Seventeen years after his flight, archaeologist McGuire Gibson is checking on eBay for a 4,000-year-old stone cylinder seal he deflighted in Iraq in the 1970s.
Gibson, the box director of an excavation conducted through the University of Chicago at Nippur, the former devout capital of Mesopotamia, when he discovered the seal, used through a governor-turned-king, when rolled up on 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 he belonged to Shar-Kali-Sharri, who later king of the Sumerian and Akkadian empires.
“It’s an exceptional and very vital seal,” 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 he’s there.”
The coin among the thousands looted from the National Museum in Baghdad in 2003, he said. With no orders from the US military to protect the museum, the US infantrymen who helped topple Saddam Hussein stood by as Iraqi looters unleashed themselves on 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 as a result of the war that ended Kuwait’s profession in Iraq.Looting and illegal industry of its antiquities in foreign markets continue to this day, Iraqi officials say.
Environmentalists say the coronavirus pandemic has higher online sales of looted antiques on social networking sites such as 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 merchants, 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 little protection
Home to the world’s first known civilizations, Iraq has at least 30,000 documented archaeological sites, far exceeding the capacity of the archaeological police specially designated for them, said 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, to cope with the weakness of the state.”
Dawood says looters dig uninsured sites in southern Iraq, in coordination with creditors or traders who put what they find for sale or auction.
“Unfortunately, the pieces look like Christie’s and elsewhere, passing through Dubai, Beirut or Asia.We stick to Interpol,” Dawood says.
Iraq is lately negotiating with Hobby Lobby, the American arts and crafts channel, on what the Iraqi culture minister describes as a $15 million deal on the return of thousands of antiques purchased for the Bible Museum.These assets are believed to have been 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 demand for the black market
In one of the most notorious recent cases related to a looted object, Hobby Lobby ordered in May to confiscate a 3,500-year-old cuneiform pill that, according to U.S. prosecutors, 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 he 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 told that documents of source would not withstand scrutiny.Christie’s then pledged to promote the pill through a personal sale than a public auction.
“I think it’s a preview of the business style that an auction house has used, and in this case, Christie’s, which is bad-ass doesn’t mean I don’t sell it.It just determines how they’re going to sell it,” says Patty Gerstenblith, director of dePaul University’s Center for Art, Museums and Cultural Heritage.”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 was ordered to return to Iraq, there are cuneiform tablets from an ancient undocumented Mesopotamian city called Irisagrig.The site in southern Iraq was excavated illegally, as researchers only learned of their lifestyle after ancient clay.Tablets began to appear in foreign markets.
Iraq has taken steps to avoid public auctions of looted artifacts at Christie’s.Auctions set 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 raised the value of an ancient Assyrian bas-relief in Iraq to more than $28 million, leading to fears that higher value would inspire looting of antiquities.Relief had been sent to the United States through an American Missionary in the mid-19th century, before legislation prohibited the export of archaeological treasures, and the pieces of ancient Nimrud were sent to those who could afford shipping costs.
Difficulty looting artifacts
A UNESCO conference written in 1970 prohibits the export of antiquities without government permission.Items that were legally sold and exported prior to ratification of the treaty are considered legal for sale internationally, however, it can be incredibly difficult to determine when they are gone.your home country.
Distributors “have all sorts of tactics around that,” Gibson says.”Listen, you’re going to say, “He’s been in this or that collection since 1953.It’s in this personal collection in Switzerland, in a personal collection elsewhere.”you know, how can you turn out that … came off the ground in Iraq after that?So it’s a very complicated thing.”
Christie’s and Sotheby’s auction houses claim to have policies to save you from selling looted antiques.
In reaction to an NPR request, 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 Museum Council’s Red List of Stolen Items includes a golden bowl of Ur and other ancient Iraqi treasures, adding several cylindrical stamps, but Gibson, but the vast majority of looted antiques are never on those lists.Many are unearthed, smuggled and sold, without the world knowing they exist.
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 selling 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 never fully documented their collections before that date.
“Some museums didn’t take the time 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 range of 16,000 to 19,000 items,” says Gibson. You will have to go through all the museum records. And of course, many records were also destroyed when the museum hit. They burned them … People pulled out drawers and threw the files away.
Gibson helps keep an eye on eBay in the hope that his label will appear, but knows the odds are slim.
“You know, you’re in favor of ‘cylinder joints’ and a lot of things come up…There are many distributors in the Gulf who take care of this device and it looks and doesn’t look very, very quickly,” he says.”If you check for a week later and locate the same thing, let’s move on.”
Read the full story in NPR.org »
Italy has reduced its coronavirus cases after its inception as the epicenter of the pandemic, yet it sees a resurgence of the virus as businesses, adding nightclubs, reopen.