7,000 Sumerian Artifacts Vanished in 72 Hours — None Were Ever Sold

In April 2003, as Baghdad fell, the Iraq National Museum — home to the largest collection of Sumerian artifacts on Earth — was stripped of roughly 15,000 objects in just 72 hours. But hidden inside the chaos was a second, quieter operation: storage rooms opened with keys, catalogued items taken while gold-colored replicas were left behind, by thieves who knew the collection in the dark. The Warka Vase came back broken in the trunk of a car; the Warka Mask was dug out of a farmer's field — yet thousands of cylinder seals and tablets from the earliest layers of civilization never returned. Stolen antiquities eventually surface — at auctions, estate sales, border seizures. Twenty years later, some 7,000 of these objects still haven't appeared anywhere. Things that are being sold circulate. Things that are being kept don't. So who has them — and why?"