Effective Date: April 30, 2008 or August 9, 1990 (see comment below)
Source: 73 Fed. Reg. 23334-23342 (April 30, 2008).
The Designated List is as Follows:
B. Coins
1. Coins in Iraq have a long history and great variety, spanning the Achaemenid Persian, Hellenistic Seleucid, Parthian, Sasanian, and Islamic periods. Coins from neighboring regions circulated in Iraq as well. Early coins are hand-stamped, so that the design is usually off-center.
2. Achaemenid coins are the gold daric and silver siglos, and fractional and multiple denominations. Both are stamped on the front with an image of the king holding a bow, and on the back with a non-figural oblong mark.
3. Coin types and materials for coins minted or circulated in Iraq during the Seleucid, Parthian, and Sasanian periods include gold staters and dinars, bronze or silver drachms, tetradrachms, and hemidrachms, and smaller bronze and lead coins. These coins usually have male and female busts (of kings and queens) on the front. Seated archers, seated gods such as Zeus, winged Victory, and other Greco-Roman mythological subjects, are usually on the reverse of the Seleucid and Parthian coins, which are inscribed in Greek or Parthian. Sasanian period coins typically feature a fire altar on the back, either with or without figures, and are inscribed in Middle Persian.
4. Early Islamic coins are of gold, silver, and copper. Most are stamped on both sides with inscriptions in Arabic, though a few types have an image on one side and an inscription on the other.
Comment: Another all-encompassing list that includes many coins that circulated far outside of Iraq. These restrictions were made under separate statutory authority justified by looting in Iraq after the First Gulf War. The effective date of this regulation is ambiguous. The regulations themselves give April 30, 2008, as the effective date. However, the enabling statute states “the term ‘archaeological or ethnological material of Iraq'’ means cultural property of Iraq and other items of archaeological, historical, cultural, rare scientific, or religious importance illegally removed from the Iraq National Museum, the National Library of Iraq, and other locations in Iraq, since the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 661 of 1990.” Emergency Protection for Iraqi Cultural Antiquities Act of 2004 (title III of Pub. L. 108-429), Sec. 3002 (b). Even more confusingly, the statute also indicates that the authority lapsed as of September 30, 2009. Id. However, the State Department takes the position that it still has authority to regulate Iraqi cultural artifacts.
