Kuwait Catalogs Thousands of Museum Items Looted by Iraq

UNITED NATIONS — Eight parchment pages from a Tunisian Koran written in exquisite Arabic calligraphy in the late 9th or early 10th Century once lay on exhibit in the Kuwait National Museum. So did a dagger overlaid with gold and set with enamel and rubies by craftsmen of Mogul India in the 17th Century. And so did an enameled glass perfume sprinkler crafted in Syria in the 13th Century.

These are but a handful of items that the Kuwaiti government says were stolen by Iraqi soldiers from its national museum during their seven-month occupation.

An incomplete list of several thousand items was catalogued on 148 closely printed pages and released by the United Nations on Tuesday. Under terms of the U.N. Security Council cease-fire resolution accepted by Iraq, it must return all property seized from Kuwait.

The looted museum pieces include a Persian earthenware oil lamp from the 10th Century, nine carved rock-crystal chess pieces from 19th-Century India, an Indian necklace of carved melon-shaped emerald beads weighing 530 carats and crafted in the 17th or 18th Century, an ivory hunting horn carved in Italy in the late 11th or early 12th Century and a pair of gold earrings with a Koranic inscription carved in Moorish Spain in the 12th Century.

Others were a stamped, tooled and gilded book binding from 15th-Century Turkey, a manuscript of 357 folios with 22 miniature Persian paintings dated 1537 in Shiraz, a fluted steel helmet from 16th-Century Turkey, a late 19th-Century prayer rug from the Caucasus, a carved marble tombstone from Egypt dated 861, numerous linen and silk tapestries from Egypt in the 10th through 13th centuries, and a pair of massive, 14th-Century carved and painted wooden doors from Fez, Morocco.