Baghdad museum looting update

From Newsweek, an article with pictures of the 30 objects on the museum's "most wanted" list. Also some further info on the ongoing investigation:

The most-wanted masterpieces were all either in the exhibit halls at the time of the looting, or in a single storage room on the main floor—Room 104. The thieves apparently were familiar with this location, and their pilfering was very selective indeed. “Someone who knows that museum and knows it well either did it or gave very good information to the people who did it,” says Matthew Bogdanos. . .

The high-value artifacts, worth millions of dollars to illicit dealers, presumably were smuggled out of Iraq very quickly after the thefts. According to Bogdanos, investigators are now focused on the buyers. “We go to the front end,” he says, meaning dealers mainly in New York and London. Bogdanos says he has concrete information and is targeting specific people, but, won’t elaborate. “Even though I might know a lot of it is in the storage room of a Madison Avenue gallery I can’t just go in there,” said Bogdanos. “It’s a process.” Earlier this month, he says, there were at least four separate seizures of items not on the most-wanted list in three different countries so far, though he wouldn’t provide details.

Those seizures haven't gotten much publicity, needless to say. Another great silence appears to have descended around Donny George. His last public statements were some time back; I meant to comment on them at the time, when he claimed that the flooding of the Central Bank's vaults was an ingenious plan to give additional protection from explosions. Rather odd, in that water transmits shock waves rather than dissipates them -- not to mention that all other reports stated that the water was sewage-laden, and that the containers used to store artifacts in the vaults were not waterproof.

UPDATE: Here's the details of one seizure:

The author of a book on rebuilding Iraq was arrested at Kennedy International Airport for allegedly smuggling stolen 4,000-year-old Mesopotamian artifacts out of Baghdad, authorities said.

Joseph Braude, author of "The New Iraq," was released on a $100,000 bond after a preliminary appearance Saturday in federal court. Braude, 28, brought the priceless artifacts into the United States on June 11, U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf said. He was arrested Friday night after arriving at the airport on a flight from London, she said.

Braude bought the three cylindrical stone seals, made of marble and alabaster, for $200 during a visit to Baghdad in June, authorities said. . .

According to authorities, the artifacts were discovered during a routine customs check when Braude flew into Kennedy in June. Braude allegedly had not declared any of the seals, which were adorned with human and animal figures and marked on the bottom with the letters "IM" and a serial number, authorities said. Braude insisted he had traveled to Kuwait and England, but not Iraq, Mauskopf said. . .

Officials questioned Braude at his Cambridge, Mass., home on June 18, when he admitted visiting Baghdad and purchasing the seals, Mauskopf said. He acknowledged knowing when he bought the seals that they probably had been stolen from the museum, she said.

A few more details in basically the same AP story in the Boston Globe.

AND in his post on this story, the Cranky Professor adds a few thoughts about cylinder seals:

Now to be honest I think that cylinder seals are, by and large, pretty and unimportant once published. They also survive in enormous quantity and are exactly the kind of object that make anti-antiquity trade fundamentalists sound very strange (much like Greek and Roman coinage or little clay lamps).

Posted by David on August 11, 2003 3:22 PM