Ancient sculpture returned

Baghdad Museum caretaker Mossen Hassen lovingly unwraps the cloth around the box holding a lifelike alabaster stone face with a broken-off nose. “She’s back,” he says in Arabic, touching the damaged nose of the Lady of Warda, a more than 5,000-year-old sculpture of a woman’s face. “This is one of the most important pieces of Iraqi civilization.” How the head came back into Hassan’s hands is a tale of the new cooperation between the Iraqi police and the US military in Iraq. It was returned to the Iraqi police, working with the 812th US Military Police, after a raid on a farm outside of Baghdad. Police were also given some small cylindrical seals looted from the museum and believed to be from the same era, according to Dr. Ahmed Kamil, an Iraq expert in uniform tablets who was involved in the recovery effort. “It’s the only one in the world. No one can put a price on it,” Kamil told IRIN at the museum, as he displayed the head and the intricately carved cylinders, which were once used as stamps or seals on documents to conduct business transactions. Looters stole the head along with 10,000 other priceless artifacts in the days immediately following the fall of former president Saddam Hussein, Kamil said. Police made the recovery after receiving a tip off from some neighbours of the looter who stole the head, according to Safa Adeen Mahdi Salih, an Iraq police colonel. Iraqi police went to the site named by the tipster and found the piece under some grass. "Police took two people into custody while they continue to investigate," Salih told IRIN. The piece was then given to Iraq’s minister of culture. But Hassan is the caretaker of such objects, so the piece was returned to his office in the museum, which is filled with various pieces of ancient civilizations. “They took it from this room,” Kamil lamented, gesturing around to metal shelves lining the high walls. Seven other large pieces were still missing - pieces for which Kamil said the museum planned to offer rewards. All of the pieces were labelled with museum numbers, so it would be hard to sell them, he said hopefully. Museum workers put numerous pieces away in locked storerooms and in the director’s office. Many were stolen, but many remained, Kamil said. Large pieces were left in the museum, including a bronze bull used outside an ancient temple, a statue of a king, a vase also found in the ancient southern city of Warka, a slab from the palace of an Assyrian king and a column with writing dated to the middle Assyrian period. All were taken, according to Kamil. “It takes time to get them to come back to us. We put a list on the Internet to tell everyone in the world that these pieces come from our museums so nobody will touch them or deal with them,” he added. Most of the 10,000 pieces are the cylinder seals, which are the size of beads and decorated with people, gods, animals and rituals of the society of ancient Iraq.