Penny Stock Journal: Returned Stolen Treasure

Sunday, July 19, 2015

Returned Stolen Treasure

Last week we reported that two Roman ballista balls from Gamla were returned. The 2,000-year-old stones were left in a bag at the courtyard of the Museum of Islamic and Near Eastern Cultures.

In 1993, a retired Red Army officer dropped off 101 drawings by masters like Goya, Manet, and Delacroix at the German embassy in Moscow.

They had been looted from the Bremen museum in 1945 by Soviet soldiers.

The looting of the Baghdad Museum as Saddam Hussein’s government crumbled was devastating for antiquities lovers. In 2003, three men anonymously returned one of Iraq’s most precious treasures in the back of a car.

The Sacred Vase of Warka, a massive limestone bowl, dates to around 3200 B.C.

In 2001, London dealer James Ede received an anonymous phone call that led him to his doorstep, where he found six fragments of Roman frescoes taken from Pompeii during excavations. They had been stolen 16 years earlier from the walls of a villa near the ancient city, and were estimated to be worth around £100,000.

In 2006, just a year after a 1,500-year-old stone box from the Mayan civilization was found in Guatemala, it mysteriously vanished.

After a national investigation, it returned through an anonymous delivery at the country’s Ministry of Culture.

In 1950 a group of 11 small ancient clay figurines were found in a Utah canyon. They belonged to a long-vanished people called the Fremont Culture, who had lived in the region from 700 to 1300 A.D. For two decades, these pieces, which came to be known as the Pilling Collection, toured around Utah museums.

In the early 1970s, one of the figures mysteriously failed to show up. In 2011, an anthropologist at Utah State University received a box with the missing piece.

In 2007 the J Paul Getty Museum returned disputed antiquities, including a prized statue of the goddess Aphrodite.

Italian authorities believe the 7ft statue, bought by the Getty for $18 million in 1988, was looted from an ancient Greek settlement in Sicily.

In April 2015 some 123 artefacts were seized by US customs as part of a five year investigation into international smuggling networks dubbed Operation Mummy's Curse.

One item, a 2,300 year-old sarcophagus was found in a garage in Brooklyn.