Looted treasures cold case cracked
Of all the ancient sites in all the wartorn countries in all the world, they were stolen a decade ago from the one where the British Museum is working. An antiquities ‘‘cold case’’ has been solved after the museum pinpointed the original home of a set of looted artefacts as a temple in Iraq that it is helping to excavate. The eight objects are about 5000 years old and include amulets, stamp seals and clay cones. They were seized by the Metropolitan Police from a dealer in London 15 years ago. The dealer, who has not been named but has since ceased trading, failed to supply proof of ownership. They are thought to have been looted around the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which was led by the United States and Britain. With no documentation and the only clues being in cuneiform the artefacts sat for years in police stores. When Scotland Yard’s art and antiquities squad re-formed late last year under new command, cold cases were reinvestigated and the artefacts were handed to the museum for analysis. The cuneiform inscriptions on three of the objects identified them as having come from the ancient Sumerian city of Girsu, one of the oldest on earth, modernday Tello in southern Iraq. The inscriptions identified the Sumerian king who had had them made as well as the god they were dedicated to and the Eninnu temple they were made for. As it happened, the museum was at that moment working with archaeologists in Iraq at the very same temple. ‘‘We could trace them not just to the site but to within inches of where they were stolen from,’’ said St John Simpson, the senior curator of pre-Islamic collections at the museum. ‘‘This is a very happy outcome, nothing like this has happened for a very, very long time if ever.’’ The small artefacts will be presented to the Iraqi embassy today in a ceremony at the British Museum and later returned to Iraq to be reunited with other remnants from the site. The museum said that the evidence suggested that the site had been raided to only a limited extent. ‘‘The scale is not as extensive or systematic as witnessed at other sites in southern Iraq,’’ Simpson said. The Eninnu temple is now protected by the Iraqi archaeological police, according to the museum. For two years its own Iraq emergency heritage management training scheme has been conducting excavations at the site. The scheme, funded by the British government, aims to train Iraqis in retrieval and rescue archaeology. The return of the antiquities has highlighted London’s clandestine role in the multibillion-pound global trade in looted artefacts. With continuing turmoil in regions that gave rise to some of the world’s earliest societies, there is concern that many other looted artefacts – with little documentation and few clues to identify their origin – are being trafficked through the capital. Hartwig Fischer, the director of the British Museum, said that they were ‘‘absolutely committed to the fight against illicit trade and damage to cultural heritage’’. He added: ‘‘The return of these objects is particularly poignant given the connection to Tello, one of the sites currently being excavated by the Iraq scheme.’’
‘‘This is a very happy outcome, nothing like this has happened for a very, very long time if ever.’’ St John Simpson, British Museum senior curator of pre-Islamic collections