Thousands of cuneiform tablets returned to their country of origin

24 August 2021

On Tuesday, 3 August 2021, crates from the United States were the focus of a ceremony in Baghdad. They arrived on the plane carrying the Iraqi Prime Minister and contained more than 17,000 archaeological objects, cultural goods returned by the United States to Iraq, including a large majority of clay tablets covered with cuneiform characters.

These objects come from the Museum of the Bible, which was opened in Washington DC in 2017 by an evangelical Christian family that owns the Hobby Lobby craft shop chain, and from the Cornell University collection.

Nearly 12,000 of these objects were acquired by Steve Green, the owner of the Hobby Lobby chain of shops from 2009 onwards to display in his new Museum of the Bible, with a view to historicising the events described in the Old Testament. The owner had to pay a hefty fine and was forced to reconsider the origin of the items in his collection. Many of the tablets bear the name of a now-defunct ancient city, Irisagrig, whose history in the 21st century BCE they document.

The most emblematic piece seized at the Museum of the Bible contains a passage from the Epic of Gilgamesh, a literary work over four thousand years old, known in several versions in Sumerian and Akkadian languages and studied today by students in the sixth grade as one of the founding texts of humanity. This fragmentary tablet, measuring approximately 15 cm by 15 cm and dating from the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, contains the Akkadian version of the dreams that the hero relates to his mother, the goddess Ninsun.

The tablet was offered for sale in London in 2003 by a Jordanian antiquities dealer and then smuggled to the United States with a falsified certificate of provenance suggesting a purchase in San Francisco in 1981 with ancient bronzes. After changing owners several times, the tablet was finally sold in 2014 by Christie's to S. Green for $1.67 million, and then exhibited at the Museum of the Bible.

It is not impossible that the tablet was stolen from a provincial museum in Iraq during the Gulf War or during the 2003 US invasion. In September 2019, the US authorities seized the tablet as a stolen item.

The second batch of cuneiform tablets repatriated to Iraq comes from the Cornell University collection. This collection originated with an initial donation of 1,500 inscribed cuneiform objects by Jonathan and Jeannette Rosen in 1999. After several other donations, the collection had more than ten thousand inscribed objects, mainly clay tablets, by 2013.

Nothing is said about how and when these tablets left their country of origin, but it is highly likely that they arrived in the United States after the Gulf War. As with the Museum of the Bible collection, the Cornell University collection includes a significant number of tablets from an archaeological site that it is impossible to locate geographically today: the ancient city of Garshana, whose tablets reveal a piece of late 3rd millennium BCE history.

Unlike the tablets in the Bible Museum, the Cornell University tablets have been deciphered at a rapid pace and published in some 30 volumes by a team of American and European researchers. On 4 August, the University issued a statement reporting the transfer of over 5,000 cuneiform tablets to Iraq.

These returns of antiquities to their country of origin simply implement the numerous international and national laws on cultural property: UNESCO's 1954 Convention (known as the Hague Convention) for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, the 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Propert; and, more specifically for Iraq, the United Nations Resolution 2199 of 12 February 2015 to prevent the antiquities trade then being conducted intensively by Daesh.

After decades of looting in a country devastated by war, it is time for the archaeological remains of ancient Mesopotamia to be studied and admired in Iraqi museums.