The looting of the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad deserves a deeper look, now that the initial reactions and finger-pointing have occurred. Before the facts were in, pundits were calling it a cultural holocaust, akin to the destruction of the Alexandria Library or the Louvre. They blamed the American military for not deploying tanks or troops to safeguard the museum, especially because the departments of State and Defense were warned that, as happened in the 1991 Gulf War, such cultural plunder would occur again.

Clearly, the military cared about Iraq’s cultural heritage, having gone to extraordinary lengths to keep thousands of archeological sites on the battlefield out of harm’s way. The United States may well be culpable, but in the interest of due process, let’s wait for the results of the official investigation before we convict.

Let’s also wait until all the facts are in before opining on the magnitude of the museum’s loss. The daily news reports on the museum’s looting continue to be contradictory. First reports had the original antiquities smashed by unruly mobs. Then, no, the mobs had destroyed plaster fakes, with the original artifacts safe in vaults, either in the museum or secured elsewhere before the war broke out.

Then, the original and most valuable antiquities had been stolen in a brilliant plot by (choose one) fleeing members of Saddam’s regime, museum employees in an inside job or a team of professional burglars bearing keys to the vaults, with the looting mobs merely providing convenient cover. The thieves were working for (choose one) private collectors, or art museums or dealers in (choose one) France, the United States, Britain, Japan or Russia.

Other reports had the looters more interested in the museum’s modern furnishings — typewriters, tables, and toilets — than the furnishings of Mesopotamian civilizations. And, predictably, there are the conspiracy theories about a cabal of wealthy and well-connected American collectors and curators who used their State and Defense department connections to plan the theft of selected pieces from the Iraqi museum three months before the war began.

Thirty cultural experts who met last week in Paris agreed on what they did not know: how many and which of the museum’s antiquities are safe, stolen or destroyed. Among the items whose status is unknown are the tablets with Hummurabi’s Code, one of the earliest systems of law, and perhaps the museum’s most important artifacts.

Other Mesopotamian antiquities, targeted for theft, apparently were already on their way to the global black market: the 5,000-year-old alabaster Warka Vase with a carved river scene; a 4,000-year-old copper bust of the Akkadian king, Sargon the Great; a number of golden bowls; as well as certain statues and ancient manuscripts.

A top priority is to determine what’s missing. A quick inventory will be difficult, because it appears the thieves methodically destroyed the museum’s catalogs and records. But a deeper question is what’s missing from the psyche of those Iraqis who willingly looted their own cultural legacy in 1991 and again in 2003. It is the most tragic of ironies when uncivilized acts destroy the record of the most ancient civilization.

When knowledge is wantonly destroyed, so is our sense of civilized place. Perhaps, as some suggest, the Iraqi looters no longer owned their past. They no longer perceived the museum as their historical legacy, having been culturally disenfranchised by two decades of a Baath party dictatorship that fashioned its ideology, repression and brutality after Nazism and Stalinism.

By comparison, natural disasters and racial riots in Washington, Detroit, Los Angeles, Chicago and other American cities resulted in similar looting sprees, but not of museums. Televisions, stereos and automobiles, yes; the Smithsonian or the Field Museum or the Getty Museum, no. When demonstrating students at the Kansas University torched their student union in 1971, they left the Museum of Natural History next door untouched.

Perhaps the Iraqis, particularly those driven by religious or political fervor, turned on the artifacts of history as heretical, much as has occurred elsewhere. In post-revolutionary Iran, the mullahs sought to destroy the Bahai temples. In Afghanistan, the Taliban razed Buddhists statues and destroyed ancient cultural treasures from the Greek, Buddhist and other eras of the country’s rich and varied history.

Or perhaps, along with Saddam’s palaces and ministries, the museum became yet another symbol for Iraqis of the powerful, feared and hated government elite. It would not be the first time. In 1792, during the French Revolution, Parisian mobs tried to trample King Louis XVI’s Royal Gardens and plunder the Royal Museum, which now survives as France’s National Museum of Natural History. Magnus Bernhardsson, a professor of Middle Eastern History at Hofstra University, agrees: “The [Iraqi] museums were governmental institutions, so they were symbols of governmental power, even though people do feel an affinity with these objects.”

The upshot is that we don’t know much about the Iraqi Museum looting on three counts: Where were the coalition forces? What was the toll on the collections? What compelled the Iraqis to ransack the antiquities, manuscripts and books in their museums and libraries at the same time they were making off with bathtubs, chairs and hospital equipment?

Teams of scholars and investigators already are assembling around these questions. We should soon begin learning the military side of the story, the fate of the artifacts and the mindset that pillages one’s own civilization. Let’s wait till the facts are in. There will be time enough then for blame, recrimination and understanding.

Leonard Krishtalka is director of Kansas University’s Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center.