It’s starting to become clear that estimates of the theft and damage of Iraq’s National Museum were too high. “While many museum officials watched in horror as mobs and perhaps organized gangs rampaged through the museum’s 18 galleries, seized objects on display, tore open steel cases, smashed statues and broke into storage vaults, officials now discount the first reports that the museum’s entire collection of 170,000 objects had been lost. Some valuable objects were placed for safekeeping in the vaults of the Central Bank before the war. Other objects were placed in the museum’s own underground vaults; only when power was restored this week could curators begin assessing what was lost. Even in some of the looted galleries, a few stone statues are intact. Still more encouragingly, several hundred small objects — including a priceless statue of an Assyrian king from the ninth century B.C. — have been returned to the museum.”