Has anyone not been stealing artefacts from Iraq? (Thursday 3 July 2008)
compiled by Madeline Meehan
The recent return of 2,466 stolen artifacts to Iraq from the Jordan customs officials has once again brought to light just how much of Iraq’s history was stolen in the looting during the invasion of 2003. The pieces were to be handed over to (presumably ceremonially and not literally) Mohammed Abbas Oreibi, the Iraqi Minister of Tourism on June 22, in order that they may be returned to the National Museum in Baghdad. The returned items range from gold coins and jewelery to ancient manuscripts. [1]
In April Syria returned 701 artifacts [2] that they had been slowly acquiring via international customs checks and earlier this month a set of 11 seals which date from between 3000 and 2000 BC were returned by U.S. customs officers who recovered them in Philadelphia the previous month. Additionally, a number of other pieces have been returned over the last five years, since the looting occurred. Other artefacts have turned up in a wide variety of locations including other parts of Iraq as well as the U.S., Italy, the Netherlands and the U.K. It is beginning to seem that the artefacts, once stolen, began to distribute themselves throughout the globe, which makes their recovery rather a difficult process.
A present, between 3,000 and 7,000 pieces are still believed to be missing. [3] Due to the difficulty of locating so many pieces that could quite literally be anywhere (very much like looking for a few thousand needles in a cartoonishly large haystack) police worldwide have taken to using rather unusual tactics and working together with a variety of types of people in order to recover the stolen items. For example, police in Switzerland worked together with eBay to recover clay tablet dating from about 2000 BC for sale on the website after a German archaeologist spotted it on the site. [4] The museum still remains closed to the public due in large part to the continued violence and instability of the surrounding area but also due to the inadequate protection of the artefacts they currently posess, as well as the small portion of their entire posession that is actually in the museum’s posession at present; they are hoping the returns will continue to trickle in and that they will eventually be able to reopen.
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