should be held sooner or later dealing with ancient antiques from the ninevah era, should give a great clue to whom is actually funding daesh. display, auctions, antique antiquity, what was in the Mosul museam collection pre 2000 display should give a great reference to 

pcs that look like these

for those few souls that find art nice to gaze upon.

looks like a great exhibit in boston coming up on the schedual...

Considering that the palace had been destroyed by an intense conflagration during the sack of Nineveh in 612 B.C., the massive walls and many of the relief sculptures of Sennacherib's throne-room suite were surprisingly well preserved. In the 1960s, because of the palace's historical importance and unique preservation, the Iraq Department of Antiquities consolidated the walls and sculptures and roofed the site over as the Sennacherib Palace Site Museum [IMAGE, 37K] at Nineveh, where visitors could tour one of only two preserved Assyrian palaces in the world. (The other is the palace of Assurnasirpal II at Nimrud, also restored as a site museum.) The four restored rooms of the throne-room suite, designated H, I, IV, and V by Layard, contained some 100 sculptured slabs in various states of preservation. In two of these rooms, IV and V [IMAGE, 51K], parts of nearly every slab survived, making these the most completely preserved decorative cycles in the palace. Most of these reliefs have never been published. Some show unusual subjects and provide valuable information on visual narrative composition in Assyrian palace decoration. These reliefs needed to be documented in case the originals were lost or damaged and to guide future conservation efforts.

I was concerned that more looted Assyrian sculptures would appear on the market but saw no further examples for more than a year. In November 1996, I was contacted by a lawyer acting on behalf of a prospective purchaser who had photographs of ten Assyrian sculptures that were said to be on the market. The lawyer wanted to know if the sculptures were being sold legitimately. They were not. Nine of the ten new pieces are fragments of wall relief from the Sennacherib Palace Site Museum. All nine fragments had been broken from large wall slabs that were intact in the museum in 1990. They had not merely been broken from the edges of a few slabs. Each fragment came from a different slab, and most of them had been broken from the middle of a slab, suggesting that the looters extracted the best-preserved bits, destroying the remainder in the process. Formerly intact and partially intact slabs are now apparently piles of rubble. The tenth fragment is evidently from the palace of Sargon II at Khorsabad, which was being stored at Nineveh in 1990 [IMAGE, 59K

hy is this happening now? Iraq has a rich and varied heritage, and this heritage has been coveted by the Western world since the nineteenth century heyday of imperial acquisition. Then, "like the wolf on the fold," representatives of European governments descended on the palaces of Mesopotamia and sacked them to fill the halls of the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Berlin Museum. Numerous sculptured slabs found their way into smaller collections in England and America as well. The most spectacular of these was a group of 28 Assyrian sculptures, including two human-headed lion and bull colossi, which were presented by Layard to his cousin, Lady Charlotte Guest, a distinguished scholar of Welsh literature, mother of ten, and wife of the wealthiest industrialist in England. She displayed them at her home, Canford Manor in Dorsetshire, in the Nineveh Porch, a Gothic Revival garden pavilion built especially for them by Charles Barry, the architect of the Houses of Parliament. The bulk of this collection is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Their story is told in my new book, From Nineveh to New York (Yale University Press), which will be published in March 1997. Today Assyria is in fashion again, and its sculptures are bringing unprecedented prices. In 1992, while doing research for the new book, I discovered an original sculpture still in place in the Nineveh Porch at Canford, now Canford School. In 1994 this sculpture was sold by the school at auction for $12 million, by far the highest price ever paid for an antiquity. (today in context was Feb 1 2001)

Today the Sennacherib Palace site museum at Nineveh represents a world heritage disaster of the first magnitude. Immediate emergency conservation measures are required to preserve what remains of its sculptures. One might think that international support for such a crucial undertaking could be readily obtained, but the obstacles appear insurmountable. The same United Nations sanctions that have contributed to the destruction of the palace museum also prohibit any form of outside cultural assistance to Iraq. The United Nations sanctions committee has repeatedly refused to grant permission for international teams to assess damage and threats to the cultural heritage of Iraq in the wake of the Gulf War, despite the urgent need for documentation and conservation of Iraqi heritage due to wartime damage, postwar looting, and emergency agricultural development.

