Baghdad, Iraq ? Iraqi museum officials and U.S. military authorities now think that the much-publicized looting of antiquities from the world-renowned Iraq Museum was most likely a well-executed theft, perhaps planned before Baghdad fell.

Museum officials have determined that most of the looting that did take place at the museum, home to more than 170,000 artifacts of human civilization, was focused on office machines and furniture, as at other government buildings, and that only selected antiquities were taken.

“The people who came in here knew what they wanted. These were not random looters,” Donny George, the director general of Iraq’s state board of antiquities, said Wednesday in front of the museum as he held up four glass cutters — red-handled with inch-long silver blades — that he found on the floor of the looted museum.

He pointed out that replica items — museum pieces that would have looked every bit as real to an angry mob as authentic items — were left untouched. The museum’s extensive Egyptian collection, which is valuable, but not unique to the world, also was left alone.

George said he hoped the United States would be able to help recover the items. “We always have hope here,” he said.

Behind him stood three M-1A1 Abrams tanks, a show of protection by the U.S. military that many in the crowd were muttering arrived five days too late.

In the main collection, it now appears that few items are missing, and very little seems to have been the victim of mob violence.

Among the most valuable stolen pieces were the vase of Warka, from 3200 B.C., and the Basiqi, a bronze Acadian statue.

Still, the damage is grave, George said.

“What we have lost and what has been broken is priceless. We will never put a number on it.”

“Human civilization was here,” he said. “There may have been other museums in the world that have small pieces of this story, but there was no collection so detailed with the evidence of human civilization.”