National Museum of Iraq

Photo: Michael Kamber for The New York Times

"Intricately patterned stone panels were among the artifacts that proved too heavy for looters to haul off when the Baghdad Museum was overrun in 2003. The executive director, Amira Eidan, said today that she could not forecast when the museum might reopen again since restoration efforts had been slowed by insufficient funding. The cost of recovering the artifacts has consumed the bulk of her museum’s budget, and pieces sometimes turned up at foreign auctions but were too expensive or difficult to retrieve, she said."