US returns 17,000 antiquities to Iraq

This clay cone bearing cuneiform inscriptions was returned on August 3, 2021, during a ceremony at the Baghdad Foreign Ministry. • AFP

Last summer, the United States returned 17,000 ancient coins dating back 3,000 to 4,000 years to Iraq, the largest return since the American invasion in 2003! After intense negotiations between the authorities of the two countries, the Iraqi Prime Minister returned from a visit to Washington in a well-filled plane.

Since 2003, the archaeological sites are no longer monitored, and are deteriorating. As for the museums, they are looted. It is estimated that for the Bagad museum alone, 15,000 objects were stolen. But the director of antiquities and heritage at the museum in Basra, Iraq's second city, acknowledges that it is impossible to quantify the number of pieces stolen from the various sites. This looting comes from organized gangs but also from local populations seeking to survive.

Illegally acquired works

Iraqi remains end up in the hands of collectors, museums or Western universities, who can sometimes buy them in good faith, but are not always very careful about their origin. Of the 17,000 pieces returned, 12,000 come from the controversial Bible Museum in Washington, created by an evangelical family who had already had to return pieces illegally taken from Egypt after the 2011 revolution. Five thousand other Iraqi objects were in Cornell University, located in New York State.

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Most of the remains returned to Iraq date from the Sumerian period, one of the oldest civilizations in Mesopotamia. In September, an object particularly awaited by the Iraqis was officially handed over to them during a ceremony in Washington, an event celebrated by UNESCO:it is a clay tablet covered with cuneiform writing dating back 3,500 year. It features excerpts from the famous Epic of Gilgamesh , one of the oldest literary works of humanity, which relates the adventures of the king of the city of Ourouk in search of immortality. It was stolen from a museum in 1991 and introduced on the American art market in 2007 before being seized by the courts.