Is It All Loot? Tackling The Antiquities Problem

Discussion which includes a former professor of mine at Stony Brook University, Elizabeth C. Stone, Ph.D. With her guidance I had studied the "Middle East" "Levant" and "Southwest Asia" archaeology. One site in particular, Nuzi, excavated in Iraq by Starr of Harvard in the 1930's was very interesting, near Kirkuk and Mosul, Iraq (in "Southwest Asia") where it's reported Catholic Christians have lived since about 300 CE (AD) (Britannica). There is a fragment of tablet that describes a wedding (failed?) between Egypt and Iraq allegedly found elsewhere, linking the kingdom of Mitanni with Egypt around 1300 BCE, its capital still yet to be found. Many tablets were found in Nuzi and were translated giving an insight into the ancient "fertile crescent" between the Tigris and the Euphrates said to be the origin of Western Civilization. The Nuzi city site was armed to the teeth when abandoned, projectile points ("arrowheads") found in many of its rooms, perhaps over-run for being cosmopolitan, at a crossroads of Hittite, Hurrian, Mesopotamian, Indus and other peoples, I thought and wrote.