The Gilgamesh Dream Tablet

A fragment of a clay tablet about six inches by five, written in Akkadian, carrying the passage of the Gilgamesh epic in which the hero tells his mother his dreams and she reads them as the promise of a friend: you will see him and your heart will laugh. In this copy the names of Gilgamesh and Enkidu are replaced by those of the gods Sin and Ea, which is why it matters to Assyriologists as well as to lawyers.

It surfaced in a London apartment about 2001 among unconserved and dirt-encrusted material belonging to the Jordanian dealer Ghassan Rihani. An American antiquities dealer bought a group of tablets from Rihani's family in the spring of 2003 for 50,350 dollars and shipped them to the United States without declaring formal entry. Cleaned and read, this one turned out to be Gilgamesh. In 2007 the dealer sold it for 50,000 dollars and, when the buyers asked for a provenance, wrote one: the tablet, he said, had been in Lot 1503 of a 1981 Butterfield and Butterfield sale in San Francisco, a box of miscellaneous ancient bronze fragments. That letter travelled with the object for seven years.

Christie's sold it to Hobby Lobby in a private sale in July 2014 for 1,674,000 dollars, for the Museum of the Bible. The government alleged that the auction house had been told by the dealer himself that the provenance would not withstand scrutiny and should not be used for a public sale, and that it withheld both the letter and the dealer's name from the buyer. Agents seized the tablet in September 2019. On 18 May 2020 two actions were filed in the Eastern District of New York on the same day: the United States sued the tablet itself under the customs forfeiture statute, and Hobby Lobby sued Christie's for fraud. Hobby Lobby consented to forfeiture in July 2021, and the ground was importation, not title. The tablet went to Baghdad, and the question of where in Iraq it came from has never been decided by anybody.

A tablet six inches across that changes two names

The object is a fragment of fired clay about six inches by five, incised on both faces in cuneiform, in Akkadian. It is the upper left portion of what was once a six-column tablet, three columns to a side.

The text is the passage of the Gilgamesh epic in which the protagonist tells his mother his dreams and she interprets them as foretelling the arrival of a friend. The United States quoted her words in its forfeiture complaint: you will see him and your heart will laugh. That is why the object is called the Dream Tablet, and it is a name given by the American market in the 2000s, not an ancient title.

The philologically interesting fact, and the one that survives every legal argument, is that in this copy the names of the hero Gilgamesh and of the friend Enkidu are replaced with the names of the deities Sin and Ea. A version of the epic in which the two central human figures carry divine names is not a curiosity of packaging; it is evidence about how the poem was transmitted, adapted and used in whatever setting produced this tablet. That setting is exactly what was destroyed when the tablet was removed from the ground without record.

One widely circulated report describes the inscription as Sumerian. It is Akkadian, as the government's own description states, and the distinction is not pedantry: the two are unrelated languages that share a script.

The claim that it came from a museum in 1991 has never been tested

Iraqi officials, and most press coverage of the return, state that the tablet was looted from an Iraqi museum during the 1991 Gulf War, when central control lapsed in parts of the country and regional museums were emptied. The BBC put it flatly on the day the object went on show in Baghdad.

No court has found that. The United States did not have to prove it and did not try. The government's complaint set out the general context - hundreds of thousands of objects looted from Iraqi sites since the early 1990s, cuneiform tablets among the most commonly trafficked classes - and then rested its case on something narrower and provable.

This is the recurring pattern in antiquities enforcement and it is routinely misreported. The state that receives an object back is not necessarily the state that proved anything. Here the assertion of a 1991 museum theft is a claim by the claimant government and a repetition by journalists, and this record grades it as such: outstanding, plausible, unadjudicated.

London, about 2001: a flat full of unconserved tablets

The tablet's first documented appearance is in the London apartment of Ghassan Rihani, a Jordanian antiquities dealer, about 2001. An American antiquities dealer saw it there among a quantity of encrusted, unconserved material. Rihani is reported to have died later that year.

