“In a large measure, the contents are pretty much unknown,” said Jeffrey Kloha, the museum’s director of collections, who joined after the pieces were acquired. It is the only Hobby Lobby artifact among those being returned to Iraq to have been exhibited in the Museum of the Bible. The Justice Department, which describes it as “stolen Iraqi property,” seized the tablet in 2019. Hobby Lobby’s batch of repatriated objects does not include what had been the best-known of its holdings from Mesopotamia: a clay tablet fragment roughly 3,500 years old inscribed with a fragment of the Gilgamesh epic, an ancient saga with similarities to stories of the Great Flood and the Garden of Eden that predates the Old Testament by many centuries.
Babylon and Ur, the reputed birthplace of the Prophet Abraham, flourished there, and it is where writing, astronomy and the first known code of law originated. Southern Iraq, part of ancient Mesopotamia, contains thousands of unexcavated archaeological sites between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers where the world’s first known civilizations began. The city’s existence became known only when tablets mentioning it were seized at the Jordanian border in 2003, while thousands more surfaced in international antiquities markets. Many of the returned clay tablets and seals are from Irisagrig, a lost ancient city. And the industrial-scale thefts continued amid a security vacuum after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. When government forces lost control of parts of southern Iraq in 1991, in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, widespread looting occurred at unexcavated sites. The holdings underline a thriving market in stolen antiquities and highlight the plight of countries like Iraq, which has been subjected to three decades of antiquities looting. Hobby Lobby agreed as part of the government lawsuit to tighten its acquisition procedures, and the museum found thousands more suspect artifacts after it later initiated a voluntary review of its collection. Department of Justice fined Hobby Lobby $3 million for failing to exercise due diligence in its acquisitions of more than 5,000 artifacts some of those artifacts were among those returned last week to Iraq. The addition of artifacts from ancient Mesopotamia was intended to provide context for Old Testament events.įour years ago, the U.S. The institution that held about 12,000 of the items was the Museum of the Bible, a four-year-old Washington museum founded and funded by the Christian evangelical family that owns the Hobby Lobby craft store chain. “It restores not just the tablets, but the confidence of the Iraqi people by enhancing and supporting the Iraqi identity in these difficult times.” “This is not just about thousands of tablets coming back to Iraq again - it is about the Iraqi people,” Hassan Nadhem, the Iraqi minister of culture, tourism and antiquities, said in a telephone interview.