More than 600 looted artifacts that were retrieved by the United States, shipped back to Iraq and then mysteriously lost finally have been found in the prime minister’s warehouse, the Iraqi tourism minister said last week.
The ancient pieces — including clay pots, a bronze Sumerian figurine and stone tablets etched with cuneiform writing — were returned to the Iraqi National Museum, resolving a caper that began when many of them were stolen from a museum in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk in 1991.
U.S. authorities had recovered the pieces over several years, some of which had been put up for auction. In December 2008, Gen. David Petraeus, then the commander of American forces in Iraq, had arranged to have them transported to Iraq on a military plane.It should have been a happy moment for Iraq, which had seen tens of thousands of artifacts from one of the world’s most ancient civilizations plundered during the 1990s and after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, and had been working hard to get them back.
What followed instead was an embarrassing mistake, official negligence or a combination of the two.The U.S. military delivered the pieces, packed in about a dozen boxes, to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s office, American and Iraqi officials said. Somehow the boxes were sent to al-Maliki’s official storage facility, where they sat for nearly two years alongside boxes of kitchen supplies and apparently were forgotten.
“We went to the warehouse, and we found these boxes,” said the minister for tourism and antiquities, Qahtan al Jubouri. “They didn’t know what was inside them.”When he was asked whether anyone would be called to account for the blunder, al Jubouri demurred. Al-Maliki’s office has remained silent on the matter.The most important piece in the boxes, museum officials said, was a bronze statue credited to the Sumerians, inhabitants of southern Mesopotamia in about 5,000 B.C. An American archeological expedition discovered the figurine in 1968.
By Shashank Bengali, McClatchy Newspapers
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