Recovering stolen artefacts is a top priority for Iran

Iran’s National Museum displays decorated glazed bricks nearly 3,000 years old after a four-decade search that was disrupted by war and an international legal fight.

In the first millennium BC, the Mannaeans, a people who lived in northwestern Iran, created this work, which features mythological creatures like lions, winged cows with human heads, horses, and bulls with goat’s horns, as well as kneeling men and women.

Colors of black, brown, light blue, yellow, or white are applied to the 51 square bricks.

It was “a series of incredible adventures” for the museum’s archaeologist, Youssef Hassanzadeh, to discover and bring the artefacts home, he told AFP.

For the second time in a week, stolen antiquities from the Middle East and Africa have been found in Western countries.

Hassanzadeh claims that Mirza Ali, a farmer, discovered painted ceramic bricks in his field after the 1979 Islamic revolution. In West Azerbaijan province, they had been used to decorate a temple.

“People were stealing and selling glazed bricks, taking advantage of the absence of government control,” said Hassanzadeh, who organised the exhibition at the museum, where visitors can peer at the bricks through glass cabinets.

– “A one-of-a-kind collection”
Iranian authorities sent a team of archaeologists to the village in 1985 during the Iraq War, who were guarded by soldiers. They began to excavate and seized some bricks, but it was too late.

They had already been exported to private and museum collections, according to the archaeologist.

An Iranian family in Chiasso, on the Italian-Swiss border, offered to sell a set of glazed bricks to the British Museum. John Curtis, the museum’s curator at the time, was sent to acquire the collection in 1991.

As a result, Curtis advised European museums “not to buy it, because it is a unique collection which must not be divided and must be returned to its country of origin,” Hassanzadeh said.

The collection’s Iranian owner had a different perspective. He was unwilling to return the Swiss artefacts.

According to Swiss law enforcement, the items were confiscated in 2008. The case was heard in a courtroom. The “identity” of the collection was confirmed by French archaeologist Remy Boucharlat, according to a statement released by the museum in Tehran.

With the National Museum’s 2015 lawsuit and Iranian diplomats’ pressure, the legal proceedings have been dragging on for more than 10 years.

As of Tuesday, the collection will be returned to its rightful owner: the National Museum, according to curator Jebrael Nokandeh.

The National Museum will open an exhibition of around 300 cuneiform clay tablets returned from the United States in October, 2019.

Other artefacts have resurfaced, but they’ve done so with far less difficulty.

Iran’s cultural advisor in Paris last year received an email from the descendant of a Frenchman who had been living in Iran during World War II, saying, “I have a large collection of Iranian antiquities.”

These 29 artefacts, which date from the Bronze Age to the Islamic period, are now on display at the museum, and the search for more stolen and lost artefacts from the long history of the country continues……….

Australia and the United States are in talks with Nokandeh about returning objects.

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