John's post about London mentions some Mesopotamian sculptures, and thereby hangs a tale.
The school I attended in England, Canford, was housed in part in an older English manor house designed by Sir Charles Barry, the architect of the Houses of Parliament and also Highclere Manor, the site of Downton Abbey. (If you go to the school's website, you will see that the highest part of the back of the house is an octagonal tower; my study was at the top of that tower.)
Set at the end of a long cloister was the "tuck shop," English slang for a place where students can buy snacks, drinks, etc. On the walls of the shop were a number of plaster casts of Mesopotamian and Babylonian bas-reliefs, copies of sculptures collected by Lord and Lady Wimborne in the nineteenth century. (In one Downton Abbey episode, mention is made of a party hosted by lady Wimborne!) As they are wont to do, students had scribbled various graffiti on these casts. None of us knew or cared a whit about them.
Well, a few years later, a young assistant professor from Yale came to the school at the beginning of a quest to try to find out what had happened to the originals. He took a look at the casts, and – they weren't casts at all, but the ancient originals! Needless to say, the tuck shop was promptly relocated elsewhere and the sculptures carefully cleaned by a team from the British Museum. Over a period of several years, they were auctioned off, some to the British Museum and some to the Metropolitan in New York, and the abundant proceeds were used to pay for a large capital expansion of Canford, including the construction of several dormitories to house newly admitted girls.
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