Rare, secretly smuggled Sumerian sculpture plaque to be returned to Iraq

A rareSumeriansculpture plaque dating back from 2400BCthat was secretly smuggled to the United Kingdom from Iran will be repatriated back to the country.

The ancient plaque, which depicts a high priest or ruler, was seized by Metropolitan police with the help of the British Musuem after they first spotted its sale in 2019 by TimeLine Auctions as a“western Asiatic Akkadian tablet”.

The British Musuem is the main advisory body of the United Kingdom regarding illicit trafficking or export licensing of antiquities.

According toDr St John Simpson, the British Museum’s senior curator,“We’re used to coming across tablets, pots, metalwork, seals and figurines on the art market or in seizures that have been trafficked. But it’s really exceptional to see something of this quality.”

Simpsonbelieves that the votive wall plaque belonged to the Early Dynastic III period and was was looted from the Sumerian heartland which in present is modern-Iraq.

In picture: British Museum archaeologists in Girsu,Iraq

''There are only about 50 examples of these known from ancient Mesopotamia. So that immediately places it on the high-rarity scale. We can be fairly sure that this object comes from the Sumerian heartland. That is the area that got very badly looted between the 1990s and 2003,'' he added.

The plague, which is carved from local limestone depicts a large seated male figure wearing a long skirt wearing kaunakes, with a tufted pattern.

The artefact has features of burning, a feature previously found on excavated discoveries at Girsu, one of the world's firsy urban civilisations.

Sébastien Rey, curator of ancient Mesopotamia at the British Museum and lead archaeologist at Tello,contacted the police, who immediately took it seriously and went to the auction house, who relinquished it when they realised what it was.