British Museum identifies looted Iraqi antiquities, sends them home

The British Museum said Thursday it is returning to Iraq a collection of looted antiquities up to 5,000 years old, after identifying the exact temple they came from in a unique piece of archaeological detective work. The eight objects were confiscated by British police in May 2003, a few months after the US-led invasion of Iraq, from a now defunct dealer in London who failed to provide any paperwork. Normally the detailed provenance of such items would be hard to establish, but three of them, fired clay cones, carried Sumerian inscriptions that gave a clue to their origins. In a remarkable coincidence, they were identical to cones found on a site in the ancient city of Girsu, now known as Tello, in southern Iraq, where the British Museum has been training Iraqi archaeologists since 2016.