Where, oh where, have my WMD gone?

While we are still waiting to hear how the search for Iraqi weapons pans out, there's a interesting piece here, suggesting the possibility that Saddam's own weapons scientists might have been scamming him. It concludes:

In the event that we do not find the WMD smoking gun this is the only explanation that would make any sense. Saddam wanted the program and was willing to endure crippling sanctions to have it. However, his henchmen were unable to deliver and, unwilling to be on the receiving end of Saddam's zero-defects program, they faked it. In the process of making Saddam believe he had a functioning program they could easily have sucked U.S. intelligence into the deception. In fact, deceiving U.S. intelligence in this way would have been important to them. It would not have been conducive to a long life if the United States had come to Saddam and told him they had discovered he had no WMD program and all of his most trusted advisers were lying.

INCIDENTALLY, how did the term, "weapons of mass destruction", end up applied to biological and chemical agents? One would never refer to the results of an epidemic or of poisoning as "destruction". If you want to lump together unconventional weapons that kill huge numbers indiscriminately, why not stick to the old military acronym NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical)? "WMD" seems pretty well entrenched, however -- though one might choose to redefine it as standing for "weapons of mass death".

Baghdad museum update

Just in from Boston.com:

U.S. authorities said Friday they are scaling back the estimates of how much treasure was looted from Iraq's National Museum after discovering that museum officials have been stashing items in secret vaults for at least 13 years.

Museum officials have squirreled away gold, manuscripts and other treasures in the vaults since at least 1990, before the start of the 1991 Gulf War, to protect them from looters, said U.S. Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos. . .

Bogdanos said early estimates of 170,000 stolen artifacts were far too high, adding that ''something in the range of thousands'' of items taken from the museum remain missing. Those include the Sacred Vase of Warca from 3000 B.C. [note that this contradicts recent reports of its recovery -- D.]

The missing head from the damaged Golden Harp of Ur, from 2450 B.C., is believed to be safe, he said. Other items expected to be recovered include the Treasure of Nimrud and some gold jewelry.

The museum's records were not well kept and an accurate estimate of missing items will take months, he said. He added that some offsite vaults are still sealed. ''According to museum staff, they removed 15 to 20 boxes of gold and jewelry including the famed Treasure of Nimrud to vaults of the Central Bank of Iraq over the past 13 years,'' Bogdanos said.

One still-secret storage location has been used since 1990. Bogdanos said museum officials promised an inventory of that vault within a week but they won't tell the Americans where it is. They say they will tell a new Iraqi government once it is sworn in.

This is most peculiar. The desire to make off with Iraq's cultural treasures is the one charge no one has levied against the American occupation forces -- and enough top Baghdad museum officials are familiar with the world of archeology outside of Iraq that they should have no doubt that the Americans will not act like the Iraqis themselves did in Kuwait. Of course, that raises the issue of what might be in the hidden vaults that the museum officials don't want found. Or, what might not be in those vaults:

Bogdanos blamed most of the looting on former museum officials. ''The first- and second- level storage rooms were looted but show no signs of forced entry,'' he said. ''The keys to this floor were last seen in a director's safe and are now missing.''

Meanwhile, this Chicago Tribune article (also reprinted with changes and additions here) suggests that some academics still do not seem to be thinking sufficiently critically, as they hail the museum staff's heroism without asking the harder questions:

The preliminary report on the looting of the National Museum of Iraq is scheduled to be released by the Pentagon today, but after spending several days inspecting the damage, McGuire Gibson, professor of Mesopotamian archaeology at the University of Chicago, has reached his own verdict. "We have dodged a bullet," he said yesterday. . . "through some luck and some real preparations by the museum staff, we have saved a lot". . .

The preparations included moving hundred of boxes of museum treasure to safe storage in an air raid shelter several miles from the museum. Luck spared several priceless pieces that were there for the taking but were overlooked by looters.

An example of the latter is the Basalt Stella, a carved frieze that dates to the third millennium B.C. The thieves ignored it. "This chunk of rock is extremely important. We were very worried about it," said Gibson, patting the black stone fondly.

Again raising the question why it would have been bypassed by the mysterious gangs of international master criminals, claimed by museum officials to have carefully prepared their moves well in advance.

"The museum authorities didn't have much time, but they got some very important stuff in storage and they completely trusted that the U.S. would secure the museum. They were inside waiting to surrender it, but the U.S. never came," said Gibson, who is also head of the American Association for Research in Baghdad.

If ready to turn over the vaults then, why the reticence now? Gibson, you may recall, was the one who the Guardian reported as stating, convincedly if not convincingly:

"I have a suspicion it was organized outside the country, in fact I'm pretty sure it was,'' Gibson said. He added that if a good police team was put together, "I think it could be cracked in no time.''

Finally, virtually everyone concerned still seems to be thinking in terms of artifacts as objects, worrying about the loss of "treasures" rather than the potential loss of knowledge:

An additional 1,000 to 1,200 pieces are missing from the museum's storage areas, but these are described as "excavation site pieces" that are mainly valuable for research purposes [emphasis added - D.]. "The struggle we have here is that numbers simply cannot tell the whole story. Ten thousand pottery shards don't equal one vase of Warka," Bogdanos said.

Bill Bertoia obit

William S. ‘Bill’ Bertoia, antique toy authority and founder of Bertoia Auctions in New Jersey, has died at the age of 52, after battling with cancer.

Read the rest here, at the Antiques Trade Gazette, dateline 13 May.

A longer remembrance by David S. Smith in the Bee.

Lightning strikes persistent golfer twice in four holes

Darwin Awards, anyone?:

Pub manager Vincenzo Frascella, 50, of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, was struck on the 14th and 17th holes of the Orton Meadows Golf Course in Peterborough on Wednesday. Both times bolts struck the tip of his umbrella as he sheltered during storms.

"It's one of those things where you don't know whether you're lucky to be alive or unlucky to have been hit. I actually think I was a bit unlucky," said Mr Frascella, a father of two who has a golf handicap of 25. "The first time there was a flash and I felt it go down my arm. The second was a bit worse. It went through my shoulder blade. It was like needles going all the way from my shoulder down my arm. I carried on and finished the round. I didn't think too much of it to be honest. I haven't been checked out or anything and I haven't felt any ill effects.

From Ananova.

Update on self-defense in Britain

A rather eye-opening letter to National Review Online in response to the article to which we linked a few days ago.

