Diyala Grave Assemblage Screener
A tool for museums to check if ancient objects for sale match known burial sites, flagging potential looting.
A due-diligence lookup that checks Mesopotamian objects offered for sale or acquisition against the grave-by-grave assemblages published in the Diyala houses-and-graves volume, flagging material that matches documented burial contexts as likely looted. It gives auction houses, museums, and investigators a citable red flag before a lot clears or a case is filed.
Concept
The Diyala excavations published their private-grave material grave by grave: burial numbers, grave plans, and illustrated object assemblages. That published record is exactly what antiquities due diligence needs, but nobody has operationalized it. The product is a simple web lookup: a registrar, auction-house due-diligence officer, or investigator enters an object's description — type, material, dimensions, distinctive features — and the tool returns the documented Diyala graves whose assemblages contain comparable pieces, each result carrying its citation to the published grave number and plate. A match does not prove theft, but "consistent with a documented Diyala burial assemblage" combined with no legal export history is the standard red flag in cultural-property due diligence, and it gives prosecutors and source countries a concrete, citable basis for forfeiture or repatriation claims. The wedge is deliberately single: screening one well-documented excavation corpus against the market.
Why now
The new volume [0] supplies the complete published inventory of Diyala-region private graves — 361 pages of grave plans and illustrated assemblages — the reference corpus such screening requires, and its pairing of graves with house plans ties assemblages to specific excavation contexts rather than generic typologies. The catalog's Tell Asmar Footprint Watch [E7] already flags fresh digging at the site by satellite; this is the downstream counterpart for the moment dug-up material surfaces on the market, and because it works purely from published evidence, it can be built without access to Iraqi site records.
Written by GLM · 12 Oct 2026
AI assessment
A highly focused, high-utility due diligence tool that operationalizes a specific academic publication into a legal and commercial red-flagging system for looted antiquities.
- Evidence strength 5/5
- The idea relies directly on a specific, 361-page published inventory of grave-by-grave assemblages, providing a concrete dataset for the tool's functionality.
- Market pull 4/5
- Auction houses and government agencies have a strong legal and reputational incentive to screen for looted material to avoid seizures and lawsuits.
- Novelty & moat 3/5
- While similar in mechanism to the Palace of the Rulers index, it applies the logic to a different legal use case (looting vs. spatial provenance) and a different corpus.
- Feasibility 5/5
- The project is a straightforward digitization and indexing of a published text, requiring no new field research or complex AI.
- Wedge clarity 5/5
- The wedge is exceptionally sharp: screening one specific, well-documented excavation corpus against the market.
- Simplicity / focus 5/5
- It avoids 'platform' creep, focusing solely on a lookup tool for a single dataset.
Scored by Gemma 4 · 12 Oct 2026. Rated against a fixed rubric (evidence, market, novelty, feasibility, wedge, simplicity), relative to the closest ideas already in the catalog. A prior estimate to compare ideas before real-world signal arrives.
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Who benefits
- Art Loss Registercompany
The largest commercial due-diligence database for art and antiquities; adding excavation-documented Diyala grave assemblages gives its paid checks a verified reference corpus for Mesopotamian material.
- Iraq State Board of Antiquities and Heritageorganization
Can use documented-assemblage matches to substantiate repatriation requests for Diyala material removed from Iraq.
Matches between seized objects and documented grave assemblages give the unit citable evidence for forfeiture and repatriation, the core of its casework.
- Sotheby'scompany
Its specialists run pre-sale provenance checks on Mesopotamian lots; a documented-grave match is a cheap, decisive reason to investigate or withdraw a lot.
Research it builds on
- Private Houses and Graves in the Diyala RegionPinhas Delougaz, Harold D. Hill, Seton Lloyd · 2026 · 87 citationsAll ideas from this paper →