No other museum can rival the collections of Mesopotamian artifacts in the Iraq Museum. Spanning a

time from before 9,000 B.C. well into to the Islamic period, the Iraq Museum's collections includes some of the earliest tools man ever made, painted polychrome ceramics from the 6th millennium B.C., a relief-decorated cult vase from Uruk, famous gold treasures from the Royal Cemetery at Ur, Sumerian votive statues from Tell Asmar, Assyrian reliefs and bull figures from the Assyrian capitals of Nimrud, Nineveh, and Khorsabad, and Islamic pottery and coins--an unrivaled treasure not only for Iraq, but for all mankind.

In the days following the conquest of Baghdad by U.S. troops in April 2003, the Iraq Museum was looted; many pieces were stolen, others damaged or destroyed. Thanks to the foresight of the museum staff, the losses were less severe than than initially reported in the media, when a total loss of this collection was predicted. Even two years, however, a full damage assessment is still missing. A complete list of all losses can only be drawn up after a complete inventory of all remaining items has been complied, a lengthy and laborious procedure that obstructed by the fact that the museum's archive had been devastated during the looting. Some 15,000 items are now confirmed to be have been stolen. Several famous pieces, such as the Warka Vase and the Warka Head, were retrieved or returned to the museum, but many other important pieces, including the museum's collection of 4,800 cylinder seals, remains missing. Irrespective of numbers, these losses are tremendous not only to the world of archaeology but to mankind in general.

Since April 2003 scholars at the Oriental Institute have been compiling a comprehensive database of objects from the Iraq Museum. While the primary objective of this project is to help in the recovery of the missing objects, we also hope that this site will be found useful as an educational resource for schools and the general public. The objects are presented in categories. We have tried to adopt a descriptive terminology, based on visually obvious characteristics, and to avoid scholarly, interpretive terms. Since different people will look for different characteristics, many objects will feature in multiple categories. The layout of the categories is hierachical, starting off with material (e.g., clay, stone, ivory), followed by prinicipal object types (e.g., sculpture, relief, seal).

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