A $1.2 million Persian soldier bas-relief was stolen twice; later a 1936 archive helped bring it back

The carved soldier was meant to guard a royal staircase at Persepolis, the ancient capital of the Persian Empire. Instead, a piece of that 2,500 year old relief passed through museums, an insurance company and the international art market. By October 2017, it was on offer at a New York art fair with an estimated value of $1.2 million.

It had already vanished twice. The first theft took it from Persepolis in the 1930s, during the period when archaeologists from the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute were documenting the site. The second came in 2011, when it was stolen from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. It was not a new dig or a high-tech scan that solved its history. It was a paper trail, decades old, that had survived.

A soldier relief missing from an ancient staircase

The relief came from Persepolis, a ceremonial centre of the Achaemenid Persian Empire in what is now Iran. The site was built from around 520 BC and sacked by Alexander the Great in 330 BC. In the 1930s, archaeologists working with the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute documented the ruins and the objects found there.


The carved stone showed an imperial guard with a spear and shield on it. It was a slab of limestone eight inches square, depicting a curly bearded ‘Immortal’ from Achaemenial Dynasty. Due to its size it was not easy to trace. It had been taken from the site, and later its history crossed several countries.

According to the University of Chicago’s account, it states that the relief was reported missing in 1936. Years later it turned up in Canada. In 1950, it was donated to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where it was kept on display for several decades.

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Stolen again, then found nearly 2,000 miles away

On September 3, 2011, the relief was stolen from the Montreal museum, one of two objects taken around that time. The museum, police and its insurer began an investigation.

In January 2014, the panel surfaced in Edmonton, nearly 2,000 miles away. Canadian police recovered it from a private apartment. The museum had already received an insurance payment, so the insurer took possession of the object instead of returning it to the collection.

That detail mattered later. The relief was no longer just a museum piece. It had entered a chain of ownership involving an insurer and antiquities dealers. The London-based dealers Rupert Wace and Sam Fogg bought it from the insurance company, saying they believed the purchase was legitimate.

By October 2017, it was on display at the European Fine Art Fair in New York. Investigators from the Manhattan district attorney’s office seized it there. Authorities believed it had been taken from Persepolis decades before it was stolen from the Canadian museum.

The clue was hidden in an old excavation file

The hard part was proving where the relief came from and when it had gone missing. That is where historical research came in.

Lindsay Allen, a scholar of ancient Iranian history, had followed the object and suspected the 2011 theft was not the start of its troubles. She contacted the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, which holds extensive records from the Persepolis excavations.

Researchers went through hundreds of pages of archival material. One document was a letter dated March 28, 1936, from the excavation’s head archaeologist. It mentioned the theft of two stone slabs from a southern staircase at Persepolis.

That letter linked the relief in New York to the earlier disappearance. The university describes the archival evidence as decisive in establishing the object’s history. Excavation notes and letters, kept long after their writers have died, can turn out to be key evidence in a modern legal case.

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Why a court ordered it back to Iran

On July 23, 2018, a New York court ordered the relief returned to Iran. The dealers agreed to give it up after investigators presented the evidence tracing it to Persepolis. It was handed to Iranian officials that year.

The case was unusual because the object had already been recovered after the Montreal theft. Its return to Canada had not settled who owned it. The insurance arrangement had passed possession to the insurer, and the later sale put it back on the art market.

The $1.2 million estimated value gave the case a modern financial dimension, but price was not the decisive question. What counted more was the evidence tying the carved stone to its original location and hence documenting its removal.

What an archive can preserve

The relief was a small piece of the vast monumental architecture at Persepolis, but its journey reflects how a fragment can hold a history that its surface does not reveal.

It was there for decades in a museum, was stolen, recovered and then put up for sale. Its return rested partly on records made during an excavation more than 80 years earlier. Without those records, tying the relief to the missing stone slabs at Persepolis would have been much harder.

The soldier was sculpted to stand in a queue of security personnel at a royal complex. Its story today is also a story about the people who record the past; the excavators who wrote down what they saw, the archivists who kept their papers secured, and the researchers who once again went back to those records when an ancient object surfaced far from home. The road back to Persepolis was not paved with stone, but it was just written on paper.