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Kanishk Tharoor goes on the murky trail of the missing Genie of Nimrud – a huge, 3,000-year-old carved figure that once protected a palace. It disappeared about 20 years ago, only to re-emerge in London and since 2002, it has been languishing in police vaults at Scotland Yard; the Winged-Bull of Nineveh was an Assyrian sculpture that guarded the gates of one of the most fabled cities in antiquity – it was destroyed by IS when they took the northern Iraqi city of Mosul; and a looted Sumerian seal that depicted a Goddess so mighty that she made her chair out of a man. This is the smallest and oldest object in our Museum. It was stolen in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and has still never been found.

(Photo: Assyrian winged-genie from Nimrud, very similar in style to the genie in possession of Scotland Yard. Credit:Brooklyn Museum)