Friese with Inlays
Showing Scenes of Dairy Farming
ca. 2400 B.C.E. | 22 x 115 cms
Limestone, Bitumen, Shell, Copper Frame
MISSING FROM BAGHDAD MUSEUM SINCE 2003



In the period 5000 – 4000 B.C.E., the Tell
or mound of Ubaid, near Ur formed much
of the early settlement of Mesopotamia - the culture that is identified by its distinctive style of pottery and the first village system to have existed in southern Mesopotamia.
It is unarguably the birthplace of agriculture and civilization - where people farmed the land, domesticated animals and fished at the Gulf. This Sumerian culture witnessed great artistic and cultural achievements, including the invention of first slow pottery wheel and the first written cuneiform script.

Many of the important artifacts of this early human civilization were collected in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad and were looted a few years ago amidst the chaos during the beginning of the infamous war in Iraq. Out of about 15,000 artifacts that were initially looted, only 35% have made their way back to the museum, and a few more have been identified or ceased by the law enforcement authorities around the world. Though a few of the most important artifacts like the Sacred Vase of Warka dated 3000 B.C.E. has been returned (shown here), other very important historical pieces like the headless statue from early Mesopotamia in Entemena, which has probably the first inscription stating the figure as a king, have not been found.

Another piece of great significance displayed here that still remains missing, is an alabaster relief, which is one of three fragments from a single stele that dates to the time of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, circa 2334 - 2154 B.C.E.

Looting art and artifacts for profit has been an integral part of the modern war in the middle east. Museums in Beirut were looted in the 1970s, the Kuwaiti museums were looted and burnt down by the Iraqi troops in 1991, and the Kabul Museum in Afghanistan was ransacked twice, once after heavy bombing in 1993, and then in 2001, just before Taliban leader’s hammers destroyed much non-Islamic art. In each case, the art objects made their way to the international market, often ending up being locked in secret vaults of private collectors and museums. The scrutiny of these stolen art objects in the international market is much more rigorous now than ever before, with museums and collectors refusing to buy such artifacts, or often turning them in to the authorities after acquiring them. But many at times, the loss is severe and irreparable as it becomes increasingly difficult to identify the origins of rediscovered objects especially when the archives of the museums, like that of Baghdad Museum in Iraq, were completely burnt down.

Identification of art objects is often problematic, as the artifacts don’t always appear in the archived form. Many times, in order to hide the origin/identity of the artifact, the marauders would saw or hammer down a part of the object and sell it in sections thus contributing to the permanent loss of heritage & history.

Scholars are calling this looting of the Baghdad Museum as the single most severe blow to cultural heritage in modern history. “This is like destroying all the museums at the Washington Mall” says Eleanor Robson, an Assyriologist at the University of Oxford, U.K. This is not just a great loss to the legacy of Iraq, but is a much greater loss to the entire human kind.