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Treasures dating to 900 B.C. found in secret Iraqi vault By Hamza Hendawi | The Associated Press Posted June 8, 2003 BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The world-famous treasures of Nimrud, unaccounted for since Baghdad fell two months ago, have been located in good condition in the country's Central Bank -- in a secret vault-inside-a-vault submerged in sewage water, U.S. occupation authorities said Saturday. They also said that fewer than 50 items from the collection of the Iraqi National Museum's main exhibition still are missing after the looting and destruction that followed the U.S. capture of Baghdad. ...The treasures, one of the...

'Oldest sculpture' found in Morocco By Paul Rincon BBC Science A 400,000-year-old stone object unearthed in Morocco could be the world's oldest attempt at sculpture. The figurine was found 15 metres below ground That is the claim of a prehistoric art specialist who says the ancient rock bears clear signs of modification by humans. The object, which is around six centimetres in length, is shaped like a human figure, with grooves that suggest a neck, arms and legs. On its surface are flakes of a red substance that could be remnants of paint. The object was found 15 metres below...

U.S. investigators have recovered 951 items looted from Iraq's National Museum, but have not gained access to central bank vaults thought to contain priceless objects or a secret storage site known only to museum staff, the lead investigator said on Friday. Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos, leader of the team investigating the museum's losses, was unable to give a firm figure of the number of items still missing from the museum's collection following the looting spree in the days after U.S. forces entered Baghdad. In a briefing from Baghdad to reporters at the Pentagon, he said his team of 14 investigators...

"Topic: Investigating antiquity loss from the Baghdad Museum" Video available on C-SPAN of previous live teleconference with Col. Bogdanos. He offered many more details than previously available about the museum looting.

Reward Offer Nets Thousands of Items Missing From National Museum U.S. Customs agents announced yesterday that investigators, working with military officials and Iraqi authorities, have recovered about 700 artifacts and 39,400 manuscripts that disappeared from the National Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad during chaos and looting that followed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. ... The agency, which is working from an inventory of losses from thefts last month, said that some high-value items apparently were stolen from vaults where museum staff had stored them for safekeeping. So far, Iraqi authorities have identified 38 missing items classified as high value, Boyd...

WASHINGTON - More than 700 artefacts and tens of thousands of ancient manuscripts that had been missing from the National Museum in Baghdad have been recovered by teams of investigators in Iraq, US officials said on Wednesday. Some of the missing works were stored in underground vaults before the United States-led invasion of the country. The US investigators located the vaults over the past week. They forced them open, revealing hundreds of artefacts that had apparently been stored there to protect them from being damaged in a US assault. The find included ancient jewellery, pottery and sarcophaguses, officials said. The...

<p>Teams of agents from the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), working with U.S. military authorities in Iraq, have recovered nearly 700 artifacts and located 39,400 manuscripts missing from the National Museum in Baghdad.</p> <p>"The recovery of these items was the direct result of a superb, cooperative effort between U.S. law enforcement, the U.S. military and the Iraqi people," said ICE acting Assistant Secretary Michael J. Garcia. "While we are pleased with the results thus far, there is clearly more work to be done.</p>

The Non-Pillage of BaghdadBy Wall Street Journal EditorialThe Wall Street Journal | May 7, 2003 "It is very common for the first information following a crisis to be wrong, and when I say wrong, I mean wrong."So spoke Ronald Noble, the Secretary General of Interpol, at a conference yesterday in Lyon, France, devoted to the recovery of stolen Iraqi artifacts. The context for Mr. Noble's remarks is the incredible reduction in the estimate of the number of artworks lost in the ransacking of Baghdad's National Museum.The claims have gone from 170,000 items first reported to the 30 to 40 that...

top British Museum official said yesterday that his Iraqi counterparts told him they had largely emptied display cases at the National Museum in Baghdad months before the start of the Iraq war, storing many of the museum's most precious artifacts in secure "repositories." The official, John E. Curtis, curator of the Near East Collection at the British Museum, who recently visited Iraq, said Baghdad museum officials had taken the action on the orders of Iraqi government authorities. When looting started, most of the treasures apparently remaining in display halls were those too large or bulky to have been moved for...