The letter (which you should read for yourself) rather dramatically illustrates the depth of British government hostility towards citizen self-defense -- a hostility that will shock most Americans, regardless of politics. For even in fervently anti-gun circles, no one would openly call for women not to fight back against an assailant, let alone demand that they be prosecuted if they do. Yet what would be looked upon as lunacy here, is now official policy there. Sic transit gloria Britanniae.

Thanks to Instapundit for the pointer.

INCIDENTALLY, it should be mentioned that UK government policy is by no means in accord with popular opinion, which, as this recent Observer poll revealed, is much closer to what one might expect in the USA. A few findings: 67% supported reintroduction of the death penalty; 68% found it acceptable to use deadly force to protect property; 22% would be "tempted to carry a gun for protection" if permitted; 80% supported a "three strikes" program; 82% believed those under 18 charged with serious crimes should be prosecuted as adults. Londoners' responses tended to diverge sharply from other Britons': "only 7 per cent of Londoners [responded that they were] tempted to carry a gun, compared to 55 per cent of those living in Yorkshire/Humberside, and 45 per cent of those living in the West Midlands." Across the board, however, the respondents displayed a lack of concern about individual privacy and civil liberties that clearly set them apart from their American brethren.

Another bog body found in Ireland

A remarkably well-preserved body found in a Midlands bog could be up to 2000 years old. The body is potentially of significant international archaeological interest, the National Museum of Ireland said yesterday.

The headless body was discovered by a Co Offaly farmer as he was digging a drain close to his home. The skin was still intact on the upper torso, the clothes were preserved and there was a bracelet on the upper arm.

Read the rest here. And for more background on bogs and bog bodies, look here and here. A number of bog bodies appear to have been victims of ritual killings, as this BBC report explains.

You know the pollen count is high when. . .

. . . you go to the eye doc to see what can be done about your burning, itching orbs, and then he walks in -- and looks even worse than you do. So I had to settle for some medicated eyedrops and the reassurance of company in my misery. Anyway, that's one reason posting has been a bit inconsistent here lately.

Jewish life in the ancient Diaspora: southern Italy

My dissertation involved much study of non-Christian (and heterodox) imagery in late antique burials; I haven't really kept up with the literature in the last several years, so this morning's NY Times article on what sounds to be a resurgence of interest in the Jewish past of southern Italy caught my eye:

The [Venosa] catacomb is only one of dozens of Jewish sites, artifacts, documents, rare books and manuscripts being discovered, analyzed and restored in southern Italy and Sicily. This work by scholars and government authorities is beginning to flesh out the largely unknown story of vibrant yet long-lost communities of Jews that inhabited the region from Roman times to the end of the Middle Ages. Jews were expelled from southern Italy, known then as the Kingdom of Naples, in the 16th century. Few returned even after the ban was lifted in the 18th century.

Historians associated with the excavation believe the catacomb may be the largest ever found in Western Europe. Hundreds of niches have already been cleared, the bones either looted or reburied according to ritual law. What is striking is that the inscriptions on the burial slabs found to date are almost totally in Greek. There is little or no Hebrew. When Hebrew is used, the characters mostly spell out Greek or Latin words. Both Greek and Latin were commonly used in that part of Italy at the time. This suggests an assimilated life for the Jews who may have lived here outside Venosa between the third and seventh centuries A.D. "Our Jews were not separated from everyone else in those early centuries," said Dr. Cesare Colafemmina, visiting professor of Hebrew and Hebraic literature at the University of Calabria.

Documents indicate that Emperor Titus brought 5,000 captives to the region after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in A.D. 70, Dr. Colafemmina said. But hundreds more are thought to have settled here before and after that time, simply because it was a prosperous crossroads of maritime trade. And Jews played a vital role in Mediterranean commerce. By the end of the fourth century many towns were dominated by Jews. They even became political and community leaders, he said.

The article notes that much of the work is being done by Italian scholars who are not Jewish, but it does not really go deep enough into the background to the previous neglect. At least in Rome, many Jewish sites were not well treated; the story of the Villa Tolonia catacomb is but one example, and luckily one with what seems to be a reasonably happy ending.

This is an interesting find that I had not been aware of:

. . . there is a first-century travertine tombstone now in the basement of the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, yet another example of vibrant Jewish life here during the first millennium. It was found in 1996 in the museum's storehouses by Dr. Giancarlo Lacerenza of the Oriental Institute in Naples and a specialist in ancient Near Eastern history. Its emotionally charged Latin inscription is now regarded by scholars as the first archaeological corroboration of the plight of the Jewish captives being herded by the Romans into Italy from Jerusalem in the late first century A.D.

This is the headstone of Claudia Aster, a 25-year-old Jew brought to the area, probably as a girl, and sold as a household slave. The inscription reads: "Claudia Aster, captive from Jerusalem. Tiberius Claudius Proculus, imperial freedman, took care of this epitaph. I ask you to make sure through the law that you take care that no one casts down my inscription."

Roman ship excavation

Following up on a story from January, here is the latest on the Netherlandish shipwreck excavation:

Archaeologists unveiled the oldest shipwreck ever recovered in the Netherlands on Thursday, an astonishingly well-preserved Roman military transport that sank along the banks of the Rhine 18 centuries ago.

Although other ships have been found in what was the sprawling Roman Empire, the flat-bottomed barge is one of the few found north of the Alps. It was built about 180 A.D., when Marcus Aurelius passed the throne to the emperor Commodus.

``What's really exciting is that the type is slightly different from others that have been found,'' said maritime archaeologist Andre van Holk, who oversaw the excavation. ``It's longer and thinner.''

The ship's 75-foot-long exterior is intact, as are a masthead and iron nails. The ship held no cargo when it sank, but the narrow construction and other remains - including a decorated chest complete with lock and key - suggest it may have been used by a paymaster sailing upriver with supplies for military camps and bases along the Rhine.

The ship, along with its wooden mooring, was found in De Meern, about three miles west of Utrecht, near what was once the site of a Roman military camp.

From the Guardian.

OCR for Sanskrit

A work in progress, as reports the NY Times:

Documents written in Devanagari, the script used for Sanskrit and other South Asian languages, can be scanned as images. But optical character recognition, or O.C.R., software for turning Devanagari texts into digital information that can be searched and reformatted has not been commercially available. . .

In an effort to accelerate the development of O.C.R. software for Devanagari (a compound word whose literal translation is "city of immortals"), Cedar [Center of Excellence in Document Analysis and Recognition, at the State University of New York at Buffalo] and the Indian Statistical Institute are distributing a script-recognition tool that they hope will become the international standard for software that can recognize Devanagari.