Even if money and expertise could be obtained for the preservation of the palace museum the sanctions prohibit its expenditure in Iraq. This hostility towards Iraq's heritage reflects a widespread misunderstanding in the west, which fails to make the connection between modern Iraq and ancient Mesopotamia, the "Cradle of Civilization." This heritage disaster also highlights the role of the west as a myopic consumer of heritage, rather than cherishing it as a vanishing irreplaceable shared resource.

I do not know where these sculpture fragments are or who has them. Anyone who is offered them for purchase is requested to notify the seller that the sculptures were removed illegally from Nineveh, and to ask the seller to turn them over to an Iraqi embassy or interests section, Interpol, or to a customs agency, so that they may be returned to Iraq. Potential buyers of Sennacherib fragments should be aware that very few such pieces appear legitimately on the market, and that many more fragments may have been smuggled out of Iraq, either from relief slabs known to have been broken up, or from other slabs in the palace museum. Any Sennacherib relief fragment should be treated with great caution

so what's the local art shows offering for new exhibits on assyrain time pieces, ones termed as" babies " hence they have not been widely viewed.

The antiquities museum in Mosul, once home to priceless ancient Mesopotamian artifacts, has been retaken by Iraqi forces. They found its valuable contents either gone or reduced to rubble. 

Troops from Iraq's elite Rapid Response Unit advanced further into western Mosul on Tuesday, recapturing the provincial government headquarters, the central bank branch and the city's antiquities museum, only to find all its remaining relics lying in ruins. Reporters from the Associated Press on the scene described the exhibition halls as being filled with only "piles of rubble" and "ankle-deep drifts of ash." They said that among the things they saw there were remains of what could have been an ancient Assyrian bull statue and pieces of cuneiform tablets. 

"The museum is completely empty of all artifacts. They were stolen, possibly smuggled," Major General Ali Kadhem al-Lami, of the Federal Police's Fifth Division, told Reuters. 

After its capture of Mosul in 2014, Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) shocked the world by releasing footage of its militants smashing up ancient artifacts in Mosul, using sledgehammers and power tools. They are believed to be selling off the antiques they have not destroyed on the black market.

Mosul is the heart of Iraqi civilization," Federal Police Major and Mosul resident, Muhammad al-Jabouri, told AP. "When I heard how Daesh [an Arabic acronym for IS] destroyed this place, death would have been a greater mercy for me." Throughout its campaign of terror, IS has systematically demolished ancient monuments, temples, churches and even some mosques which don't fit in with their radical religious ideology. "Daesh came to Iraq to destroy our heritage, because they don't have their own," Federal Police Cpl. Abbas Muhammad said. 

The museum is completely empty of all artefacts. They were stolen, possibly smuggled,” Lami said.

Reuters was not yet able to access the museum to verify

so i wonder what exactly was on those oil trucks that made Obama take them off limits to bombing.

WHITE HOUSE GAVE ISIS 45 MINUTE WARNING BEFORE BOMBING OIL TANKERS

Why did it take 15 months for the U.S. to target the Islamic State's oil infrastructure?

https://eng.majalla.com/2016/08/article55250737/display-ancient-iranian-artistic-technical-excellence-cannot-beaten

Deep beneath the tomb, archaeologists found tunnels that ISIS had dug, leading to a palace that had been undiscovered and untouched for 2,600 years. ISIS dug the tunnels to search for priceless artifacts and antiquities to sell for the funding of its operations. Fortunately, ISIS left the ancient palace untouched.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/Transasia_trade_routes_1stC_CE_gr2.png

when these competeing crafts men had to be the best to get selected for the cargo to pharoah, or ceazar they made better pieces, they saw what other pieces that made the grade looked like and they had to make more refined work to be in place on horse covered hemp covered wagon.