<p>BAGHDAD - The vast majority of the Iraqi trove of antiquities feared stolen or broken have been found inside the National Museum in Baghdad, according to American investigators who compiled an inventory over the weekend of the ransacked galleries.</p> <p>A total of 38 antiquities, not tens of thousands, are now believed to be missing. Among them is a single display of Babylonian cuneiform tablets that accounts for nine missing items.</p> <p>The single most valuable missing piece is the Vase of Warka, a white limestone bowl dating from 3000 B.C.</p>

Investigators and experts are mounting an international initiative to recover artifacts stolen in the catastrophic looting of Iraq's National Museum of Antiquities. But their efforts are sobered by the knowledge that stolen museum pieces -- especially those lost in massive quantities -- are almost never recovered. The Iraqi museum held 175,000 items before the war. It is not clear how many of them were plundered, but the losses will dwarf the estimated 2,000 to 4,000 objects looted from nine regional Iraqi museums in the aftermath of the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

AMMAN, Jordan (AP) -- Jordanian customs officers have confiscated dozens of archaeological items, artworks and other items that may have been stolen from the National Museum in Baghdad or Saddam Hussein's presidential palaces, officials said Thursday. Khalaf al-Hazaymeh, deputy director of the Customs Department, said no arrests were made yet among the travelers leaving Iraq because officials must first determine if the items were stolen or legitimately purchased. Items seized included seven statues, two old manuscripts, 26 historical books, a Quran and three copper Shiite pots engraved with the names of the imams. Also found were 11 carpets, a warrior's...

--snip-- Slowly but surely, military officers and U.S. Customs agents are beginning to account for the disparate pieces of a vast museum collection from a land rich in history and artifacts thousands of years old. And what they have discovered is that far fewer pieces were looted from the museum's collection than initial reports indicated. --snip-- "Some of the original reports indicated close to 170,000 items were either stolen or destroyed," said Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos, who heads the investigation. "What we're finding is that the number is significantly smaller, by a factor of at least 100.

MISSING ANTIQUITIES Loss Estimates Are Cut on Iraqi Artifacts, but Questions Remain By ALAN RIDING BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 30 — Even though many irreplaceable antiquities were looted from the National Museum of Iraq during the chaotic fall of Baghdad last month, museum officials and American investigators now say the losses seem to be less severe than originally thought. Col. Matthew F. Bogdanos, a Marine reservist who is investigating the looting and is stationed at the museum, said museum officials had given him a list of 29 artifacts that were definitely missing. But since then, 4 items — ivory objects from...

U.S. Museum to Return Ramses I Mummy to Egypt Hillary Mayell for National Geographic News April 30, 2003 A 3,000-year-old mummy that many scholars believe is ancient Egypt's King Ramses I is the star attraction of an exhibit at the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta that will run from April 26 to September 14. How the mummy came to reside in North America for 140 years, and wound up in Atlanta, is a tale that includes the collapse of law and order in ancient Egypt, grave robbers, stolen antiquities, a two-headed calf and a five-legged pig, the wonders of...

The entire security and liberation effort in Iraq was called into question recently because of missing tchotchkes. Two of the president's cultural advisers are resigning in protest, the curator woman at Baghdad's antiquities museum--clearly someone who thrived under Hussein's regime--was positively tragic, and there was plenty of indignation to go around among people to whom knickknacks have more value than human life. If you ask such folks whether all those missing artifacts are worth a single life otherwise spent in bondage, not to speak of millions of lives, they'd have to think long and hard before answering. (Especially since, in...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. soldiers shot back at anti-American protesters after being fired on in a town west of Baghdad, and at least seven demonstrators were hit, a U.S. officer said Tuesday. Residents said 15 Iraqis were killed. U.S. officials also announced that a top adviser to Saddam Hussein, who served as oil minister and earlier headed Iraq's top-secret missile program, had surrendered. The shooting took place Monday night in the town of Fallujah, about 30 miles west of Baghdad. Though residents reported 15 deaths, Col. Arnold Bray of the 82nd Airborne Division said seven people in the crowd were...

