Iraq's National Museum attracts locals and foreigners

The museum was closed for three years due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and political unrest, then reopened in March this year.

It has since seen an influx of visitors, according to museum officials.

"We noticed an exceptional turnout from both foreign tourists and the Iraqi people," said the director of the guides department at the museum Wafaa Abdel Jabbar.

The museum is about as old as modern Iraq. It was founded in 1923 by King Faisal I, scion of a prominent family from what is now Saudi Arabia and chosen by British colonial rulers to fuse three disparate Ottoman provinces into a new country.

It has more than 20 wings and has been closed during the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, after which tens of thousands of antiquities were looted and smuggled out of the country.

The National Museum opened again in 2015, despite thousands of pieces missing, and was closed again in 2019.

Throughout the years, thousands of ancient artifacts were returned to Iraq, including from the United States and Lebanon - and "a lot of pieces, thousands of pieces, are in the final stages to be returned home," Abdel Jabbar, the museum official, told Reuters in Baghdad last week.

According to Abdel Jabbar, among "the most significant pieces that were recently recovered and returned to the Iraqi national museum" is The Gilgamesh Dream Tablet.

The 3,500-year-old clay tablet bearing part of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the ancient Sumerian tale is believed to be one of the world’s first pieces of literature.

U.S. authorities seized the Gilgamesh tablet in 2019 after it was smuggled, auctioned, and sold to an arts dealer in Oklahoma and displayed at a museum in Washington, D.C. It was returned to Baghdad in December 2021.

Iraq's ancient heritage has been decimated by conflict, destruction, and looting, especially since 2003.

Authorities have been trying to track down, retrieve and preserve thousands of archaeological relics which are still missing.