Iraq has repatriated a 4,500-year-old statue of an ibex from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the latest success in its campaign to retrieve national treasures and reclaim looted historical artefacts.
The Mesopotamian treasure, a copper statue depicting a wild goat with curled horns, was returned to Iraq keeping in a ceremony at the museum on the Upper East Side on Tuesday. The Iraqi embassy in Washington said the transfer was “a reaffirmation of our natural place as the cradle of human civilisation”.
“This rare piece reflects the genius of our ancient civilisation in metal artistry more than 4,500 years ago,” it said.
The artefact, known properly as Vessel Stand with Ibex, is a copper-alloy sculpture from the Early Dynastic Period of Mesopotamia in 2600BC to 2350BC. It is inlayed with shell, the rock lapis lazuli and has a patina of green oxidation.
“It’s an early example of Sumerian ritual culture,” said Kim Benzel, the Met's curator in charge of ancient West Asian art, referring to the civilisation founded in the Mesopotamia region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers about 4,000 years ago.
The statue is also a “very, very early example, possibly the earliest example, of the hollow core lost-wax casting technique”, Ms Benzel said.
The lost-wax process is a method of casting in which a molten metal is poured into a mould that has been created from a wax model. Once the mould is made, the wax mould melts and drains away.
“This is an object that is so direct, I mean it’s really looking at you,” Ms Benzel added. “You feel like it’s something you can commune with … I’m not saying this is a divine animal, but if it is a ritual object, it is navigating between the world of humans and the world of divine.”
The statue was bought by the museum in 1974 and was displayed nearly continuously from 1977. “We’ve enjoyed it tremendously and loved it many years,” Ms Benzel said.
It is the latest artefact to be handed over to Iraq by the Met as part of the museum's Cultural Property Initiative, which was launched in 2023 and includes a review of works in its collection. Several artefacts have been returned to their places of origin in several countries.
In May, Iraq recovered three items from the Met dating back to the Sumer and Babylonian civilisations from about 3000BC to 2000BC. They include a Sumerian container depicting two rams that is made of gypsum alabaster, a type of mineral and soft rock. The other items are Babylonian ceramic sculptures of the heads of a man and a woman.
The Met and Iraq have agreed to further collaborative research on the ibex sculpture. They have sent it for high-powered scanning at the Fraunhofer Institute, a specialised lab in Munich, Germany, to allow researchers to better understand hollow-core lost-wax casting.
“The ibex in the centre of this extraordinary work of art is among the oldest known examples of the use of a clay core in casting a human or animal figure by direct lost-wax casting – an innovative breakthrough that enabled the creation of large and complex metal sculptures and continues to be used by artists today,” the Met said.
“While later large-scale castings from the ancient world have been extensively studied, the much earlier examples from Mesopotamia have not been fully examined until now.”
Decades of war, instability, lack of security and mismanagement have taken their toll on Iraq’s heritage, art and culture. After the 1991 Gulf War, when a US-led international coalition repelled Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and the UN imposed economic sanctions on Baghdad, illegal archaeological digs became widespread, mainly in remote areas that troops were unable to secure.
In 2003 with the fall of Baghdad during the US-led invasion of Iraq that ended Saddam's regime, looters broke into the Iraqi National Museum and stole priceless artefacts, only a few thousand of which have been recovered.
Looters continue to dig at unprotected archaeological sites, leading to hundreds of artefacts showing up on overseas markets. With the help of the international community, Iraq has managed to retrieve thousands of items around the world in recent years, mainly from the US.
