The Warka Vase, looted from Baghdad in 2003

Between 8 and 12 April 2003, in the days after Baghdad fell to US-led forces, looters broke into the Iraq Museum. Matthew Bogdanos, a US Marine colonel who led the American investigation, dates three separate thefts to those days. When Donny George, the museum’s research director, went in, he found the empty stand on the floor and the glass case smashed, University of Chicago Magazine reports. The vessel had been hacked from its base. Staff had not moved it to safety before the war. They thought no looter would take an object so heavy, about 270 kilograms by some accounts. Reports differ on where it stood. The Associated Press says it was wrenched from its display case. The Washington Post said in June 2003 that it was taken from a restoration room at the back, where experts were working on it.

The Warka Vase is a carved alabaster vessel, about 105 centimetres high, made around 3200 to 3000 BC. Some reports call the stone limestone. German archaeologists found it at Uruk, now called Warka, in the precinct of the goddess Inanna. Ralf Wartke, a curator at a Berlin museum, wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in April 2003 that the excavators’ field book records the find on 2 January 1934. Its carving runs in bands: water and plants, sheep, naked men carrying offerings, and a scene before Inanna or her priestess.

How much else was lost is still debated. Early reports of more than 170,000 items taken in 48 hours were later shown to be wrong. In June 2003 museum staff told the BBC that 33 major items and about 2,100 minor ones were missing. The Art Newspaper estimated 3,000 to 12,000 items at the end of that month. The low figure came from the UK government and the high figure from the museum’s director, Nawala al-Mutawalli. Bogdanos wrote in 2005 that 13,864 pieces were first counted as stolen, a number likely to pass 15,000, and that about 5,359 had been verified as recovered. In 2015 UNESCO gave the museum’s estimate of about 15,000 looted and 4,300 returned, and noted that the total is debated. The counts do not measure the same thing, so they do not match.

The vase came back on 12 June 2003. It arrived at the museum in the trunk of a car, in pieces, with other objects. The Washington Post and The New York Times said three men handed it over. The Art Newspaper said two. The men were not named and no charge has been reported. The Coalition Provisional Authority, the US-led administration then running Iraq, announced the return. Pietro Cordone, its senior adviser on culture, said he was delighted. Bogdanos says the vase came back with 95 other objects after two weeks of talks under a no-questions-asked amnesty. He says money was discussed but none was paid. Sources disagree on the number of pieces: the Associated Press says more than a dozen, and University of Chicago Magazine says one large section and about six smaller ones.

By March 2004 an Italian team was cleaning the pieces inside the museum and training an Iraqi conservator, The New York Times reported. University of Chicago Magazine said in 2010 that Iraqi conservators had repaired it again. The museum stayed closed to the public until its official reopening on 28 February 2015, and the vase was among the objects shown. It is now in the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad.