BAGHDAD, 18 September 2003 — Iraq’s new culture minister announced yesterday the recovery of a priceless 5,000-year-old sculpture looted from Baghdad Museum in April after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Speaking of the “Mona Lisa of Mesopotamia,” Mufic al-Jazaeri said: “I do not have any details on where it was found, but it appears as if it never left Iraq during all this time.”
The 20-centimeter (eight-inch) high marble sculpture, dating from 3,000 BC, depicts the head of a woman.
It was fashioned in the southern city of Warka during the Sumerian period, and was among the five most precious pieces still missing since the museum was sacked after the April 9 fall of Baghdad to the US-led coalition.
Yet there are many more artifacts still missing.
Jaaber Jelil Ibrahim, Iraq’s director general of antiquities, recently said that around 13,000 pieces are still to be found, 32 of them of great value. Overall, 15,000 pieces were stolen from the collection of 170,000 artifacts.
“We lost a lot, but we are going to do everything possible to recover it,” he said. “This find shows that our efforts are on the right track,” the minister added, expressing his thanks to the police and to ordinary citizens for those pieces that had been returned to the museum.
