FBI Returns Cultural Antiquities to Iraq about the most substantial piece of information in a text full of padding is:
the FBI repatriated four cylinder seals to the Iraqi government[...] The seals returned on October 25 are small enough to fit in a person's palm.No details of where they were seized, from whom and why, or what happened to the bloke they were taken from (let alone who he got them from). But there seems to be a pattern here, the photos are crap - traditionally- so it is difficult to see what the Iraqis got from the US. But the green one (chalcedony?) has very clear characteristics of being made by a rotary grinding wheel, in other words a method not generally used for genuine cylinder seals and among collectors regarded as a way to tell the very many fakes from the real thing. The American no-questions-asked antiquities market is (deservedly) full of worthless fakes, so it would not be surprising that among the objects given back from that market, there should be a fair number of fakes.
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