Iraq has been recovering antiquities smuggled from its territory for some time. Now it has announced the return from Italy of a 2800 year old ancient stone tablet written in Babylonian script.
The ancient stone tablet, which is inscribed in the Babylonian alphabet known as cuneiform, displays the emblem of Shalmaneser III, an Assyrian monarch who ruled over the Nimrod area in modern day northern Iraq from 858 to 823 BC.
Although the circumstances underlying the tablet’s arrival in Italy are still unknown, the Italian government gave it to Abdul Latif Rashid, the president of Iraq, on his recent trip to Bologna.
“I would like to thank the Italian officials for their efforts and cooperation in bringing back this piece,” Rashid said during a ceremony Sunday at a Baghdad presidential palace to hand the artefact over to the national museum.
According to Laith Majid Hussein, director of Baghdad’s council of antiquities and heritage, the tablet landed in Italy in the 1980s, when it was taken by police.
According to Iraq’s Minister of Culture Ahmed Fakak al-Badrani, it’s unknown how it was discovered. “Perhaps (it was found) during archaeological excavations or during work on the Mosul dam,” Iraq’s biggest built in the 1980s, he said.
The Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian civilisations, which gave rise to writing and the first cities, were born in the land that is now modern Iraq. In the chaos that followed the US-led invasion in 2003, theft of the nation’s antiquities surged.
“We will continue to work to recover all the archaeological pieces of Iraqi history from abroad,” said the Iraqi president. “We want to make the national Iraq Museum one of the best museums in the world, and we will work to do so.”
In May, New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg announced the return of two ancient statues to Iraq. One is a limestone Mesopotamian elephant and the other an alabaster Sumerian bull from the ancient city of Uruk.
According to the prosecution, the statuettes were stolen during the Gulf War and smuggled to New York in the late 1990s. The bull was part of the private collection of Shelby White, a billionaire philanthropist.
Ancient artifacts belong in the land of their birth. We rejoice at every news of their return.