And this through a statement issued by the Iraqi presidency indicating that “a ceremony took place in the building of the Iraqi embassy in London, with the follow-up and the blessing of the President of the Republic, Abd al -Latif Jamal Rashid, to receive (6,000) British artefacts that had been borrowed from Iraq for study since 1923.”
The statement added: “This happened on the sidelines of Rashid’s visit to the UK to attend the coronation ceremony of King Charles III, where the President of the Republic decided to return the artefacts from London to Baghdad during of his return home after the conclusion of his current visit to Britain, and to hand over the exhibits duly to the Iraqi Museum.”
The reception ceremony took place in the presence of the Minister of Culture, Tourism and Antiquities, Ahmed Fakak Al-Badrani, the Ambassador of the Republic of Iraq to Great Britain, Jaafar Al-Sadr, the Director General of British Museums and the Chief Executive of the Museum of London, as well as a large number of Iraqi and British media professionals, scholars and prospectors.
Active stimulus diplomacy
And Iraqi Foreign Ministry spokesman Ahmed Al-Sahhaf had earlier confirmed in a statement that “with exceptional efforts and through the Embassy of the Republic of Iraq in London, and to complete the working pages of “recovery diplomacy”. , on 5/9/2023, 38 boxes containing Iraqi antiquities lent by the British side, the number is about (6000) pieces, with 4 boxes containing replicas for study purposes, two paintings and 6 boxes of books.
Hakim Al-Shammari, media director of the Iraqi General Authority for Antiquities and Heritage, said in an interview with Sky News Arabia:
This batch of recovered antiquities, which will soon reach the homeland a century after being borrowed by Britain, is an important indication of the continued successes of the recovery diplomacy pursued by Iraq to fully recover its antiquities, who left the country. , whether by legal or illegal means. Almost daily, we receive artifacts belonging to different historical civilizational eras in Mesopotamia, either from Iraqi citizens who find them by chance or through random excavations, or from our embassies abroad or from the international police Interpol, and this in addition to reflecting Iraq’s wealth of antiquities and cultural treasures, it further reveals that many of these antiquities were smuggled and stolen. This is why the efforts of the government and the Ministry of Culture continue unabated to recover Iraqi cultural, archaeological and heritage properties scattered around the world.
The biggest refund
And Iraq had announced the largest operation to recover smuggled Iraqi antiquities and cultural treasures, recovering around 17,000 valuable artifacts from the United States at the end of July 2021, via the same plane that carried the Iraqi Prime Minister. of the time, Mustafa Al-Kazemi, coming from Washington.
Iraq is one of the richest countries in the world in antiquities, so much so that certain archaeological and cultural treasures, due to their abundance, sometimes float on the roofs of historical sites, due to environmental and climatic factors such as than rain and torrential downpours.
Iraq was once home to some of the oldest cities and civilizations in the world, and there are thousands of archaeological sites across the country where Sumerians, Babylonians, Mitannians and Assyrians once lived.
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