The Epic of Gilgamesh - one of the world’s oldest works of literature from The Middle East before The Christian Era

Don't know about any of you, dear readers, but 'once-upon-a-time' not so long ago but way before the current controversies in public education over teaching Critical Race Theory, studying The Epic of Gilgamesh was required reading in an advanced-placement high school class on World History.

                   No one objected or complained . . .

Ancient Gilgamesh tablet seized from Hobby Lobby by US authorities

The craft store had acquired the 3,600-year-old artefact for its Bible museum, but court says it had been smuggled and should be returned to Iraq

The Gilgamesh Dream Tablet seized by US authorities. Photograph: US Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Hobby Lobby Forfeits Rare Gilgamesh Tablet Smuggled From Iraq

The arts and crafts chain is once again under scrutiny for its collecting practices

In 2014, the craft retailer Hobby Lobby purchased a rare cuneiform tablet inscribed with a portion of the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest known works of literature. The artifact was acquired for display at the Museum of the Bible, a Washington, D.C. institution funded by the family of Hobby Lobby founder David Green. But this week, reports Jordan Freiman for CBS News, the Department of Justice (DOJ) ordered the tablet’s forfeiture on the grounds that it was illegally imported into the United States and sold to Hobby Lobby under false pretenses.

Known as the “Gilgamesh Dream Tablet,” the artifact is inscribed in the Akkadian language and details a dream sequence from the ancient epic, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP). It is around 3,500 years old and originated in modern-day Iraq.

 

Hobby Lobby's Illegal Antiquities Shed Light On A Lost, Looted Ancient City In Iraq

Ancient artifacts seized from Hobby Lobby are shown at a May 2 event returning the artifacts to Iraq in Washington, D.C. The seized artifacts include cuneiform tablets from the little-known ancient city of Irisagrig. Win McNamee/Getty Images

June 28, 201811:22 AM ET Jane Arraf

NPR.org | June 28, 2018

Archaeologist Eckart Frahm didn't have much time to determine where the 4,000-year-old clay tablets had come from. Homeland Security officials had given him just 2 1/2 days in a dimly lit New York warehouse to pore over the cuneiform inscriptions etched into the fragile, ancient pieces and report back.

"They were not in great shape. They had infestations of salt in them, so it's not that I could say I had been able to read everything," says the Yale University professor. "My main goal was to provide a general assessment from when and where did these tablets actually originate."

Frahm determined the tablets at the center of a federal case against the Oklahoma-based Hobby Lobby arts and crafts chain were from a place few had ever heard of — an ancient Sumerian city called Irisagrig.

"You could argue that this is a lost city because this place has never been properly excavated and you don't even know exactly where it is," Frahm tells NPR.

But looters know. The roughly 250 tablets Frahm examined in 2016 were among 5,500 objects, including ancient cylinder seals and clay seal impressions known as bullae, smuggled into the U.S. starting in 2010. Shipped from the United Arab Emirates and Israel without declaring their true Iraqi origin, some of them were marked "ceramic tiles" or "clay tiles (sample)."

They'd been purchased by Hobby Lobby for $1.6 million.

In a settlement last year with the Justice Department, Hobby Lobby agreed to forfeit the objects and paid a $3 million fine. In May, about 3,800 objects were handed back to the Iraqi government at a ceremony at its Washington, D.C., embassy, and will be returned to Iraq later this year.

Last November, Hobby Lobby president Steve Green, the son of the craft store chain's founder David Green, opened a Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., which contains another $201 million worth of ancient artifacts tied to Hobby Lobby. . .

Those tablets marked the first time archaeologists were known to have seen the name Irisagrig. According to one of the cuneiform tablets, it took four days to tow boats upstream from Umma, a better-known ancient Sumerian city, giving Molina a rough probable location of the lost city in the south of the country.

Umma itself is one of the most heavily looted of all known ancient sites in Iraq. Thieves dug hundreds of holes into the tells — the mounds under which the ancient city is buried — after security collapsed following the 2003 U.S. invasion.

Archaeologist Lamia al-Gailani at the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. The museum was looted in 2003 after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Some of its antiquities were recovered but looting has continued in the south of Iraq, where thousands of ancient sites yet to be excavated by archaeologists are unprotected. Jane Arraf/NPR hide captiontoggle caption Jane Arraf/NPR

The remains of thousands of other ancient towns and cities likely exist under other mounds, archaeologists believe.

"Don't forget, even if we take only ancient Iraq, it's 3,000 years — so they didn't live in just one or two cities," says Lamia al-Gailani, a British-Iraqi archaeologist with the Iraq Museum in Baghdad and the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. . .

> Frahm says apart from the Irisagrig archive, the Hobby Lobby artifacts that are being returned to Iraq also include tablets dating from about 2500 BCE (an alternative to "B.C." commonly used by scholars to denote "before the common era") with incantations to the gods, Babylonian letters from between 1900 and 1700 BCE and hymns from several hundred years BCE.

Frahm describes the incantations as some of the most important pieces in the collection. The tablets, about 300 years older than the Irisagrig tablets, invoke three Mesopotamian gods. He says another text from the first millennium BCE is written in both Babylonian and Emesal, a dialect of Sumerian he says was originally a language used only by women.