LONDON, ENGLAND—The Telegraph reports that an Assyrian artifact held in police storage in London for 22 years has been returned to Iraq. The stone panel, carved with a winged genie, measures about four feet long, five feet wide, and has been dated to the ninth century B.C. It was excavated from the Northwest Palace at Nimrud, the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, in the early 1970s, but was stolen in the 1990s after the Gulf War. London’s Metropolitan Police seized the panel in 2002 as part of an undisclosed investigation. “As a sculpture excavated by an Iraqi archaeologist at a capital of Assyria that was badly destroyed by Islamic State, it has added symbolic value,” commented St. John Simpson of the British Museum. To read about plant DNA extracted from one of the palace's bricks, go to "Ancient DNA Revolution: Modeling Assyrian DNA."