Their script-recognition software, which can be downloaded free at www.cedar.buffalo.edu/ILT, can separate lines and individual characters written in the flowing script. It then offers an on-screen transliteration in Roman characters for proofreading.

Dr. Govindaraju said that in the early 1990's, Cedar gave away similar tools it had created for the United States Postal Service to analyze handwriting. "That spurred work in the Roman alphabet on handwriting recognition," he said. "There has been tremendous progress since then."

90% of Iraqi National Library reported safe

I have not posted much lately on the looting of Baghdad's museums and libraries, though a summary of what is currently known and a rundown of the key players is overdue. At least in part, the delay has been due to the steady trickle of news contradicting earlier reports, the latest of which appears in the
Boston Globe:

Inside a cavernous room at the Al Hak Mosque in the newly named Revolution City, roughly 400,000 manuscripts, biographies, religious works, and graduate-school theses are stacked to the 12-foot ceiling and gathering dust in the dry, 95-degree heat. . .

''We had to protect the Islamic and Arabic heritage, so we acted before Baghdad fell to chaos,'' said Mohammad al-Jawad al-Tamimi, the mosque's imam. ''These books, it concerns the whole country''. . .

''We have about 30 percent of the library holdings, and another 60 percent are hidden [at the library] and elsewhere,'' said the sheik's brother, Mahmoud al-Tamimi. ''We brought them all here to protect our past from thieves". . .

Librarians say that as American troops pressed into Baghdad April 9, they pleaded with soldiers to protect the site from looters and Kuwaiti arsonists. They said the Kuwaitis were bent on revenge for the 1990-91 invasion and war. But the troops were involved with the business of the day, toppling Saddam Hussein's regime.

The library staff then turned to mosques, Mahmoud Tamimi said, and came to him. Tamimi and his family began working with Hawza -- Shi'ite leaders who loosely coordinate city and regional religious affairs -- to recruit volunteers to protect the library. On April 10, teams of men began moving library shelves at random into trucks belonging to neighbors of Tamimi's mosque 8 miles away. ''No one tried to stop us,'' Tamimi said.

The work continued for four days, until the arsonists appeared. Other books and artifacts were hidden elsewhere on site, and library workers believe that at least some of those items survived the fire and looting.

The story sounds plausible, though I will have to look into these allegations of Kuwaiti arsonists seeking revenge. Offhand, it sounds rather implausible, though a more comfortable explanation for Iraqis than admission that their fellow citizens wielded the torch.

Eric Idle does Merchant Ivory

I don't get out to the movies as much as I'd like to, but this sounds promising:

Eric Idle is to make a Merchant Ivory spoof called Remains of the Piano.

Billy Connolly and Geoffrey Rush are among the big names to sign up to the comic costume drama. The film, which begins shooting in August, will send up some of Britain's most renowned acting talent. Daniel Day-Lewis will be played by Lord of the Rings star Orlando Bloom, while Patrick Stewart plays a character called Obie Ben Kingsley.

Pounds, not Euros

What really has me surprised about this headline story is that no one seemed to see it coming.

OK, I confess I didn't post anything about it, either. But back in mid-March, when Tony Blair openly accused Jacques Chirac of "poisoning" international diplomacy by promising to veto any UN resolution authorizing military action against Saddam Hussein, I read the news and commented to my wife, "they'll never give up the pound now."

Polls consistently show the majority of British citizens want to keep the pound; Blair, however, had made the adoption of the Euro one of his personal goals, and would likely have succeeded eventually. But once he realized that the Franco-German axis was fundamentally untrustworthy, it was obvious the game was up. Blair played it cool, though, and even now, he has not openly changed his stance: for the record, he has simply accepted Chancellor Gordon Brown's assessment that the UK is not ready to join the Euro zone -- but it is clear that this would not have been so passively accepted before Blair had been so thoroughly alienated by the would-be custodians of UK's monetary policy.

Save the languages!

The number of "living" languages spoken in the world is dwindling faster than the decline in the planet's wildlife, according to a new study. . .

Linguists estimate that there are 6,809 "living" languages in the world today, but 90 per cent of them are spoken by fewer than 100,000 people, and some languages are even rarer – 46 are known to have just one native speaker. "There are 357 languages with under 50 speakers. Rare languages are more likely to show evidence of decline than commoner ones," Professor Sutherland said. . .

Over the past 500 years, about 4.5 per cent of the total number of described languages have disappeared, compared with 1.3 per cent of birds and 1.9 per cent of mammals. Colonisation has had the strongest influence. Of the 176 living languages spoken by the tribes of North America, 52 have become extinct since 1600. Of the 235 languages spoken by the Aboriginal Australians, 31 have disappeared. . .

Between 200 and 250 languages are spoken by more than a million people, with Chinese Mandarin, English and Spanish being the three most popular tongues.

Read more here.

Saddam's favorite painter unmasked

I wonder which was more mortifying: seeing one's paintings in the inner sancta of Iraq's strongman, or reading the world's resulting opinions about the deposed dictator's taste (which for some, it would seem, was an even greater crime than his murderous rule):

American artist Rowena Morrill - known for fantasy-styled, brightly coloured works - has told the BBC of her shock at the discovery of her paintings in Saddam Hussein's private collection. . .

"I was utterly stunned," Morrill told BBC World Service's Everywoman programme. She added that she had had "absolutely no idea" the Iraqi leader had purchased the two paintings.

From the BBC.

"Pig ignorant" Education Secretary speaks out again

The Education Secretary, Charles Clarke, has stoked the argument about what universities are for - suggesting that study for its own sake is merely "an adornment to society". He questioned the point in having universities if they were not contributing to the UK's economy - and suggested that purely academic study should get only 1% of the funding it gets now. . .

In a statement in response, Mr Clarke denied being "in any way opposed to medieval studies (or for that matter Latin)". In January, the Education Secretary was accused of "pig ignorance and blind prejudice" after reportedly questioning the value of studying classics at university.

Though Clarke's utilitarian view of university funding may outrage academics, it also points out the dark side of university dependence on government funding. From the BBC.

Moving stone the medieval way

From the BBC:

Eels and rabbits were bartered on a waterway in Cambridgeshire on Thursday as part of the re-enactment of the medieval route for building materials.

A huge block of stone is being transported by barge from Wansford near Peterborough to Ely, where it will be installed in the town's Jubilee Gardens. The chunk of Lincolnshire limestone, weighing more than 6.5 tonnes, was loaded from a lorry onto the barge to make its journey along the River Nene . . . the stone - which is nearly the size of an automobile - is the same material as those used for Ely Cathedral, and is being transported in the same manner as the stones used to build the historic edifice.