In the spring of 2003 the American dealer returned to the apartment with a cuneiform expert and met members of the Rihani family. They inspected a number of tablets and judged, from what could be seen through the dirt, that these were likely to be literary texts rather than the ordinary administrative documents that make up most of the surviving cuneiform corpus. On that judgement the dealer bought the group for 50,350 dollars.

The purchase is the hinge of the whole case, and it is worth being precise about what it was. A dealer paid about fifty thousand dollars for a lot of unreadable objects on the expectation that at least one would turn out to be literature. Eleven years later one of them sold for 1,674,000 dollars. The margin is the reward for taking the risk of not knowing - and, on the government's account, for supplying a document that made the not-knowing disappear.

It was imported twice, and the importation is the case

The dealer and the cuneiform expert shipped the tablets from London to the United States without declaring formal entry. Once here, the tablet was cleaned and read; about 2005 it went to Princeton, where a scholar studied it for several weeks. In July 2014 an employee of the auction house carried it on a flight from London to New York and it was hand-delivered to Oklahoma City.

Those two movements, in 2003 and in 2014, are what the case was about. The forfeiture statute the government used, 19 U.S.C. 1595a(c)(1)(A), provides that merchandise introduced into the United States contrary to law shall be seized and forfeited if it is stolen, smuggled or clandestinely imported. The legal argument runs through cultural property law only indirectly: property is treated as stolen for these purposes if it was taken without official authorisation from a country whose law vests ownership of such material in the state, and Iraq's patrimony law, originally of 1935, does exactly that for anything man-made over two hundred years old. Layered on top is the American sanctions regulation prohibiting trade in Iraqi cultural property illegally removed since 6 August 1990.

The practical consequence for collectors is the one Hobby Lobby set out in its own pleading: to comply with American law, prudent buyers deal only in Iraqi cuneiform with an ownership history that predates August 1990. A provenance document taking the object outside Iraq before that date is therefore not a nicety. It is the entire licence to own the thing. Which is precisely why one was written.

The letter: Lot 1503, a box of miscellaneous ancient bronze fragments

In 2007 the dealer sold the tablet, with a translation, to two antiquities dealers for 50,000 dollars. He gave them no provenance. When they asked for one, he wrote it.

The document that the pleadings call the False Provenance Letter said that the tablet had been deaccessioned by a small museum, which it did not name, and had formed part of Lot 1503 in a 1981 sale by Butterfield and Butterfield in San Francisco, a lot the catalogue described as a box of miscellaneous ancient bronze fragments. There is no mention of Rihani, of London, or of 2003.

Look at the construction. The sale is real and the lot is real and the catalogue description is quotable; a diligent buyer can find Lot 1503 and read those words. The claim being smuggled through is that this clay object was inside that box of bronze. A miscellaneous lot is unphotographed and unitemised by definition, which makes it the ideal place to have found something: nothing in the record contradicts it, because the record contains nothing.

The date does the legal work. 1981 is comfortably before August 1990, so a tablet that was in that box was outside Iraq when it needed to be. One sentence converts an object that cannot lawfully be imported into one that can.

The letter then travelled. One of the 2007 buyers catalogued the tablet as having a clean provenance and a single American owner for twenty-five years. It appeared in an October 2007 catalogue of Michael Sharpe Rare and Antiquated Books, offered with a translation, an authentication and a clear provenance. Each resale laundered the claim a little further by adding a respectable name on top of it.

A private sale is a decision about scrutiny

In December 2013 a later owner approached the London office of Christie's, wanting to consign the tablet for a private sale rather than a public auction. A representative of the Museum of the Bible saw it in London in March 2014. In July 2014 Hobby Lobby bought it for 1,674,000 dollars.

According to the government's complaint, the auction house's antiquities director had by then spoken to the dealer who wrote the letter, and had been told by him that the provenance would not withstand scrutiny and should not be used in connection with a public sale. The house nonetheless represented to Hobby Lobby that the tablet had been bought in the 1981 auction. When the buyer and the museum later asked for more detail - the museum expressed discomfort with the provenance in 2017 - they were told the dealer had confirmed the details. The letter itself, and the dealer's name, were withheld from them.