Tuesday, April 22, 2003; 12:01 a.m. EST] We Americans must face two realities since Operation Iraqi Freedom has proved so successful. Reality #1: The world's leftists and America-haters (many of them fellow Americans) want to see us fail in Iraq. Reality #2: They have plenty of time to make sure we fail or at least give the mentally challenged worldwide the impression that we did. They will conduct a campaign against America until long after an Iraqi government takes over and Iraqi oil is lubricating the Iraqi and world economies. The campaign began with the fall of Baghdad. The hullabaloo...

The blue Kia minivan rolled through the guarded gates of the National Museum of Antiquities early this afternoon, loaded with a precious cargo of metals and minerals: a bronze relief from the 4th century B.C. swathed in yellow foam padding, antique farm implements, an elaborately engraved marble slab wrapped in plastic, a decapitated statue of an Assyrian king. Also inside the van was Namir Ibrahim Jamil, a 33-year-old Iraqi pianist who said that 11 days ago he watched in horror as looters ransacked the museum, hauling away as much of Iraq's tangible legacy as they could carry. He said he...

If Iraq's National Museum had not been looted, the conspiracy theorists - the antiwar, anti-Bush commentators and protestors - would have had to invent the story. Instead, they merely invented the story of how it happened. Here are some of the interpretations racing across the Internet from loony to loony. George W. Bush is a cultural dunce, who wouldn't know a 5,000 year-old Warka Vase from a Mexican flower pot from Wal-Mart. He didn't care about the artifacts. (It's not like they're Rembrandts or Leonardos or even Elvises on velvet, he said to himself.) Besides, his cronies who are rich...

Volume 56 Number 3, May/June 2003 Editor's note: The following Special Report was written just before the war's outbreak. THE SPECTER OF WAR Protecting Iraq's museum collections and archaeological sites in the event of an invasion. BY JOANNE FARCHAKH The grand reliefs from the Assyrian palaces of Nimrud and Khorsabad--the pride of the Baghdad Museum--are housed in an exhibition hall across the street from the Ministry of Communication and a mere 300 feet from a television and radio station. These buildings, as experience has shown, are the first targets for air strikes, and Iraqi cultural officials fear that the reliefs,...

It's truly precious how members of the antiwar left, whose superior consciences bade them to oppose war in Iraq because they really cared about the lives of U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians, are now bemoaning the lack of pre-emptive U.S. military force to protect Baghdad's national museum. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd opined that "the Pentagon could easily have saved the National Museum and library if they had redeployed the American troops assigned to guard Ahmad Chalabi, the Richard Perle pal." "The whole world saw the U.S. priorities when they guarded the oil ministry and stood by while other...

Customs agents at a US airport believe they have seized at least one item taken from Baghdad museum, which was looted of thousands of valuable artefacts as Saddam Hussein's regime collapsed. The FBI refused to say at which airport the object had been confiscated or the nature of the artefact, but customs officials across the country have been put on high alert amid suspicions that many of the stolen objects will end up on the US market. Many objects from Iraq, looted both at the end of the first Gulf War in 1991 and during the last, have already started...

<p>WHO'S to blame for the destruction of Iraqi museums, libraries and archives, amounting to what The New York Times calls "one of the greatest cultural disasters in recent Middle Eastern history"? The Bush administration, say academic specialists on the Middle East. They proceed to compare American leaders to some of the worst mass-murderers in history.</p>

<p>BABYLON, Iraq -- The roots of Western law and writing sprang from the Mesopotamian cradle of civilization here, the site of the resplendent Hanging Gardens of Babylon -- one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. The palace of Hammurabi and King Nebuchadnezzar -- like antiquities throughout this country -- has met a fate that has devastated Iraqis and archeologists throughout the world.</p>

KUWAIT CITY — In a memo sent two weeks before the fall of Baghdad, the Pentagon office charged with rebuilding Iraq urged top commanders of U.S. ground forces to protect the Iraqi National Museum and other cultural sites from looters. "Coalition forces must secure these facilities in order to prevent looting and the resulting irreparable loss of cultural treasures," says the March 26 memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times. The Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), led by retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, sent the five-page memo to senior commanders at the Coalition...