As of Sunday the block was still in transit. . . .

Crime, the citizen, and self-defense in Great Britain

An interesting essay in today's National Review Online on what happens when citizens' right to self-defense is systematically suppressed:

The British government is more abusive than ever to people who use force for lawful protection, and as accommodating as ever to violent criminals. The news that two Britons carried out a terror bombing in Israel has not resulted in calls from the government or from the "posh," non-tabloid press for cracking down on the clerics who incite terrorism. The tabloid Express takes a harder line. The bombers grew up in England in a secular, English-speaking, integrated environment, but then fell under the influence of hateful clerics in England, so the connection between terrorist incitement and terrorist action is clear enough. The civil-liberties merits of tolerating terrorist clerics is far outweighed by the massive loss of liberty for non-terrorist citizens that would follow the nearly inevitable advent of jihad bombings in Great Britain.

Non-terrorist criminals also continue to get an easy ride from the government. Some teenagers who perpetrated an unarmed gang homicide on a random stranger were last week sentenced to terms of 2-4 years. The same week, reports the Evening Standard (4/29), "An evil young killer who stabbed a complete stranger through the ear with a hunting knife" was sentenced to seven years in prison. Meanwhile, the government is introducing a five-year mandatory minimum for carrying a gun illegally. So, merely carrying a gun merits a sentence in the same range as murdering someone.

The piece also makes mention of the UK gun amnesty:

A gun "amnesty" has resulted in the surrender of about 25,000 arms, and was proclaimed a great triumph by the government. Civil-libertarian Stephen Robinson noted in the Telegraph: "The police were strangely reluctant to specify how many of the guns were handed over in inner city areas, fueling the suspicion that many of the weapons were family heirlooms. . . . Many appear to have been handed in by the elderly and law-abiding who fear becoming criminalized in a society in which private gun ownership is slowly being outlawed."

UPDATE: If you think this is just a rehash of the gun control debate, leavened with a dash of soft-on-terrorism, take a look at the letter linked to here, which nicely illustrates that the gulf between the US and UK on self-defense goes much, much deeper.

Lindisfarne Gospels discoveries

Researchers have found a possible link between the Lindisfarne Gospels and another celebrated early British text, proving they may have been written at the same time and location.

The Gospels are now thought to have been written at the same time, and in the same monastery, as Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, according to the British Library. . .

They were thought to have been written by Eadfrith, the bishop of Lindisfarne, in 698 AD, as a tribute to St Cuthbert. But the date has now been revised to around the year 720 AD. . .

Michelle Brown, the British Library's curator of illuminated manuscripts . . . said the earlier accepted date had ignored a lot of archaeological and historical detail that related to Eadfrith's work. . .

[British Library curators] used a non-destructive laser to analyse the books' pigments to help guess its age. Brown said Eadfrith . . . used revolutionary techniques when he created the gospels. She said there was evidence he had invented [read: "used" -- D.] lead pencils - 300 years before they were widely used - in making the Lindisfarne Gospels.

"He also invented the lightbox," she said. "He used the same technique as modern cartoonist - putting emulsion on the opposite side so he did not cover fine detail . . . [and came] up with an enormous range of colours using only six local materials, and the colours were so varied "even Photoshop would have difficulty matching them".

The Gospels are on show at the British Library from Friday until 28 September.

At least some of this is not exactly new, having been presented at a conference around a year back. From the BBC.

First inflatable church

I don't know quite what to think about this:

The world's first inflatable church opened its Gothic arches to worshippers on Tuesday to reveal a blow-up organ, a polyvinyl pulpit, an air-filled altar and fake stained glass windows.

The church is the brainchild of British entrepreneur Michael Gill, who says it could breathe new life into Christianity by letting preachers take their message into their communities. A priest could carry it around on the back of truck and set it up on patches of grass or in village squares for impromptu services, he says. . .

At $35,000, the 47-foot-high church will be too costly for many parishes. But Gill says he has had expressions of interest from over 20 countries thanks to his Web Site www.inflatablechurch.com and has even been asked to design inflatable mosques and synagogues.

It can be inflated in about three hours and can house around 60 people at a time. The brown polyvinyl chloride pews can seat 12 people while the rest of the congregation have to vie for floor space with the large PVC organ.

Tongue splitting

Just when you think it can't get any more bizarre. . . .

AND here is a case of erring in the other direction: sewing the tongue into the mouth. A pretty big "whoops" from Wales.

Dogs down lampposts

Your strange news for the morning:

Urinating dogs are being blamed for a rash of collapsing lampposts in Croatia. A report from the state-run power company says the urine left when male dogs mark their territory is corroding lampposts to the point where they collapse after a few years. . .

City officials who issued the report appealed to pet owners to make their dogs urinate somewhere else.

MasterCard sued: online merchants strike back

One of my longstanding pet peeves has been the high commissions charged by credit card processing companies to online merchants. The claimed rationale has been that online transactions are more likely to be fraudulent, yet it is an underappreciated fact that the cost of that fraud comes entirely out of the merchants' pockets -- the credit card companies pay nothing.

Now one of the big Internet processing companies has filed suit against MasterCard, and many more potential plaintiffs are lining up. VISA will likely also be a target -- the two companies' policies are for all intents and purposes the same.

Bass-o-matic lands gallery in court

The director of a Danish art gallery is in court after two fish were killed in an electric food blender. The fish were on display swimming in a Moulinex blender as part of an exhibition by controversial artist Marco Evaristtis. The fish died when a member of the public flicked the switch to turn the blender on, reports Danish daily Berlingske Tidende.

Evaristti said at the time that he wanted to force people to "do battle with their conscience" when they were confronted with the switch. Peter Mayer, director of the Evegobalck art museum in Kolding, was prosecuted for allowing the blender to be connected to a live electricity supply. . .

Mayer told the court that he did not want to turn the power off as he did not want to interfere with the artist's work.

From Ananova.

UPDATE: Liquifying goldfish is now officially legal in Denmark, as the court decided in acquitting the gallery owner.

Brimfield reminiscences

Today is opening day of the spring Brimfield antiques market. For many a year I eagerly looked forward to this day, to getting up before dawn to run around muddy fields with a flashlight as dealers unpacked, fresh treasures popping up left and right, a big wad of cash in my pocket that was never quite big enough. When I lived in Manhattan it was quite a drive, greatly shortened when I finally moved to Rhode Island. Yet now it's been years since I last shopped Brimfield, and more since I did it with the old seriousness.

