Persian Bas-Relief Stolen Twice — the $1.2M Heist

Some stolen treasures vanish forever. This one refused to stay lost. A Persian bas-relief stolen twice — first from the ruins of Persepolis in 1936, then from a museum in Montreal in 2011 — passed through the hands of dealers, collectors and insurers for more than eighty years before a dusty archive in Chicago brought it home. The eight-inch square of carved limestone shows a bearded imperial guard carrying a spear and shield, and it was valued at $1.2 million when police seized it at a New York art fair in 2017. But its real value was never the price tag. It was the proof: photographs and a letter from 1936 that showed exactly where the stone belonged, and exactly when it was taken. This is the true story of a twice-stolen treasure, the detective work that unmasked it, and the ending that finally sent it home to Iran.

It is a story with everything a great heist tale needs: an ancient empire, a thief in the night, a brazen daylight robbery, a museum that gave up, an insurance company that cashed in, and a team of archivists who dug through boxes of old photographs until the truth fell out. And unlike most art crimes, this one has a happy ending.

The Persian Bas-Relief Stolen Twice: A Soldier Carved in Stone

To understand why anyone would steal this small slab of stone — twice — you have to understand what it is. The relief is a piece of carved limestone, about eight inches square, showing the head and shoulders of a Persian imperial guard. His beard and hair are carved in tight, beautiful curls. He carries a spear and a shield. He was one of a long line of soldiers carved into a parapet, or balustrade, at the central building of Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire — the First Persian Empire — near the modern Iranian city of Shiraz.

The relief was uncovered in 1933, during the first major excavation of Persepolis by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Archaeologists photographed it in place, still part of the stairway parapet where it had stood for two and a half millennia. Those photographs would turn out to be the most important evidence in the case — but nobody knew it yet.

Theft Number One: A Thief in the Spring of 1936

Sometime in the spring of 1936, a thief walked up the stairs of a royal building in the heart of Persepolis and pried a chunk off the ancient parapet. The carved soldier came away in his hands. There were no alarms, no guards on the stairway, and no cameras. The excavation team discovered the loss after the fact, and the site’s head excavator wrote about it in a letter dated March 28, 1936, which mentioned the theft of two slabs from a southern stairway.

That letter, filed away in the Oriental Institute’s archives, would sleep for more than eighty years. But the theft itself was already a crime with a clear legal meaning. In 1930, Iran had passed a law criminalising the export of antiquities except under official agreements — so the relief was not merely stolen, it had been taken out of the country illegally. Whatever happened to it afterwards, it could never have a clean title.

A Quiet Life in Montreal — Then Theft Number Two

For sixty years, the relief lived a respectable museum life in Montreal. It was catalogued, photographed, studied and displayed as part of one of Canada’s finest collections of ancient art. Nobody questioned where it had come from. In the 1950s, questions about the provenance of antiquities were rarely asked, and a donation from a wealthy collector was simply accepted with thanks.

Then, in September 2011, the relief was stolen for the second time — and this theft was far bolder than the first. A man wearing jeans, a dark jacket and a baseball cap walked into the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in broad daylight, took the Persian relief off display, and walked out with it under his arm. He also took a first-century Roman marble head of a man. There was no smashed glass, no dramatic chase — just a thief strolling out of a museum with two ancient treasures as if they were his own shopping.

The Montreal police and the museum were stunned. The Roman marble head has never been found. But the Persian relief turned up again in 2014, when Canadian authorities recovered it from an apartment in Edmonton. The resident told police he had bought it for $1,400, and he was charged with possessing stolen property. The relief was safe — but its legal fate was about to take a strange turn.

The museum had already received a $950,000 insurance payout for the theft. Faced with a choice, the museum decided to keep the money and let its insurer, AXA, keep the title to the relief. AXA then sold the piece to Rupert Wace, a well-known London antiquities dealer, working with his partner Sam Fogg. On paper, the dealers had bought the relief legally from an insurance company. But paper is not the same as provenance — and the stone’s real history was about to catch up with it.

The $1.2 Million Comeback at a New York Art Fair

The seizure was not an accident. Lindsay Allen, a scholar of Near Eastern history at King’s College London, had followed the piece through its long, strange journey and had raised the alarm. She reached out to the Oriental Institute in Chicago — the institution that had excavated Persepolis in the 1930s and still holds about 52,000 objects from ancient Persia, along with thousands of documents from the excavation. If anyone could prove where the relief came from, it was them.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s office built a full timeline tracing the location and ownership history of the relief. But a timeline is only as strong as its evidence, and the prosecutors needed proof that this particular stone had been taken from Persepolis after 1930, when Iran’s export ban took effect. That proof was sitting in boxes in Chicago, waiting to be found.

The 1936 Archive: Proof of a Persian Bas-Relief Stolen Twice

Those two facts together were decisive. The photographs proved the relief was still in Persepolis in 1936. The letter proved it was stolen that same year — six years after Iran had criminalised the export of antiquities. No dealer, collector or insurer could claim a legal chain of ownership that started with a theft. The Persian bas-relief stolen twice had finally met the one thing no thief can outrun: a paper trail.

In July 2018, a New York Supreme Court judge agreed and ordered the relief to be returned to Iran — the first piece from Persepolis ever to be repatriated by court order. The London dealers did not appeal. After some negotiation, they agreed to hand the piece over, a decision that protected both the law and, as some observers noted, their own reputations in the art world.

Home at Last: The Courtroom Verdict and the Flight to Tehran

In September 2018, the relief was officially handed over at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. Anne Flannery and Lindsay Allen were both present when the piece was given to Gholamali Khoshroo, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations. Then came the final, almost cinematic detail: the relief was personally carried back to Iran by President Hassan Rouhani, who was returning from the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Back in Tehran, the relief was ceremonially unveiled in a new display at the National Museum of Iran. Firouzeh Sepidnameh, director of the ancient history section of the museum, told reporters that the piece belonged to the people of Iran and was part of their identity. The soldier who had been pried off a stairway in 1936, sold for $1,000, displayed in Montreal, stolen in daylight, recovered in Edmonton and seized at a Manhattan art fair was finally home — more than eighty years after he was taken.

The case also sent a message far beyond one small slab of limestone. It showed that old excavation archives — photographs, letters, requisition forms — can be powerful legal weapons against the illegal antiquities trade. And it reminded museums, dealers and collectors that a beautiful object with a murky past can be seized, even at the world’s most prestigious art fairs. The relief’s journey is not over in a wider sense, either: Iranian officials have said they are tracing other Persepolis fragments that were stolen in the same era, hoping to bring more of them home.

Key Takeaways

Some art crimes end in mystery. This one ended in a museum gallery in Tehran, where a 2,500-year-old soldier finally stands where he belongs. The Persian bas-relief stolen twice survived two thefts, five countries and eight decades of changing hands — and what finally defeated the thieves was not a detective or a daring raid, but an archivist, a box of old photographs, and a letter written in 1936. If you love real-life heists with a twist, do not miss the story of the con man who sold the Eiffel Tower — twice, or the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. And for another tale of a ruler who became a legend, read the true story of Vlad the Impaler, the real Dracula.

Sources: University of Chicago News; The Art Newspaper; Tehran Times; Global Times.