MOST works of art stolen from Iraqi museums by looters will resurface on the world art market, a German expert has said. "That is what happened after the first Gulf War," Ulli Seegers, from the Art Loss Register (ALR), which manages the world's largest database of stolen artwork, told the DPA news agency. "The museums would not have been ransacked if there were not an international market for the works," she said. The ALR is expecting to receive a detailed list of stolen works, in order to trace them on the art market. "Whether in fairs or auctions, we watch...

The world's leading museums are to join forces to send an emergency team to Iraq to help rebuild its shattered cultural heritage. The Louvre, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, New York's Metropolitan and the Hermitage in St Petersburg are among those preparing to contribute to a task force led by the British Museum. The alliance is being co-ordinated by Neil MacGregor, the British Museum's director, who last week pledged to send his own curators to help assess the extent of the cultural "catastrophe" suffered by the Iraqi capital. Up to 170,000 priceless antiquities – many hailing from the earliest...

Since coalition forces have taken control of Iraq's major cities, the looting and disorder in the streets - particularly the sacking of the Iraqi National Museum - have prompted criticism that U.S. and British soldiers haven't done enough to contain the chaos. Perhaps they could have done more to safeguard the national treasures. But they did, after all, have a war to win. Now, with the war almost a wrap, the troops' role is legitimately shifting toward restoring order. Case in point: the foiled heist at a Baghdad bank Thursday, where soldiers scared off armed robbers and then safeguarded $4...

U.S. troops committed the cultural "crime of the century" when they failed to protect priceless Iraqi artefacts from looters and likely trampled archaeological sites during the invasion, top antiquities officials here charged yesterday. They also said a small number of "valuable" missing museum pieces were returned after appeals by religious leaders, but denied reports from a UN conference that Iraqi officials may have been involved in an organised theft. "With what I'm expecting has happened in the (archaeological) sites in the field and what happened to the Iraq museum, I would say it's the crime of the century because it...

Baghdad residents returned 20 looted pieces from Iraq's ransacked national collection holding some of the earliest artefacts of civilisation. Iraq's antiquities chief, Jabar Hilil, yesterday called looting of Iraq's national museum following entry of US forces the "crime of the century." And he questioned why US forces made no move to safeguard it in the days of chaos that followed the toppling of President Saddam Hussein's government. But Hilil left open the possibility that losses were not as absolute as first thought. With no electricity in Baghdad, he said, museum operators had yet to make a full assessment of the...

In the 1980s, when I traveled several times to Baghdad to cover the bitter Iran/Iraq war, for moments of joy I would slip over to the Iraqi National Museum and lose myself — and reclaim myself — among the glorious treasures of our least-known antiquity. I remember it as a rather small museum. Apparently it has since been enlarged. But there was incredible intimacy to be found among the cultural riches, such as the Sumerian silver harp from Ur and the iconic "Head of a Woman" from Uruk. I recall particularly moving very slowly through the basement of the museum...

Media outlets worldwide lament the fate of Iraq's National Museum at Baghdad, said to have been looted on 12 April. All refer to the important archaeological treasures, now nowhere to be seen, and quote museum officials on the horrors of the marauding mob. The Americans are generally blamed for failing to protect the museum. A petition in this matter, organized by Cambridge and Oxford scholars, has already gone to UNESCO (14 April). Only a few reporters have detected some strange flaws in this story. In the Daily Telegraph (14 April), David Blair observes that the heavy steel doors of the...