There's been a fair amount written about the impact of the Internet, and eBay in particular. But I haven't seen much in print about how quickly and irrevocably the antiques business has changed. In the areas of collecting in which I'm most active, things were still pretty much the same up through 1997, but in 1998 a large number of new and enthusiastic buyers appeared online. All of a sudden, prices for ordinary pieces on eBay soared; items so common as to be virtually unsalable began to fetch quite decent sums. Clearly, the web had enabled these new buyers to bid on items they had never before seen (or at least noticed), and they bid with abandon, secure in the knowledge that others were bidding just as much. It wasn't long, however, before a rush of new sellers flooded online to take advantage of the high prices. By 1999, the gold rush was over and prices were pretty much down to where they had been originally, generally settling into what had been the low retail to wholesale level.

Nonetheless, things were no longer the same. Before, there had been a long and inefficient food chain: an item bought at a yard sale, flea market, or estate clearance would likely pass through many hands, increasing in price with each transaction, before finally arriving at an end buyer with the specialized knowledge and wherewithal to pay the absolute maximum. If, of course, it got all the way to that end buyer: as things stood, collectors unwilling to pay top dollar could still acquire top pieces by trolling lower on the food chain. Big wholesale markets like Brimfield played a vital role in matching up buyers and sellers, allowing nonspecialist dealers to sell items that might have languished unsold in their home markets.

Once the majority of transactions moved online, the food chain became drastically shortened. The big winners were the pickers, who used to get merchandise fresh out of houses and old accumulations and quickly flip it to other dealers at a low markup. Now they could list the stuff on eBay and sell it directly to end buyers, or at least to specialist dealers selling to end buyers. The specialist dealers by and large did OK, but those in the middle part of the food chain largely ended up squeezed out -- as did proprietors of many group shops, whose tenants fled en masse to eBay. General wholesale markets, such as Brimfield, and specialized shows alike found themselves increasingly bypassed in favor of the 24/7 trading of the virtual world.

Shortening the food chain not only cut out a lot of middlemen, it also permanently changed the nature of collecting. As noted above, one used to be able to make big scores by diligent searching low in the food chain -- working with pickers, visiting group shops, etc. That doesn't happen so much now that everything goes straight onto eBay (or is priced by reference to the Web). On the other hand, end buyers have more selection than ever, since the notable pieces that once didn't make it all the way up the food chain now are offered publicly for all to see. Interestingly enough, some items formerly believed to be rare have turned out to be more common than expected, turning up on eBay at regular intervals. Other items' rarity, however, has only been further confirmed.

A short food chain has also led to an increased volatility, as the market can so easily be flooded. In times past, the large number of pieces held in the food chain acted as a damper on price swings. Dealers and collectors alike were in less of a hurry to resell, and if buying low on the chain, could afford to sit on large inventories through market downturns. The increased volatility, of course, is most pronounced where the market is narrowest -- that is, in areas of collecting with smaller numbers of collectors.

To be continued. . . .

Vintage guitar given CAT scan

From Ananova:

Rockabilly guitarist Brian Setzer, formerly of the Stray Cats, had asked makers Gretsch to brace his Gretsch signature series 6120 guitar the original way.

The Gretsch model 6120 was made with unique bracing from 1959-1961 but was discontinued for no apparent reason. Gretsch put a 1961 guitar through a CAT scan machine in Scottsdale, Arizona, rather than taking the guitar apart to study how it was built.

Not as surprising as all that. One of the leading vintage fountain pen restorers in Italy used to have a dentist friend X-ray unfamiliar models so he could figure out how to disassemble them.

No Neanderthals in the woodpile?

Early humans and Neanderthals probably did not interbreed, according to evidence collected by Italian scientists. . .

The latest research, from the University of Ferrara in Italy, compared genetic material from Neaderthals, Cro-Magnon humans and modern Europeans. The DNA from the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons was taken from their bones. The DNA came from cell structures called mitochondriae rather than the nucleus.

They found that while, unsurprisingly, modern humans show clear genetic signs of their Cro-Magnon ancestry, no such link between Neanderthal DNA and modern European DNA could be established.

The results, they say, indicate that Neanderthals made little or no contribution to the genes of modern humans.

From the BBC.

Leaders and the universities

Geitner Simmons has posted some thoughts on Elizabeth I and her progresses, including this quote from Paul Johnson's Elizabeth I: A Study in Power and Intellect:

The government took extraordinary care in arranging her visits to the universities. It was considered vital that the regime should be popular, and the sovereign venerated, in the seats of learning.

Though it is tempting to draw facile contrasts with the current American presidency, Elizabeth surely found it much easier to charm and flatter her way into the good graces of academia than would George W. Bush today. That said, the politicization of the academy would seem to have weakened rather than strengthened professorial authority on matters extramural, at least here in the USA.

Digitizing books

Interesting article in today's NY Times about robotic book scanners. Unfortunately, the story -- which focuses on Stanford's digitization programs, not all of which rely on robots -- doesn't reveal how much the new scanners cost, nor how accurate they might be.

The article also makes reference to the problems posed by recent extensions of copyright protection, but without spelling out quite how great the difficulties can be. As things now stand, there is a huge quantity of ephemeral material -- magazine articles, advertisements, etc -- that is anywhere from 30 to 80 years old, commercially obsolete, out of print, and yet potentially still not in the public domain. Collectors' publications make liberal use of this material without bothering to investigate copyright, but libraries and other institutions are already on notice and can't assume anything. One thing I would love to see taken up was a suggestion by Lawrence Lessig, that if copyright protection is to be permitted for such a span of years, it should at least have to be renewed periodically -- precisely to insure that material of no further commercial value should promptly enter the public domain.

Limited market for looted antiquities

In the wake of the Baghdad museum brouhaha, many journalists showed their lack of any real knowledge of the antiquities trade. The fact is, there is not much evidence for the existence of wealthy, corrupt collectors in the mold of Dr. No, commissioning skilled thieves to acquire museum masterpieces for their hidden private galleries. And as this Financial Times article states, the market for stolen antiquities isn't as wide open as it used to be, especially when it comes to the more valuable pieces:

The looters who rampaged through Baghdad's National Museum last month will find that stealing the thousands of objects was the easy part. Selling such fully catalogued antiquities will be harder.

