THE finest jewellery of the ancient world is to be loaned to Britain in an exhibition set to rival the popularity of Tutankhamun at the British Museum 23 years ago.

The Nimrud gold, comprising the grave goods of Assyrian queens and princes, has barely been seen in Iraq, let alone anywhere else.

The treasure, which was found in the North-West Palace of Nimrud, south of the modern Iraqi city of Mosul, in the late 1980s, dates from the 8th century BC. It was feared lost when Iraq fell victim to looters and anarchy after the fall of Saddam.

The unprecedented worldwide tour has been organised to raise more than $10 million (£5.3 million) for the National Museum in Baghdad, which was the biggest victim of the looters. Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, described the theft of treasures from the museum as the greatest catastrophe to afflict any great institution since the Second World War.

The Art Newspaper reveals this week that an exhibition of the jewellery will open on October 23 at a venue in Europe to be announced next month, despite concern over the artifacts going to countries that led the military action in Iraq.

The show will then tour for five years to eleven other cities in Europe, North America and the Far East.

Preliminary discussions for a loan have been held with the British Museum and that the Royal Academy has been approached over the project.

Iraq’s heritage is that of the world. Ancient Mesopotamia — modern Iraq — represents the cradle of civilisation as the birthplace of writing, cities, codified law, mathematics, medicine and astronomy. The British Museum boasts the greatest collection of Mesopotamian antiquities outside Iraq.

Exhibits include the iconic winged human-headed bulls and stone bas-reliefs found in the palaces of the Assyrian kings at Nimrud and Nineveh.

The Gold of Nimrud: Treasures of Ancient Iraq will display about 300 objects that are currently in a high-security store at the National Museum.

The treasures were thought to have been looted during the chaos that followed the capture of the Iraqi capital by American forces, but were found intact in a basement of the Central Bank. They had been placed there in the early 1990s, possibly to protect them during the 1991 Gulf War.

In 2003, the American authorities put them on show for several months in the museum to demonstrate that life in the capital was returning to normal. Apart from that spell, the gold has never been seen by Iraqis.

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