Matsuura said top museum officials tried to protect the institution, but the thieves may have succeeded in paying off guards or other low-ranking personnel. He said he doesn't blame the U.S. military, even though UNESCO had urged the U.S. government before the war to safeguard it and other cultural sites. "If I were to blame somebody, it would be those armed bandits who looted their own cultural treasury," Matsuura said. The museum was assaulted during "a power vacuum" following the collapse of Saddam Hussein's government, and "anything could happen in such confusion and turmoil," he said.

3 resign from U.S. art panel to protest Iraq museum looting Friday, April 18, 2003 Associated Press WASHINGTON -- Three members of the White House Cultural Property Advisory Committee have resigned to protest U.S. military unresponsiveness as Baghdad's National Museum of Antiquities was looted, even though reports suggest the thefts may have been carried out by professional thieves. FBI Director Robert Mueller, meanwhile, said his agency was in on the hunt for looted Iraqi treasures. Martin E. Sullivan, Richard S. Lanier and Gary Vikan, each appointed by former President Clinton, said they were disappointed by the military's failure to protect...

<p>We shouldn't have been surprised that, after the looting of Baghdad's antiquities museum last weekend, negligent Americans, not the looters themselves, got most of the blame. For much of the media, every bad thing since the invasion has been America's fault. So adding another charge to the indictment was an easy call.</p>

Looters at Iraq's National Museum of Antiquities pillaged and, perhaps, destroyed an archive of more than 100,000 cuneiform clay tablets -- a unique and priceless trove of ancient Mesopotamian writings that included the "Sippar Library," the oldest library ever found intact on its original shelves. Experts described the archive as the world's least-studied large collection of cuneiform -- the oldest known writing on Earth -- a record that covers every aspect of Mesopotamian life over more than 3,000 years. The texts resided in numbered boxes each containing as many as 400 3-inch-by-2-inch tablets. The Sippar Library, discovered in 1986 at...

Looting of the Iraq National Museum, long home to many rare and unique antiquities, has been big news. While much of the concern expressed about the fate of the museum certainly is genuine, at least some of the discussion has been driven by the anti-war crowd. If only the United States and the Coalition force had not invaded, their argument goes, then precious artifacts would not have been lost. But there's much more to the story. Like much else about the regime of Saddam Hussein, the museum was run with great secrecy about what it actually possessed. It seems that...

Expert Thieves Pillaged Iraqi Museums JOCELYN GECKER Associated Press PARIS - Professional thieves, likely organized outside Iraq, pillaged the nation's priceless ancient history collections by using the cover of widespread looting - and vault keys - to make off with irreplaceable items, art experts and historians said Thursday. The bandits were so efficient at emptying Iraqi libraries and museums that reports have already surfaced of artifacts appearing on the black market, some experts said. Certain thieves apparently knew exactly what they wanted from the irreplaceable Babylonian, Sumerian and Assyrian collections, and exactly where to find them. "It looks as if...

PARIS, April 17 (AFP) - Much of the looting of treasures at Iraq's national museum was carried out by organised gangs who traffic in works of ancient art, according to experts at a United Nations conference called on Thursday to examine the war-damage to the country's cultural heritage. "It looks as if at least part of the theft was a very deliberate, planned action," said McGuire Gibson, of Chicago University's Oriental Institute, who is president of the American Association for Research in Baghdad. "Probably (it was done) by the same sorts of gangs that have been paying for the destruction...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The head of a U.S. presidential panel on cultural property has resigned in protest at the failure of U.S. forces to prevent the wholesale looting of priceless treasures from Baghdad's antiquities museum. "It didn't have to happen," Martin Sullivan said of the objects that were destroyed or stolen from the Iraqi National Museum in a wave of looting that erupted as U.S.-led forces ended President Saddam Hussein's rule last week. Sullivan, who chaired the President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property for eight years, said he wrote a letter of resignation to the White House this week in...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Martin Sullivan, the head of President George W. Bush (news - web sites)'s cultural advisory committee, stepped down this week in protest over the United States failing to stop the looting of Baghdad's museum. AFP Photo Latest news: · U.S., Italy Consult Over Abu Abbas ExtraditionReuters - 4 minutes ago · Public Transportation Improves in Baghdad AP - 14 minutes ago · Bush's top cultural adviser steps down over looting of Iraqi museumAFP - 23 minutes ago Special Coverage   In a letter to Bush dated Monday, Sullivan said he was resigning as chairman of the...

