehards from stealing it. (The vaults were finally drained in 2003 and the gold recovered intact.) By the eve of the current war, the museum was a sad and demoralized place, its employees hunkered down behind steel gates bracing for the next disaster to strike. The museum's story of early promise erased by war and Saddam's megalomania becomes here a kind of metaphor for the recent history of Iraq.

Even after the looting, no institution in the world can tell the story of writing like the Iraq Museum. Cuneiform, the world's first script, was born in southern Iraq, and carbon dating indicates it originated between 3400 and 3300 B.C., writes Robert Biggs in one of the book's finest essays. There must have been quite a burst of innovation, because within a century or two the wheel appeared as well. It was quickly put to use in war, on chariots pulled by recently domesticated donkeys. Cuneiform found its first use in record keeping: receipts for barley bales, notices of gold shipments, more the work of accountants than poets. But before long, people went wild for cuneiform. Clay tablets with its spindly arrangements of flicks and crosses started to appear by the thousands, recording paeans, epics and incantations.

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