“It was found in 67 fragments but cleaned and restored by Christie’s.”
...remarkable that all the pieces were there.
A tedious job at best. I wonder if they used, or are aware of, a technique used by some ingenious archeologists in Israel. (Saw it on TV about a year ago.)
These geniuses had a computer program written that would take scanned pictures of pottery shards and trying different configurations, swapping the edges around until they fit - all at computer speed. Using something like a paint-by-numbers approach, they then took the physical pieces and matched them up to the computer screen and had the pot assembled in no time.
Now if only they could do some automatic transliteration of all those cuneiform tablets.