Treasures back on view in Iraq
A 4,300-year-old Mesopotamian statue rescued from a Baghdad cesspool took center stage Tuesday when Iraq’s National Museum put on display hundreds of recovered treasures it had lost in a postwar looting spree.
The museum has recovered only about 4,000 objects from the 14,000 looted when Baghdad fell to invading U.S. forces in April, Culture Minister Mofeed al-Jazaeri told a news conference.
Some of the 800 items on display were up to 5,000 years old and belonged to Iraq’s Sumerian, Akkadian and Babylonian civilizations. Some were bought off the black market. Others were stumbled upon purely by chance, such as the Akkadian Bassetki, a copper statue of a seated man that American troops searching for guerrillas uncovered in a Baghdad cesspool.
Museum director Donny George said the natural curves in the figure, the top half of which is lost, made it a pioneering work in the history of human art.
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