Museums, auction houses and dealers have been quick to mount a united front against the despoliation, pledging full support in returning any suspect objects that come their way and backing an amnesty in the hope that the thieves will not destroy their seizures in frustration.

The greatest treasure, the Warka [Uruk] vase of the third millennium BC, was recovered this week by US forces. Although some collectors in the countries bordering Iraq might be prepared to pay low sums for antiquities they can never exhibit or sell, the chances of a major work surfacing on the market are negligible.

The antiquities trade has cleaned up its act. Until the 1980s many antiquities that had been illegally smuggled out of Italy, Greece or Egypt escaped the scrutiny of museum curators. Tomb robbers made a good living exporting their spoils to dealers in London, Brussels, Paris and New York.

But tighter national heritage laws and more international co-operation have greatly reduced the traffic. Today a member of the Antiquities Dealers Association in the UK must show the provenance of any object in stock valued over £2,000, and James Ede of Charles Ede, the London dealer, is pushing the International Association of Dealers in Ancient Art, of which he is chairman, to lower its validation criterion below the current £10,000 mark. . .

In practice objects from ancient Iraq are not a major part of the business . . . However, there is a brisk trade in Babylonian and Assyrian cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals of the 2nd and 3rd millennia BC, which can be sold for less than £1,000. . .

Most of the 500 lots in Christie's early summer sale on the 13th are estimated at less than £5,000. They include tablets and cylinders from ancient Iraq.

Also just ran across this article, which is one of the few in the general press to discuss the divide between the antiquities world's anti-collecting (academics, archeologists) and pro-collecting (museums, dealers, collectors) factions, and how that rift undermined the possibility of presenting a cogent plan to the US government in the period leading up the invasion of Iraq:

It's a dirty business, the antiquities trade," said Jane Waldbaum, president of the Archaeological Institute of America, a scientific group that largely opposes the antiquities traffic. "They will say they only buy from reputable dealers. But where do they buy things from?"

Countered William Pearlstein, a Manhattan lawyer who represents museums and collectors: "What the archaeologists have trouble understanding is that we have a regulated market. In their view, even the most careful collector is still aiding and abetting tomb robbers."

The intensifying bitterness of those divisions prevented the two sides from uniting in the days before the Iraq war, a time when each mounted separate and ultimately unsuccessful efforts to prevent the destruction of Iraq's treasures.

While members of the American Council on Cultural Policy, a 2-year-old organization of dealers, collectors and museum curators, met with both the Department of State and the Pentagon to map out plans to prevent the destruction of Iraq's antiquities, the archaeological institute found itself on the outside. The two groups were unable to put together a joint statement.

"We wanted a statement that was more comprehensive and didn't just address the bombing," said Patty Gerstenblith, a DePaul University law professor who helped spearhead the institute's efforts.

The archaeologists were "asleep at the switch," complained Ashton Hawkins, former counsel for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a founder of the cultural policy council.

In the end, the council's do-not-bomb list prevented destruction from the air, but neither Hawkins' group nor Gerstenblith's, was able to persuade commanders on the ground to station troops around the Iraqi museums or libraries that were stripped of treasures dating to 3000 B.C.

Stupid painting theft

News from New York's Onondaga County:

Deputies say the head of the organization in charge of raising money for the county library system stole a $50,000 painting from the library's main branch and sold it for $200 at a garage sale.

Given the man's obvious lack of talent at turning a profit, I wonder how he did as a fundraiser?

Roman ruins in Wiltshire trashed by off-roaders

From the Telegraph:

Drivers of 4x4 vehicles have caused serious damage to the site of a Roman town at Easton Grey in Wiltshire, scoring ruts up to three feet deep in the protected ancient monument, English Heritage said yesterday. Over recent years, English Heritage and Wiltshire county council have spent thousands of pounds trying to keep 4x4 drivers out, but a hard core have persisted, tearing out first concrete bollards and then heavier "dragon's teeth", triangular concrete blocks. The 4x4 drivers, who are mostly young, enjoy driving up and down the banks of the Avon and along the river bed at the site near Malmesbury, damaging trout-spawning grounds and killing endangered native crayfish.

John Tremayne, the landowner, said: "We are extremely annoyed. This problem started 10 years ago but it has been particularly bad in the last two or three years" . . . "We have tried to remonstrate with them but we have been alerted by the police to be careful as there are 10 of them and one of me." He said the drivers tended to take off their number plates when they went off-road, making it harder to catch them.

Traces of the buildings of a small town, which flourished between the second and fourth centuries, are still visible on the surface of nearby fields and the Roman remains are only six to nine inches deep. There are the remnants of what appears to be a bridge and it is thought that wooden structures might have survived in the waterlogged conditions. . .

Roy Canham, the county archaeologist, said: "The Roman site is especially important because it did not continue in use after the Roman period and was not disturbed by medieval or modern development."

A Roman main street in Northamptonshire

A Roman high street, complete with a pedestrian walkway, shops and a roadside shrine where weary travellers could refresh their spirits and curse their enemies, has been unearthed by archaeologists. The 200-yard stretch of Roman village life was uncovered in farmland destined for a housing estate in Northamptonshire. The site is so large, and the finds so plentiful, that archaeologists have yet to uncover many of its secrets. . .

Archaeologists, funded by English Heritage and the landowners, the Duchy of Lancaster, have been recording and retrieving as much as they can from the five-acre site before the bulldozers move in. . .

The archaeologists believe around half the village has been exposed. The rest lies below a 1950s housing estate to the south-east. On one side of the road they found foundations of at least 18 buildings - possibly homes, shops and workshops. On the other side, they uncovered the remains from two shrines. . .

From records and finds elsewhere, the archaeologists believe that buildings were stone-built with steeply pitched thatched roofs. They had no chimneys - the smoke from the central hearths seeped through the thatch. The windows were probably simple squares with wooden frames and shutters but no glass. The discovery of tweezers, brooches and hairpins, all made from bone, across the site suggest many were homes. Coins and iron weighing scales are clues that they were used as shops, while needles, chisels and pruning hooks indicate that some could have been workshops.

The village was probably settled in the second century AD when a collection of round stone buildings was built next to a road running along the high ground bordering the Nene Valley.

Read more here.

Geraldo's blog: dumb, or stupid?

Did you know Geraldo Rivera had a blog?
And does it surprise you that he writes his posts all in caps -- as Prof. H.D. Miller notes, "the same as thousands of internet illiterates and kooks, which, when you read the whole piece [to which he links -- D.], is only natural."

