This makes me sick at heart.

One quick search...

(Hopefully they're all just replicas.)

Antiquities Hopefully this fellow's stuff is, too...

Aspire

A story from 2004

Lawless

Standing in the storerooms of the Iraq National Museum one morning last summer, I found myself surrounded by the appalling chaos left by looters. Everywhere manuscripts were strewn about, mixed with modern catalogue cards and broken bits of 6,000-year-old pottery. Smashed ancient glass lay where looters had dropped objects in their haste. Scanning the scattered shards, as an art historian and specialist in the archaeology of the ancient cultures of the Tigris-Euphrates valleys, I automatically began to identify objects and assign them dates. On the floor in front of me were remains of Mesopotamia, the cradle of" civilization: the land where the first cities were built, where writing was invented, and where human beings first conceived of institutionalized government and codes of law. The irony was that I now stood in a land without law, where the want of law had led to the plunder and destruction of so much of humanity's cultural heritage.

Red Lists

including...

Lost and Stolen - Afghanistan

and

Lost and Stolen - Iraq

'Inca Gold'....yeah, it's a Dirk Pitt novel, and I've seen widely varying critiques of Cussler's work and abilities....Hack or no, he frequently touches on historical and archaeological matters, in such a fashion as to get your attention and keep it.

Here, the protagonists have to deal with a world-wide artifact-smuggling operation while chasing down a lost Inca treasure. While Pitt & co. were able to stop their opposition, it was perfectly clear that this was only a battle, and there's no way to win the war; as long as there are people with money wanting to spend that money collecting artifacts of historical significance there will be thieves willing to steal and fence said artifacts.

Add to this sad statement on the state of Human nature the fact that protecting the sites was not a military priority during the fighting, and the police or guards that could have guarded them afterwards were disarmed and sent home. It might as well be our fault, insofar as our military and political figures laid the groundwork for what happened.

I've been bummed about this since the invasion...and short of confiscating the collections of every wealthy individual around to check for illegally-obtained pieces, I see no solution that will be even remotely easy. Look at how long it took to return some of the Nazi loot?

-5.75,-4.05 Rule of the Great:
When people you greatly admire appear to be thinking deep
thoughts, they probably are thinking about lunch.

There's a rather odd grabbag of information at a website that bills itself as the "Iraq Museum International"

I especially like this....

with the tag...

"SAFETY IN IRAQ: CIVILIZATION + RISK
Iraq Museum International strongly urges archaeological teams and others visiting Iraq to first undergo
civilian safety training such as the workshop on surviving execution offered by Crisis Response International."