Iraq's lost art: an ongoing investigation - Front Page - objects stolen from Iraqi National Museum, Baghdad, Iraq

In the wake of the looting of Iraq's National Museum in Baghdad last April, estimates of loss and damage fluctuated, depending on which reports one read [see "Front Page," June '03]. Some journalists claimed that nearly all of the museum's 170,000 objects had disappeared, while others said that only a handful of items had been stolen. Helping to clarify at least some aspects of the situation, the museum was opened briefly to diplomats and journalists in early July, and in late summer American, British and Iraqi investigators released a list of 30 major missing works as well as a preliminary assessment of total losses and damages sustained by the museum during the U.S. bombing and subsequent anarchy.

Over the past four months, museum director Donny George, Iraqi museum staff and British Museum experts, working with Matthew Bogdanos, the U.S. Marine colonel in charge of the investigation, determined that while some works have been voluntarily returned by local residents or seized in raids, a total of some 13,000 items are still missing from the museum. Worth millions of dollars, the 30 works highlighted by the team, including a 4,500-year-old bronze sculpture base weighing more than 300 pounds, as well as an ancient Sumerian plate and a white marble Sumerian mask of a goddess, both more than 5,000 years old, were stolen from display cases in the public galleries or were taken from a single storage room on the main floor. Most of the less valuable pieces were taken from various storage areas or display cases throughout the museum building. For the investigators, the specificity of the vandals' targets indicates that the thefts of the major pieces were preplanned to some degree. For that reason, according to Bogdanos, the focus of the investigation is now on buyers. He indicated to the press that many of these "most-wanted" pieces probably left the country soon after the looting and are expected to appear on the international market soon, most likely in London or New York.

To prove that some of the country's treasures are still in Iraq, U.S. officials reopened the museum for a two-hour display. The focus of the exhibition was a collection of 3,000-year-old royal Assyrian treasures from Nimrod, mostly gold jewelry that was recently discovered in storage and which has not been seen in public since the 1980s. Also on view were a number of works that recently returned to the museum under its "amnesty" policy allowing Baghdad residents to return stolen items with no questions asked. Among those thus retrieved is the well-known Warka Vase (ca. 3,000 B.C.), a 5-foot-high alabaster vessel with carved and painted figures, which looters smashed into 15 pieces.

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