In 1951 the Directorate General of Antiquities in Baghdad acquired a limestone statue of apparently Sumerian date. The dealer from whom the purchase was made claimed that he had found the statue at Tell Aswad, an ancient mound situated on the left bank of the Euphrates some 24 km. to the north-west of Ramadi. Shortly afterwards a team was dispatched by the Directorate to examine the mound and in the course of executing small trial trenches near the surface of the mound encountered structures of plano-convex mud-brickwork. In view of certain peculiarities in the style and proportions of the Tell Aswad statue doubts were voiced among members of the Directorate as to its genuineness, and in consequence approaches were made to various eminent archaeologists and art historians with a view to eliciting their professional opinions concerning it. On the basis of photographs supplied by the Directorate the consensus of opinion among the experts was that the statue showed certain stylistic differences from hitherto known Sumerian statuary which by themselves at least were not sufficient to mark the piece as definitely genuine or definitely false.