<p>PARIS (AP) -- Some of the looters who ravaged Iraqi antiquities had keys to museum vaults and were able to take pieces from safes, experts said Thursday at an international meeting.</p> <p>The U.N. cultural agency, UNESCO, gathered some 30 art experts and cultural historians in Paris on Thursday to assess the damage to Iraqi museums and libraries looted in the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion.</p>

Museum Pillage Described as Devastating but Not Total By IAN FISHER BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 16 - Curators surveyed the damage at the National Museum of Iraq today, and expressed both worry at how much might have been stolen in the looting last week and tentative hope that thousands of years of Iraq's cultural heritage might not have vanished completely. "It's not a total loss," Donny George, the director of research for the Iraqi Board of Antiquities, said in an interview today. "But some of the major masterpieces are gone." The museum, which housed a priceless collection dating back 7,000 years...

According to a report by Greg Palkott at the museum in Baghdad, it is unclear how many priceless items were actually lost. He said that the staff was trained to secure the entire collection in 24 hours. A British team of curators which visited in the past, said that a great number of displayed items were "fakes" with the real artifacts safely secured. Palkott asked a "spokesman" for the museum, how many priceless items were lost. His answer was "some". Palkott pressed him, "not the 170,000 that we've been told about?" The spokesman said "We don't know".

It has now been more than twenty-four hours since the first news of the looting of the Baghdad Museum started coming in; the details mount, and the mourning becomes unbearable. I sit at my desk looking at a photo of a woman's head made of marble, whose empty eyes have stared back at me for my whole adult life. This amazing face had survived for more than five thousand years and I always took it for granted that it would gaze out at the world long after I was gone. Now, together with approximately 170,000 other objects: statues, stele, figurines,...

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- U.S. troops at Saddam Hussein's main palace complex said they have had to begin destroying Saddam's cars because so many looters have tried to take them. They fear that the cars could be used as suicide bombs or to create dangerous roadblocks. Destroying the cars, some of them American classics, has proven more painful for the U.S. troops than for the people who wanted to take them. Saddam's main palace complex is near the Tigris River on the city's west side. When soldiers arrived, they found two garages with about 60 cars. Among them: a 1917 Mercedes,...

The always amusing Robert Scheer, "columnist-fanatic" for the Los Angeles Times, never fails to grasp any straw that gives him a chance to rant about the Bush administration. Yesterday he was feverish over the weekend news from Iraq: "Destruction of one of the world's most significant collections of antiquities." Scheer arches his eyebrow and notes that the oil fields were protected, but not the museum. Get it? Scheer is simply echoing a complaint about the antiquities that has ricocheted around the elite media. This is a convenient excuse for disgraced gloom-mongers to switch the subject from the liberation of Iraq...

<p>Baghdad's museums, deplorably, have been looted. Determining the extent of the loss and assessing blame will take months, if not years. But there is an immediate question for the archaeological establishment to face: What to do now? Do we try to rescue what is left? Or do we simply write off the whole thing as a total loss?</p>

. "Look, it's a no-brainer because, unless you know for a fact this Sumerian piece has been in some English lord's collection for years, you can bet you're probably trading with Saddam Hussein and it's probably all stolen stuff with cooked-up, fake provenances. As a museum director, don't even bother with it, just hands off." FORT WORTH _ The Kimbell Art Museum is working to recover $2.7 million from a New York antiquities dealer after returning what was advertised as a rare Sumerian statue that the Kimbell bought last year, according to sources familiar with the transaction. Museum officials would...