BAGHDAD — A small clay tablet dating back 3,500 years and bearing a portion of the Epic of Gilgamesh looted from an Iraqi museum 30 years ago and recently recovered from the United States returned to Iraq on Tuesday.
The Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, known as the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, is one of the oldest surviving works of literature and one of the oldest religious texts in the world. It was found in 1853 as part of a 12 tablet collection in the rubble of the library of Assyrian King Assur Banipal.
During the Gulf War, a tablet was looted from an Iraqi museum. Officials believe it was illegally imported into the United States in 2003, then sold to Hobby Lobby and put on display in the Museum of the Bible in Washington.
Federal agents with Homeland Security Investigations seized the tablet from the museum in September 2019. In July of this year, a federal judge in New York approved the forfeiture of the tablet.
On Tuesday the tablet was handed over to Iraqi authorities in a ceremony at Iraq's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the presence of UNESCO officials and Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein and Hassan Nadhem, Iraq's minister of culture, tourism and antiquities.
We were able to recover about 17,926 artifacts from several countries, including America, Britain, Italy, Japan and the Netherlands, Hussein said.
The process of restitution of the valuable artifact was described by UNESCO as the culmination of decades of cooperation between the U.S. and Iraq, both of which are signatories to the UNESCO Convention of 1970.