Word: museum
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Muna Hassan, the head of a committee working on the restoration of pieces returned by Syria, says that further negotiations are now in the works with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Italy and Germany. So far, Ali says roughly 4,000 stolen pieces have been returned to the museum - most of them confiscated within Iraq's borders. Two days ago, an Iraqi citizen in the southern city of Nasiriyah offered the museum 643 artifacts, some of which he claimed to have excavated himself, said one museum official, who was not authorized to speak to the press. Many other items...
...Museum officials hail success on another front as well. The past year saw a sharp drop in sectarian violence across the country due to the combined effects of a major milita's cease-fire with the government, the expansion of Sunni tribal cooperation with U.S. forces, and the U.S. troop surge. Now, says one museum official, archaeologists are taking advantage of those gains. "After the events of 2003, there was no security. When stability returned to some of the provinces, we resumed excavations," said the official, who added that 11 sites were excavated in 2007 across southern Iraq, in areas...
...museum's deputy director Ali says the institution lost an estimated 15,000 of some 200,000 artifacts during the days of looting and chaos that followed the U.S. invasion of Baghdad. In March UNESCO said that between 3,000 and 7,000 of those pieces are still missing. Nevertheless, some museum officials say the number of missing items is impossible to pinpoint because of lost records. "We have some of the records, but others were taken... Outside of Iraq, people want proof that the pieces were taken from the museum. That is the problem now because we lost some...
Perhaps not surprisingly, funding is another obstacle. Rehabilitation of the museum ranks low on the government's list of priorities in a country that continues to be wracked by violence, corruption and food scarcities. "It's very little," said the official of the museum's annual allotment from the Ministry of Finance. "We need more...
Indeed the museum's recovery may take a long time, and few who witnessed the looting have forgotten the frustration they felt as Iraq's riches were plundered. Five years after that catastophe, the centerpiece of Iraqi historical glory remains closed to the public. When it will reopen remains unknown. The larger stone pieces that never escaped the museum walls because of their weight remain in the shadows where they were left, some of them cracked from the failed efforts of looters to chip away chunks. But in one of the 27 halls, where intricately carved Sumerian wall panels depicting...