Is Iraq Getting Screwed in a Looted Treasures Deal with the Hobby Lobby?
In 2011, a shipment of between 200 and 300 small clay tablets destined for the Hobby Lobby compound in Oklahoma City, was seized by U.S. customs agents in Memphis. The tablets were part of a large purchase of 10,000 tablets, all thousands of years old, that were written in cuneiform, the script of ancient Sumer, Assyria, and Babylonia. These ancient Iraqi tablets were brought into the country illicitly and it was unclear if they had been legally acquired in the first place. The 2011 seizure set in motion a chain of federal investigations, civil forfeiture and repatriation agreements, and lawsuits that shone a harsh spotlight on the substandard collecting practices of Hobby Lobby and their owners, the Green family.
Now, over nine years later, it appears that Hobby Lobby and Museum of the Bible, the museum founded and funded by the Green family, are close to reaching an agreement with the Iraqi government about the fate of the numerous items in their collections that are the rightful property of the people of Iraq. Among the illicit items in the collection were stolen papyri that belong to the Egyptian Exploration Fund, an ancient Egyptian papyrus purchased via eBay, thousands of cuneiform tablets from Iraq, and, most famously, the Gilgamesh Dream tablet.
Last March, Steve Green, the CEO of Hobby Lobby and president of Museum of the Bible, told the Wall Street Journal that he plans to return 11,500 illicit Iraqi and Egyptian artifacts currently owned by the company or museum to their countries of origin. (He neglected to mention that the Gilgamesh Dream tablet had been seized on Sept. 24, 2019 by the Department of Homeland Security and Homeland Security Investigations or that he is required to do this by law). In a statement released in March 2020, Steve Green announced that, “We also hope to finalize agreements with organizations in Egypt and Iraq that will allow for us to provide technical assistance, and support the ongoing study and preservation of their important cultural property.”