Editors’ Page: Losing Iraqi Antiquities For Good

How do we ensure that the antiquities missing from the Baghdad Museum and the even larger number of items looted from sites all over Iraq will be lost forever? Ask the United States Senate and the Archaeological Institute of America (which supports crazy legislation passed by the Senate). They know.

While it is true that the initial estimate of 170,000 items that had been looted from the museum proved to be a wild exaggeration, at the present writing the number is still significant: about 30 important pieces from the displays and about 12,000 from storage, including more than 5,000 seals.

But that may not be the worst of it. Iraq has as many as 10,000 ancient sites, many of which are being looted. Estimates of the items looted from ancient sites run as high as 175,000, most of them cuneiform tablets.