"Big Red" jellyfish

From Monterey last week:

A bizarre new species of jellyfish has been discovered in the deep waters off the Californian coast. The bell-shaped creature spans a metre in diameter and has been nicknamed "big red", because of its unusual deep red colour. The US and Japanese teams that discovered it say the species deserves its own subfamily.

Tiburonia granrojo was discovered using video cameras on deep-diving remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). Its colour and shape set it apart from its other gelatinous relatives, but it has another unusual characteristic -- a complete lack of tentacles. Instead, the jelly has four to seven fleshy arms that it uses to capture food. While jellyfish species normally can be distinguished by the number of tentacles they have, the number of arms differs between individual big reds.

Police seize magician's wand as deadly weapon

From Scotland's Daily Record:

A magician had his new wand confiscated by cops after it was found to be a prohibited weapon. Malcolm Wilson, stage name Magic Malky, was stunned to find out his £100 Big Bang wand fired bullets. Police ballistics experts told him: "You can't have that," when he asked them if his blank-firing wand was legal.

No luck with a quick Google search for Big Bang magic wands -- looks as if they have vanished!

£500 offered for baked beans in a can

Tesco is offering to pay £500 for a ten-year-old can of budget baked beans. The supermarket chain wants the can to display in its headquarters to mark ten years of its cut-price Value brand. But, despite producing millions of cans, the supermarket did not keep any for itself . . .

The beans were launched with 40 other Value foods in 1993 and originally sold for 17p.

From Ananova.

AND we may now have a winner!
Must hand it to Tesco -- they got a lot of publicity for their £500 offer.

How many pet tigers?!

They may be facing extinction in India, China and Siberia, but in the US, tigers have found a new lease of life — after a fashion. According to the American Zoo and Aquarium Association, more than 12,000 tigers are kept as pets — double the number thought to exist in the wild. The craze persists, despite concern among politicians and animal-welfare groups.

Michael Jackson and Mike Tyson each have one; the magicians Siegfried and Roy are known for their specially bred white tigers in Las Vegas; the internet and specialist trade magazines advertise exotic-animal auctions and 'jungle-cat reduction sales'. The National Alternative Pet Association — 'Do people put you down because your pet isn't a socially acceptable cat, dog or goldfish?' — promotes ownership of endangered species. Prices are not particularly prohibitive: $1,000 for a generic cub, $3,500 for a pair of Bengal tigers, then rising to $15,000 for a more fashionable white tiger. . .

Today in Texas there are said to be 4,000 pet tigers, more perhaps than the number that roam free in India, and because captive tigers are just as fertile as domestic cats, the numbers are likely to grow. Some private owners simply like being different, while others find the sleek feline almost erotically intoxicating. There are even stories of tigers being used as 'guard cats' by drug dealers. . .

Conservationists are also worried at the level of inbreeding. There are so few regulations regarding the trade of tigers that records of a big cat's origin are few. And because of the relatively low numbers available, the gene pool is impoverished and blindness and kidney problems are increasingly common. . .

The kitten-for-Christmas syndrome is magnified when applied to tigers. . . former pets are beginning to fill up animal sanctuaries across the US, and zoos say they already have more than they can take. Unwanted tigers are found chained in basements, starved in makeshift back-yard cages, or wandering the streets after being set loose by bored, frightened or broke owners. . .

In October 2001, a three-year-old boy was killed in Texas by his grandfather's tiger. The year before, a four-year-old put his arm through the bars of a cage housing a Bengal tiger kept as a pet by his uncle; his arm was torn off. The Humane Society of the United States has compiled a list of three dozen such attacks in the past 12 years. At least seven people have been killed by tigers in the US in the past four years.

From the Sunday Times Magazine.

Hapsburgs seek return of Nazi-seized properties

The heirs to the Hapsburg dynasty, whose forebears ruled central Europe for over 600 years in an empire that once stretched from the borders of Russia to Spain, have asked the Austrian government to return forests, homes and a palace seized by the Nazis on the eve of World War II. . .

The Hapsburgs' rule ended in 1918 when the family was forced to abdicate at the end of World War I. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, over which the Hapsburgs presided, was broken up and the family was awarded the land and buildings as a form of state pension. But when the Nazis occupied Austria in March 1938, the property was confiscated.

There is little doubt that the Hapsburgs lost their property because they opposed the Nazis. Otto von Hapsburg spoke out in Austria against Hitler and warned of dire consequences for Austria in the event of Anschluss, the incorporation of Austria into Germany.

Three of Otto's cousins enlisted in the United States Army and fought against the Nazis in World War II. A fourth cousin, Robert von Hapsburg, flew with the Royal Air Force against the German Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain, in 1940. In exile in France, Otto and Carl-Ludwig von Hapsburg helped persuade a diplomat from neutral Portugal to issue visas to thousands of Jews fleeing the Nazi advance, also in 1940.

From yesterday's NY Times.

Egg-cooking stumps most Brits

Some Sunday survey silliness:

Three-quarters of [Britons] do not know how to boil an egg, according to a poll. Asked how long it would take to soft boil an egg, 70% said three minutes or less, which would leave the white runny and raw, the ICM poll for The Guardian found. Four per cent thought 6 to 10 minutes, which would result in a hard yolk. The correct answer is four to five minutes, which was the response given by 25% of those asked.

From Ananova. I would have guessed three minutes, but then, hardboiled is more my preference.

Looters overwhelm guards at Nimrud

Amid the firestorm over the museum looting in Baghdad, the situation in remote archeological sites has not received much attention in the press. This Chicago Tribune article is a welcome exception:

Nobody except a few shepherds heard the gun battle that erupted the other night in this ruined, 3,000-year-old city of Assyrian kings that overlooks the wrinkled plains of Mesopotamia.

To be sure, it wasn't much of a fight. Only 30 or 40 shots were fired. And there were no casualties. None, that is, except humanity's priceless inheritance of ancient art. Holding off frantic security guards with well-placed rifle fire, a gang of armed looters methodically attacked Nimrud in the predawn darkness Saturday, prying off world-famous wall carvings and dragging them on blankets to waiting cars. The guards fired back until their ammunition gave out. And then, mockingly, the thieves shouted that they would be returning soon for more artifacts.

"They called out to us by name," said Muafaq Mohammad Ismael, a beleaguered antiquities guard whose trailer at Nimrud is punctured by bullet holes. "They threatened our families if we continued to resist. So we won't."

A month after Iraq's museums were ransacked in the chaos of Saddam Hussein's downfall, thieves have started targeting the very source of this war-battered land's immensely long history--archeological sites that hold some of the earliest and most gloried remnants of human civilization. . .

