Among the antiquities and artifacts acquired by the US company Hobby Lobby, the US government seized in July 2017 a set of 450 cuneiform tablets that had been illegally extracted from Iraq.
These tablets are about 4,000 years old, most dating between 2100 and 1600 BC. They generally contain administrative texts, contracts, inventories of goods and merchandise, but a few also contain magical spells and incantations, and even a bilingual religious text from the Neo-Babylonian period.
All of them were returned to Iraq on May 2, although some researchers regret that this was done hastily, without time to study them more thoroughly.
However, the most surprising detail is that they all seem to come from the ancient city of Irisagrig, known from the sources but whose exact location is unknown, and therefore has never been excavated or investigated.
According to Professor Manuel Molina, from the Higher Council for Scientific Research, the location of Irisagrig is a matter that still provokes heated debates among researchers, and it is not the first time that cuneiform tablets have appeared from it in recent years.
Hobby Lobby belongs to antique collector Steve Green, who already has a collection of more than 40,000 objects, including several Dead Sea scrolls. The latter under suspicion of being forgeries.
The cuneiform tablets had been introduced to the United States labeled tile samples or ceramic tiles purportedly from a seller in the United Arab Emirates.
Fonts
The United States Attorney’s Office / Motherboard / “On the Location of Irisagrig”, in S. Garfinkle – M. Molina (eds.), The Present and Future of Neo-Sumerian Studies:From the 21st Century BC to the 21st Century AD. Proceedings of the International Conference on Neo-Sumerian Studies Held in Madrid, July 22-24, 2010, Winona Lake 2013, pp. 59-87.