The Controversy over Irisagrig Tablets

Iraqi artefacts smuggled into the US by Hobby Lobby contain new evidence of a lost Sumerian city, and have scholars divided over whether to study the looted relics (Sarah Emerson, 'eBay, Organized Crime, and Evangelical Christians: The Ethical Minefield of Studying Ancient Civilizations' Vice May 3 2018).

When Eckart Frahm entered the New York City warehouse in 2016, he knew that a wealth of rare artifacts lay inside. Roughly 250 cuneiform tablets, looted cultural treasures dating from 2100 BCE to 1600 BCE, had been sequestered there by the federal government. Frahm, a professor of Assyriology at Yale University, had been asked by the Department of Homeland Security to assess these artifacts. But he had no idea what he was about to discover—tangible evidence of Irisagrig, or Āl-Šarrāki, a lost Sumerian city that held great importance during the Third Dynasty of Ur in ancient Mesopotamia. Until recently, it was only known through word of mouth, with no physical evidence, and its exact location has never been confirmed. [...] These clay relics were among 5,500 Iraqi antiquities purchased by Hobby Lobby, the Oklahoma-based corporation known for its chain of arts and craft stores. It is perhaps more famous for the 2014 Supreme Court ruling in which Hobby Lobby’s lawyers successfully argued that, due to the company’s religious ownership—the Green family is evangelical—it could not be forced to pay for insurance coverage of birth control. The artifacts were smuggled into the United States beginning in 2010, near the end of the Iraq War—falsely labeled as tile samples, and eventually intercepted by Customs and Border Protection. Hobby Lobby agreed to surrender them last year, forfeiting an additional $3 million, after a civil complaint was filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York. About 3,800 artifacts, including the tablets, were returned to Iraqi officials yesterday in Washington, DC.

The article considers whether the tablets should have gone back before US scholars had had a chance to look at them more closely:

At the warehouse in New York, Frahm pored over the tablets for nearly three days, which meticulously chronicle life in Irisagrig. All the artifacts were carefully wrapped, though most were worse for wear. Salt incrustations, maybe due to water damage, plagued the Irisagrig (pronounced ee-ree-sah-grig) tablets. Others were broken and illegible. Frahm only had time to survey half of them. Some, which he managed to photograph, still showed their Sumerian text in striking relief.

It is worth noting that photos seem to show that the tablets had been fired before being smuggled.

Read more here.