At least two ancient sites in northern Iraq, Nineveh and Nimrud, have been hit by pillagers in recent days, local archeologists say. In Nineveh, the hometown of the Old Testament prophet Jonah, looters last week tunneled into a tel, or man-made hillock, in search of gold ornaments or jewels. And last weekend at the stone palaces of Nimrud, where an Assyrian king named Assurnasirpal once held a royal feast for 70,000 guests about three millenniums ago, gun-toting tribesmen from surrounding villages took sledgehammers and crowbars to alabaster sculptures that had been exhibited in museums around the globe. . .

The most vulnerable corner of the country includes the age-worn plains of northeastern Iraq, Jabr said, because a stabilizing U.S. military presence is thinnest there.

In that vanished heartland of the sprawling Assyrian empire, Iraqi researchers have logged more than 1,500 archeological sites. Only two still remain guarded by ragged and long-unpaid antiquities police. Nimrud, known in the Old Testament as Calah, is one of them. . .

Roving bands of looters from the neighboring Al-Jaburi tribe have laid siege to the city at night, boring through walls and shooting locks off warehouse doors. The site's half-dozen guards--poorly equipped and technically unemployed since the fall of Hussein's government--fought them off. For an early-warning system, the guards dug a foxhole atop Nimrud's eroded ziggurat, or stepped pyramid. They stubbornly patrolled the site's cut fence. But finally, on Saturday, they were overwhelmed.

"More than 10 men came at night armed with AK-47s," said Ismael, 28, a skinny, exhausted-looking man who has been providing security at Nimrud for four years. "When we ran out of ammunition, they threatened our families. That was the end." Demoralized, the small police force has threatened to quit.

If we can't provide military protection, someone should at least take up a collection to cover the poor guards' back pay and to buy them a decent supply of ammunition.

Cellini's masterpiece stolen

Cellini's gold salt cellar has been stolen from the Kunsthistorische Museum in Vienna:

Thieves stole the sculpture from its glass display case after smashing a window to get into the museum, police said. "The thieves climbed up some scaffolding to the first floor of the building, broke a window and climbed in," a police spokesman said. "They shattered the glass display case and took the sculpture. There were movement sensors all over the place - we are currently investigating why the alarm did not go off." [The] Saliera, which is 26 centimetres (10 inches) tall, is Cellini's only remaining authenticated gold work.

Although Cellini may not be a familiar name for non-art historians, the stolen piece was probably the icon of Italian Renaissance/Mannerist goldsmith's work, which the Vienna museum authorities not unfairly compared in importance (if not celebrity) to Leonardo's Mona Lisa. From the BBC.

HERE is an entry on the saltcellar; thumbnail Cellini biography here; Symonds' translation of Cellini's celebrated autobiography is available online at Bartlebys.com -- and quite an eventful and swashbuckling tale it is.

UPDATE: Two days later, the NY Times is on the story. Apparently the alarms went off, but the guard just switched them off and reset the security system.

Brighton pier burns

Firefighters have contained a fire at Brighton's West Pier - and say it was probably started deliberately. The fire - the second to sweep though the structure in less than two months - broke out in the early hours of Sunday. Firefighters have been forced to leave several "hot spots" burning because they are unable to reach them safely. . .

The 137-year-old structure, derelict since 1975, was largely stripped to its cast iron shell after a fire on 28 March. The fire has been described as "severe". . .

In December and again in January, large parts of the pier collapsed into the sea. In February Brighton and Hove City Council voted, despite fierce opposition, to press ahead with ambitious plans to restore the pier at a cost of £30m.

From the BBC. Another writeup from ITV here. Previous posts on the pier's collapse here and here.

Baghdad museum looting: the facade crumbles

Will be expanding on this shortly, but here is a big (if not entirely unexpected, at least for our readers) break in this story:

The furore over the looting of Iraq’s national museum took an unexpected turn yesterday when workers accused their director of conniving in the theft of priceless antiquities during the chaotic collapse of the regime in Baghdad.

Fifty museum employees staged a protest in which they waved placards under the noses of American investigators proclaiming that Jabir Khalil, chairman of the Iraqi state board of heritage and antiquities, was a “dictator” and a “thief”.

Another museum director tried to calm the protesters, calling their allegations against their boss “stupid” and baseless. “In any case, there are proper procedures for investigating these matters,” said Donny George, the museum’s head of research. . .

The investigators, too, have expressed suspicions that the plunder was facilitated by museum employees. Objects had vanished from a storage vault outside the museum to which museum officials had access. “It may turn out to be an inside job,” said one investigator. “Whoever did this seemed to know exactly what they were looking for.”

A full account of what is missing has yet to be given. Even so, officials concede that the losses may be less severe than at first thought, when talk of looters carting off thousands of ancient carvings and crushing pottery underfoot prompted international outrage at America’s failure to intervene. . .

Suspicions about the involvement of staff with knowledge of the underground vaults are growing. “Looters went into the storerooms, to a specific area, and removed small items of high value,” said George. “It shows a certain knowledge.” However, he stopped short of accusing colleagues of consenting to the plunder, saying the investigation had yet to determine how the thieves broke in.

He said initial reports on the scale of the losses had been deeply misleading. “The whole museum collection includes about 170,000 items but somehow this ended up being reported as the number of pieces that had been stolen. It is nothing like that.” In fact, he said, a large quantity of pieces had been removed for safekeeping before the war. Only between 30 and 35 items . . . had been stolen from the museum’s exhibition area.

Leaving open the question of why the 170,000 figure was not immediately contradicted by museum representatives, including Dr. George. In fact, it was the American government investigators who first announced the drastically lowered estimates of the losses, now generally accepted, not the museum officials.

American investigators think the number of items missing from storage is several hundred. The task of tracking the artefacts is complicated by the fact that thousands of objects in storage had never been catalogued or photographed, making them a tempting target for professionals hoping to profit from sales on the international black market. . .

Iraqi museum staff have been heartened by the recovery of hundreds of missing items in recent days, some of them anonymously delivered to mosques after appeals from religious leaders. Others have been brought to the museum by individuals who claim they witnessed the looting and decided to take items home to protect them from thieves.

These have included the stone statue of King Shalmaneser III from the 9th century BC — “a remarkable piece”, said George. Also returned was a series of bronze reliefs from the Sumerian period of about 3500BC and some “excellent” pieces of Assyrian pottery that might have fetched high prices overseas.

From the Sunday Times of London.