EBay stops sale of Iraqi treasure

Wired

Slightly off-topic, but of interest. Following on from David Gill's recent comments about the rise in sale of Egyptian antiquities, and his personal mission to tackle the sale of looted objects world-wide (see his Looting Matters blog), here's an item about a cuneiform tablet, supsected to have been looted from Iraq, posted for sale online on the Swiss branch of Ebay.

A 4,000-year-old clay tablet authorities suspect was smuggled illegally from Iraq was pulled from eBay just minutes before the close of the online auction, authorities said Tuesday.

Criminal proceedings have been launched against the seller, identified only as a resident of Zurich, officials said.

A German archaeologist had spotted the tablet bearing wedge-shaped cuneiform script on the online auctioneer's Swiss Web site, http://www.eBay.ch , a government official said.

The archaeologist alerted German authorities, who passed the tip onto their Swiss counterparts, said Yves Fischer, who directs the Swiss Federal Office of Culture's department on commerce in cultural objects.

EBay Inc. stopped the auction on Dec. 12 "a few minutes before the end" of its bidding deadline, Fischer said. Zurich police then confiscated the small tablet - about the size of a business card - from a storage facility.

The tablet, which dates from around 2000 B.C., was "with great probability" smuggled out of Iraq illegally, government officials said in a statement.

Ebay has faced criticism in the past for failing to adequately police its auctions for items of this type, and have only recently taken measures to work with heritage organizations to monitor the situation in different countries (e.g. in the U.K.), so it is good to see that they have taken active steps on this occasion to prevent the sale of the tablet.

For more on the subject of the trade in illicit antiquities, see the Editorial by Neil Brodie from theAutumn 2000 issue of the journal Culture Without Context (produced by the Illicit Antiquities Research Centre).

There is an online article by Geoffrey Tassie about the illicit trade in Egyptian antiquities entitled A Trade Older Than The Pyramids. The article was motivated by the dispute over the Kanefernefer mask, now on display in the St. Louis Art Museum.