4,000-year-old tablets repatriated to Iraq

Return of Mesopotamian antiquities smuggled to US divides scholars over ethics of looted artefacts

THE 4,000-year-old tablets and seals from the lost Mesopotamian city of Irisagrig have begun their journey back to Iraq, raising questions among academics about the best way to handle looted artefacts.

Eckart Frahm, a professor of Assyriology from Yale University, originally examined thousands of the artefacts in a New York customs warehouse. “I had no idea what they would be,” he said.

The items had been smuggled in by an American chain of hobby shops with misleading labels claiming they were “ceramic tiles” or “samples”.

As Prof Frahm examined the salt-encrusted tablets lined with cuneiform text – one of the earliest forms of writing – he deciphered unusual names for months, words only ever thought to have been used in the city of Irisagrig.

Archaeologists have never been able to find its exact location.

Prof Frahm, who spent three days authenticating the tablets for the US customs authorities in 2016, said the ancient relics revealed the economic life of a bustling city close to the Tigris river. “They are mostly administrative texts, recording for example the rations issued to female weavers at the palace or food provided to royal emissaries being sent to inspect canal work or work on royal roads,” he said.

It paints a picture of a city of highly specialised workers, where the female weavers were unusually well fed for the 21st century BC.

The details add to a growing picture of Sumer, the earliest known civilisation in the area now covered by southern Iraq.

But handling that knowledge has become a matter of fierce debate within academic circles as experts on Middle Eastern history grapple with the ethics of using information gleaned from stolen artefacts. The 3,800 relics arrived in the New York warehouse only after being seized from Hobby Lobby, a chain of stores run by an Evangelical Christian. The case highlights the lucrative trade in looted treasures that has grown up in the chaotic aftermath of the Us-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Antiquities experts warned Hobby Lobby it risked breaking laws designed to thwart smugglers but still went ahead with a $1.6million (£1.2million) deal to acquire thousands of items from middle men as it built a collection of artefacts dating to biblical times. Last year, it agreed to pay a $3million fine and give up the items.

Other parts of its collection have since gone on display at the Museum of the Bible, which opened in Washington in November. Iraqi officials have hailed the return of the lost items, and say there is no question about whether Iraq is the best place for the tablets.

Fareed Yasseen, Iraqi ambassador to the US, said the pieces “are very important to us and they should be returned home to Iraq, to the rightful owner of these pieces”.

Officials hope some of the tablets will go on display at the country’s National Museum in Baghdad and say that visiting academics will be welcome to study them.

David Owen, emeritus professor at Cornell University, said the items should have been studied and documented before their return. Sending them back, he said, was a political move designed to appease an ally. “Most of these things that go back are simply no longer accessible to the scholarly world and simply remain in storage, never to be seen again,” he said.

“So there is no cultural advantage to seeing these antiquities go back unless they are recorded and made available to scholars.”

Prof Elizabeth Stone, of New York’s Stony Brook University, said promoting research gleaned from stolen items carried grave risks. “The more enthusiasm you put into that, then the more of a market there is and more is ripped from the ground,” she said.

Many academic publications refuse to publish papers on looted items for fear of stimulating the illicit trade.