NYT: U.S. Helps Recover Entemena Statue and Gives It Back to Iraqis

[DeepModem Mom]

U.S. Helps Recover Statue and Gives It Back to Iraqis
By BARRY MEIER and JAMES GLANZ
Published: July 26, 2006


(Angel Franco/The New York Times)
A headless stone statue of the Sumerian king Entemena of Lagash, looted in the ransacking of Iraq’s National Museum three years ago, has been recovered.

One of the most important treasures looted in the ransacking of Iraq’s national museum three years ago has been recovered in a clandestine operation involving the United States government and was turned over to Iraqi officials in Washington yesterday.

The piece, a headless stone statue of the Sumerian king Entemena of Lagash, was stolen in the days after the fall of Baghdad. In the wake of the looting, American officials came under sharp criticism from archaeologists and others for failing to secure the museum, a vast storehouse of artifacts from civilization’s first cities....

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In interviews over the weekend in Baghdad, Iraqi officials expressed relief that the statue of the king, which had stood in the center of the museum’s second-floor Sumerian Hall, had been found. But the same officials voiced frustration at what they said was the slow pace of international cooperation on the recovery of artifacts....

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“We will fix it and put it in the same place where it was,” (Mohsen Hassan, an expert at the museum’s commission on antiquities) said, adding that security had largely been restored at the museum, which is close to notorious Haifa Street in a district that periodically erupts in violence.

But a tour of the building over the weekend, granted reluctantly by Mr. Hassan, raised questions as to how the museum could function while housing valuable artifacts like the statue. A walk down a corridor toward the Sumerian Hall, for example, ended abruptly at a concrete wall, which someone had crudely crosshatched with a fingertip to simulate bricks. Mr. Hassan awkwardly conceded that four times since the invasion, he had been forced to wall off the collections as the only reliable means of preventing further looting....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/26/world/middleeast/26antiquities.html

[Name removed]

1. Deleted message

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[Javaman]

2. This is wonderful news...

With the recovery of each object that was looted, a small piece of Iraqi identity is recovered.