Former Iraq Museum Director Donny George leads tour at Oriental Institute Museum January 6, 2009

Former Director General of the Iraqi Museums and Chairman of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, Dr. Donny George Youkhanna was a central figure during the looting of the Iraq Museum. He witnessed firsthand the looting and destruction that followed the collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime, and has worked tirelessly to try to recover the thousands of priceless antiquities that have gone missing. Dr. George left Iraq in 2006 and is presently Visiting Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stony Brook University in New York.

This personal tour will give a unique, in-depth view of the Oriental Institute Museum's incredible collection of ancient Iraqi artifacts. This collection is renowned not just for its scope and quality, but for the legal, ethical, and scholarly way in which almost all of it was assembled. Not only did the Oriental Institute lead many pioneering excavations in the region, from which these items came, but the Institute also took action after the devastating looting of the Iraq Museum, by using the Internet to distribute photos of the artifacts from Baghdad, to help identify them if they had been stolen.

Event submitted by Eventful.com on behalf of Savingantiquities.