‘Looted’ Iraqi sculpture sells for $31m in New York
A 3,000-year-old gypsum carving sold for almost $31 million at Christie’s auction house in New York last night, shattering the record for Assyrian art, despite last-minute protests by the Iraqi government to halt the sale.
The carving of the “winged genius” was billed as the most exquisite piece of Assyrian art to reach the market in decades, and formed the centrepiece of Christie’s antiquities sale with an estimate of $10m to $15m.
Frantic bidding rapidly pushed it well beyond the previous record of $12m.
“Staying at the back of the room here in New York, at Christie’s,” said the auctioneer raising his gavel. “$27.25m … is sold.”
The final price brought gasps to the crowded room.
With commissions, that means the two-metre frieze was sold to an unidentified bidder standing at the back of the room for almost $31m.
Iraq’s Foreign Ministry had demanded the sculpture it claimed belonged to the country should be returned.
“The artefact belongs to Iraq and is under the protection of Iraqi Antiquities Law,” ministry spokesman Ahmed Mahjoob said.
The two-metre section of bas relief features a winged genie, a deity also known as an Apkallu, holding a bucket and a cone-shaped object.
The mural once adorned the wall of the Northwest Palace at Nimrud and was commissioned by King Ashurnasirpal II, who ruled ancient Assyria from 883 to 859BC.
Baghdad’s central government objected to the sale, claiming the object was a looted piece of its heritage.
“Iraq’s embassy in Washington is following the case with the New York prosecutor and the US government,” Mr Mahjoob said.
Christie’s says the relief was acquired in Mosul in 1859 by an American missionary named Henri Byron Haskell from the English archaeologist Sir Austen Henry Layard, who led excavations near Mosul in the mid-1800s.
“The relief arrived in Alexandria [Virginia] in 1860, making it one of the earliest-known examples of ancient art to reach American soil,” Christie’s said.
But Iraq’s Culture Ministry claims it was taken from Nimrud during the 1970s.
Iraq’s Culture Ministry has contact Interpol and Unesco, the UN cultural organisation, to stop the sale and repatriate the artefact.