A small clay tablet dating from 3,500 years ago is back at an Iraqi museum. The slab bears a portion of the historically important poem, Epic of Gilgamesh. Stolen during wartime, the ancient tablet has been on display illegally—but possibly unwittingly—in a U.S. museum.
The $1.7 million Mesopotamian cuneiform tablet is known as the “Gilgamesh Dream Tablet.” It is one of the world’s oldest surviving works of literature and one of the oldest religious texts. It was found in 1853 as part of a 12-tablet collection in the rubble of the library of Assyrian King Assur Banipal.
Experts believe someone looted the tablet from an Iraqi museum 30 years ago during the 1991 Gulf War. The tablet passed through the hands of a London coin dealer, an American antiquities dealer, and several other collectors before being bought by Hobby Lobby’s Founder and CEO Steve Green. Hobby Lobby officials eventually put the tablet on display in the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. (See Museum of the Bible Opens.)
Federal agents with Homeland Security Investigations seized the tablet from the museum in September 2019. Hobby Lobby officials told prosecutors they were unaware that the tablet was stolen. They said that many of the 40,000 artifacts they bought for their museum had been mislabeled as being from Turkey or Israel.
Green blames the doubtful purchases on “inexperience” in the antiquities field. Green’s company eventually paid out $3 million and returned the items.
Last week, U.S. officials handed the tablet over to Iraqi authorities. Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein and Minister of Culture, Tourism, and Antiquities Hassan Nadhem attended the ceremony at Iraq’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. UNESCO officials were also there. UNESCO is a United Nations agency that promotes international cooperation in arts and culture.“We were able to recover about 17,926 artifacts from several countries, namely America, Britain, Italy, Japan, and the Netherlands,” Hussein told reporters.
UNESCO has described the process of recovering the valuable artifact as the culmination of decades of cooperation between the United States and Iraq, both of which are signatories to the UNESCO Convention of 1970.
Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression. — Isaiah 1:17
(A recovered clay tablet from the United States is on display at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, December 7, 2021. (AP/Khalid Mohammed)
