The British Museum is returning 156 looted Mesopotamian texts, written on clay in cuneiform script, to the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, the largest ever haul of looted items to be seized in the UK and returned to Iraq.

At the same time, the Museum is returning a collection of Taliban-looted, 4th century Gandharan sculptures to Kabul in Afghanistan. Both repatriations are part of the Museum’s work on cultural heritage involving partnerships with law enforcement agencies. 

When discovered entering the UK illicitly in 2011 - at that time the cuneiform tablets were described as "miniature handmade clay tiles" - there followed an investigation by HMRC's Fraud Investigation Service, who sent them to the British Museum in 2013 for analysis, conservation and cataloguing. The Museum has been liaising with the national museums in Iraq and Afghanistan to arrange the return of both groups of objects. 

Neither group of objects entered the Museum’s permanent collection.

Many of the tablets, which date to between 2100BC and 1800BC belonging to the Ur III and Old Babylonian dynasties, are understood to have come from the city of Irisagrig, a site that suffered harshly from random looting in the immediate aftermath of the second Gulf war and the American-led invasion of Iraq.  They represent mostly economic documents, letters, legal and school texts, as well as mathematical calculations.

The collection of nine  Buddhist statue heads and a torso, stripped from a Buddhist monastery in the ancient kingdom of Gandhāra, were recovered at Heathrow airport in 2003 from a flight which originated from Peshawar in Pakistan. Almost certainly looted from Afghanistan during the Taliban’s orgy of iconoclasm in early 2001, the British Museum will be returning these statues, after conservation and exhibition, to Kabul. 

Earlier this month, another huge hoard of almost 500 stolen artefacts, dating back to 4000 BC, was returned to Pakistan after confiscation from an unidentified dealer by French police.  The looted items, including terracotta pots, busts and goblets, are understood to come from burial sites in Pakistan's Balochistan province.

An EU Parliament Resolution in January this year included a horrifying, but unverified statistic that claimed at least 80% of all worldwide antiquities sales comprise artefacts of illicit origin.  The British Museum maintains the returns it is making to Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrate their on-going commitment to fighting this illicit trade and will help preserve the cultural heritage currently under assault in conflict zones.  The Museum is determined to send a message that all plundered items entering the UK will be returned via diplomatic means to their country of origin. 

The Museum used an exhibition earlier this year about the last great ruler of ancient Assyria, Ashurbanipal to highlight the work undertaken by its Iraq Emergency Heritage Management Training Scheme. In response to the destruction by ISIS of heritage sites in Iraq and Syria, the British Museum's scheme offers training to 50 members of the Iraq State Board of Antiquities and Heritage staff in techniques of retrieval and rescue archaeology.

Photo: The British Museum, London 

Courtesy of PublicDomainImages from Pixabay