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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;GinoLR, post: 23150746, member: 128351&quot;]You may be right: the very word Mesopotamia must have automatically &quot;raised a red flag&quot;. But it is understandable. Since 2003 and the fall of Iraq&#039;s authoritarian regime, a certain form of anarchy has prevailed in this country. For antiquities, it has been a disaster, starting from the looting of Baghdad&#039;s National Museum in full daylight. There have been illegal digs everywhere and tons of antiquities of all kinds (coins, pottery, cylinders, fragments of statues or reliefs, etc.) have been proposed to potential buyers on internet. In the 2000s it&#039;s no longer like in the 1970s, when such items were only available in Baghdad or Mosul antique shops, or on the very sites where locals used to propose them to the few tourists or expats; now traffickers can immediately reach customers from the whole planet by the tens of thousands thanks to social networks or sites like ebay. </p><p>Ebay could be sued for this, because it facilitates trafficking of looted heritage and even makes money from it. They must do something, and the least they can do is banning any antiquity that has words like Mesopotamia, Sumerian, Iraq, Syria, etc. in its description so it is easy to find with a simple word search. Of course it&#039;s awkward, but much less than all these security checks we have to go through when we travel by plane, or the prohibition of carrying any liquid items with us - just because there are sometimes a handful of terrorists.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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