Two stone slabs bearing reliefs (dating to about 650 BC) of Assyrian kings waving to their subjects have been returned to Iraq by a delegation that went to Geneva at the beginning of this month. Together "they weigh as much as a small family car" a newspaper report says (so "barely portable antiquities", then). The reliefs had been taken from the ruins of Assyrian palaces in the northern Nineveh province and disappeared in 1994 in the period of chaos caused by US-led sanctions and the consequent looting of archaeological sites at the end of Saddam Hussein's reign. The stolen slabs had been purchased by an unnamed Swiss dealer who in 2004 contacted the Iraqi authorities because he wanted to give them back to Iraq, officials said.The slabs were "delivered by a Swiss citizen to the Iraqi embassy in Geneva in 2007 and were kept in the house of a former Iraqi ambassador", Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari is reported as saying at a press conference at Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad. the slabs will not return to the site where they were taken, but will be displayed in the Baghdad Museum.
So, who was the generous, or repentant "Swiss dealer" then? Would it have been the first name that comes to mind who was involved in 2006 in another repatriation of a stolen Iraqi artefact ?
Sources:
Muhanad Mohammed, 'Ancient Assyrian stone slabs returned to Iraq', Reuters Thu Oct 27, 2011 (edited by Jim Loney and Belinda Goldsmith)
Alssabbah, 'Iraqi delegation to Switzerland to restore the effects of a stolen'.
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