Lady of Warka recovered

Good news from Baghdad:

Investigators have recovered the Lady of Warka, one of the most valuable exhibits stolen from the Iraqi National Museum in the chaos during Saddam Hussein's fall, Iraq's new culture minister said on Wednesday.

The alabaster sculpture is believed to be one of the earliest artistic representations of the human face, dating from around 3500 BC.

"During the past two days, we were able to recover the second most valuable item of the Iraqi Museum, that is the face of the Lady of Warka, which is known as the Sumerian Mona Lisa," Mofeed al-Jazairi told a news conference. . .

Jazairi did not reveal exactly how the sculpture was recovered, but he said Iraqi police and U.S. military police had played a part.

ADDENDUM: There's a bit more word-of-mouth information about the recovery at the Iraqcrisis newsgroup. The post also makes reference to the recovery of the "sword of Saladin", also reported here.

Posted by David on September 17, 2003 9:00 PM