New York court orders Gilgamesh tablet returned to Iraq
The US Department of Justice said a past seller of the tablet, infamously purchased by the US company Hobby Lobby, misrepresented how it had been acquired.
An ancient piece of literature from modern-day Iraq was illegally brought to the United States and must be forfeited, a New York City court ruled today.
A tablet including part of the Epic of Gilgamesh — a tale from the ancient civilization of Sumeria and one of the world's oldest pieces of literature — entered the United States illegally and was then sold, the Department of Justice US Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York said in a release Monday.
“Whenever looted cultural property is found in this country, the United States government will do all it can to preserve heritage by returning such artifacts where they belong,” the district’s attorney Richard Donghue said.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is a long poem written the Akkadnian language that was found in 1853 in the ruins of a library of the Assyrian King Assurbanipal, located in the modern-day Nineveh province of northern Iraq. The story of a king is one of the oldest known epics in human history.
