Mario Tama
Seventeen years after his flight, archaeologist McGuire Gibson is checking on eBay for a 4000-year-old cylindrical stone seal that he covered in Iraq in the 1970s.
Gibson, the cash director of an excavation that led through the University of Chicago in Nippur, the former devout capital of Mesopotamia, discovered the seal, used through a governor-turned-king.When rolled into a clay tablet, the seal certifies the governor’s documents.
“I was cleaning around a drain and I pulled out the beak and the thing blew up,” Gibson says.”I hit the seal at the end and jumped. It was a magnificent seal on agate with a truly glorious depiction of a human being led to a god.
The inscription indicated that it belonged to Shar-Kali-Sharri, who later king of the Sumerian and Akkadian empires.
“It’s an exceptional and very vital label,” says Gibson, co-author of Lost Heritage: Antiquities Stolen from Iraq’s Regional Museums. “I’m looking for this specific sealArray … I’m pretty sure it’s there.”
The coin among thousands looted from the National Museum of Baghdad in 2003, he said. Without orders from the U.S. military to protect the museum, U.S. infantry soldiers who helped overthrow Saddam Hussein remained standing as Iraqi looters untied at the museum.
Heritage experts estimate that thousands of other artifacts were looted directly from Iraqi archaeological sites after Saddam lost parts of the country in 1991, after the war to end Kuwait’s profession in Iraq. The looting and illegal industry of its antiquities in foreign markets continues to this day, according to Iraqi officials.
Environmentalists say the coronavirus pandemic has higher online sales of looted antiques on social networking sites like Facebook and other online platforms.
Some archaeologists estimate that up to 80% of the antiques for sale on Facebook and eBay lack documentation and are false or stolen, many at archaeological sites that were looted before they can be excavated by a professional.
“Unfortunately, at the same time as traders, galleries, auction houses and even museums are closed, the black market never stops,” says Tess Davis, executive director of the Antiquities Coalition, which fights cultural organized crime.
Thousands of sites with little protection
Iraq, home to the world’s first known civilizations, has at least 30,000 documented archaeological sites, far exceeding the capacity of the archaeological police specially designated to them, says Hosham Dawood, an adviser to Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi.
“You know, we have thousands of sites and only 4,800 police officers for them,” Dawood told NPR. “This means that we do not have the capacity, in addition to economic and security problems, with the weakness of the state.”
Dawood says looters dig into undeclared sites in southern Iraq, in coordination with creditors or traders who put what they find for sale or auction.
“Unfortunately, the pieces are exhibited at Christie’s and pass through Dubai, Beirut or Asia. We stick to interpol,” Dawood explains.
Recently, Iraq is negotiating with Hobby Lobby, the American arts and crafts channel, on what the Iraqi culture minister describes as a $15 million deal on the march of thousands of antiquities purchased for the Bible Museum. It is believed that these assets were looted. The Ministry of Culture said the agreement would pay Iraq for education and gadgets in exchange for lending certain pieces to the museum in Washington, D.C.
Auctions fuel black market demand
In one of the most notorious recent cases involving a looted item, Hobby Lobby ordered in May to confiscate a 3,500-year-old cuneiform pill that U.S. prosecutors said had been stolen from Iraq. According to a complaint from the Department of Justice, a foreign auction space provided documents incorrectly indicating the origin, the chain of ownership of the pill, when it sold the pill to Hobby Lobby in 2014.
Hobby Lobby then met the auction space as Christie’s, which is suing for the sale of $1.6 million.Christie’s said in a statement that he did not know that the documents from source had been forged.
But the U.S. complaint ordering Hobby Lobby to return the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet indicates that Christie’s had been informed that the original documents would not be examined. Christie’s then pledged to promote the pill as a component of a personal sale that at a public auction.
“I think it’s a preview of the commercial style used through an auction house, and in this case, Christie’s, which is of poor origin doesn’t mean they don’t sell it. It just determines how they’ll sell it.” says Patty Gerstenblith, director of the Center for Art Law, Museum and Cultural Heritage at DePaul University. “In a personal sale, no one will know unless, you know, years later, the government finds out and becomes a legal matter. But for the most part, no one will know that this sale took place.”
Among the other looted items that Hobby Lobby has been ordered to return to Iraq, there are cuneiform tablets from an undocumented Mesopotamia village called Irisagrig. The site in southern Iraq was illegally excavated, as researchers only learned of their lifestyle after the old clay tablets began to appear in foreign markets.
Iraq has to avoid public auctions of artifacts looted at Christie’s. Auction assistance sets out the costs of antiques sold in other options and, according to some archaeologists, the fuel required on the black market.
A bidding war at Christie’s two years ago sent the price of an ancient Assyrian bas-relief from Iraq soaring to more than $28 million, sparking fears that the high price would encourage antiquities looting. The relief had been sent to the U.S. by an American missionary in the mid-19th century, before laws prohibited the export of archaeological treasures, and pieces of ancient Nimrud were parceled off to those who could pay shipping costs.
Difficulty looting artifacts
A UNESCO conference in 1970 prohibits the export of antiquities without government permission. Items that were legally sold and exported prior to treaty ratification are considered legal for sale internationally, however, it can be incredibly difficult to determine when they have left their home country.
Distributors “have all sorts of tactics to solve this problem,” Gibson says. You hear them saying, ‘He’s been in this or that collection since 1953. It’s in this personal collection in Switzerland, in a personal collection somewhere else.’ And you know, how can you turn out that Array … came here from the floor in Iraq after that? Then it’s a very complicated thing. “
Christie’s and Sotheby’s auction houses claim to have policies to save you the sale of looted antiques.
In reaction to an NPR application, eBay says it is working intensively with government agencies, law enforcement and others to identify and remove any parts that may violate its policy prohibiting the sale of looted property.
The International Council of Museums’ Red List of stolen items includes a golden bowl of Ur and other ancient treasures from Iraq, including several cylinder seals — though not Gibson’s. But the vast majority of looted antiquities never make it onto such lists. Many are dug up, smuggled out and sold, without the world ever knowing of their existence.
Other pieces, too recognizable to be sold publicly, end up in personal collections, many of them in the Gulf, according to Gibson and other archaeologists, after being sold networks of merchants and intermediaries.
Another explanation for why it is difficult to locate all the looted pieces of Iraqi regional museums after 1991, Gibson says, is that museums had never fully documented their collections before that date.
“Some museums hadn’t been able to take pictures of the elements of their collections,” he says.
We may never know exactly what was stolen from the Iraqi National Museum.
“It’s anything in the diversity of 16,000 to 19,000 items,” Gibson says. “You had to go through every single one of the museum’s records. And, of course, many records were also destroyed when the museum hit. They burned them Array … People pulled out the drawers and dropped the records.”
Gibson keeps an eye on eBay in the hope that his seal will turn up, but he knows the chances are slim.
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