The United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Richard P. Donoghue, put the government's characterisation on the record when the complaint was filed: a major auction house failed to meet its obligations by minimizing its concerns that the provenance of an important Iraqi artifact was fabricated, and withheld from the buyer information that undermined the provenance's reliability. Christie's said it had not known the documents were false at the time.

The structural point is that the choice between a public auction and a private treaty sale is not merely commercial. A public sale generates a catalogue, a photograph, a lot number, a published estimate and a result, all of which enter databases and become searchable by source countries and by researchers for decades. A private sale generates an invoice. The market's own diligence machinery is switched on by publication, and the parties here, on the government's account, understood that and chose accordingly.

Two lawsuits, filed the same day, pointing in opposite directions

Agents seized the tablet from the Museum of the Bible in September 2019 under a judicially authorised warrant. On 18 May 2020 two separate actions were filed in the same courthouse in Brooklyn.

The first was the government's: United States v. One Cuniform Tablet Known as the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, docket 1:20-cv-02222, assigned to Judge Ann Marie Donnelly. It is an in rem action, meaning that the defendant is the object. The tablet, not Hobby Lobby, was the party being sued, which is why no finding of wrongdoing against the purchaser follows from the result.

The second was Hobby Lobby's, against the auction house, for fraud and breach of express and implied warranties. In both proceedings Hobby Lobby maintained that it was an innocent purchaser who had done appropriate diligence and had reasonably relied on the seller's representations.

In June 2020 Hobby Lobby filed a Claim of Interest in the forfeiture, asking for the tablet back. A commentator writing in January 2021 noted the tactical value of that step: the claim gave Hobby Lobby a right to serve discovery on the auction house inside the forfeiture case at a time when its own suit was stalled, the house having moved to compel arbitration under the sale contract. The buyer, in other words, used the government's action against the object as a discovery instrument against its seller.

Forfeiture on the customs ground, not on title

Hobby Lobby consented to forfeiture and the decree was entered in July 2021; the docket records the case terminated on 26 July and the announcement came on the 27th.

The Justice Department's own account of the basis is exact and it is the most important sentence in the case: Hobby Lobby consented to the tablet's forfeiture based on the tablet's illegal importation into the United States in 2014.

So the United States did not obtain a judgment that Iraq owns this tablet. It did not obtain a finding about which site or museum the tablet left, or when. It obtained a forfeiture because merchandise came into the country contrary to law, and it then transferred what it had forfeited to the Republic of Iraq as a matter of executive action. Forfeiture, repatriation, settlement, restitution and conviction are five different things, and this case is the first two only. No one was prosecuted. Nobody was convicted. Christie's was not a defendant in the government's action.

That is not a criticism of the outcome. It is the reason the outcome was achievable. Proving where an unprovenanced tablet came from is often impossible; proving how it crossed a border is a documents exercise. The customs route is the workhorse of American antiquities enforcement precisely because it substitutes a provable question for an unprovable one.

Washington, then Baghdad

On 23 September 2021 a ceremonial certificate transferring ownership from the United States to Iraq was signed at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian by Steve K. Francis of Homeland Security Investigations and by Fareed Yasseen, Iraq's ambassador to the United States. Kenneth A. Polite Jr, Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division, said the return was meant as a message that the United States government will take action to seize and repatriate antiquities and other significant items of cultural heritage that have been unlawfully brought into the United States. Audrey Azoulay of UNESCO, Iraq's Minister of Culture, Tourism and Antiquities Hassan Nadhem, and State Department officials took part.

The tablet went on display in Baghdad on 7 December 2021, its first public showing in the country in three decades. Iraq's foreign minister, Fuad Hussein, said at the ceremony that it was one of 17,926 objects recovered from the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Japan and the Netherlands over the preceding year. A single famous tablet is the visible fraction of a number that large.

The buyer's other eleven thousand five hundred objects

This tablet is not an isolated purchase and cannot honestly be read as one. In 2017 Hobby Lobby agreed to pay a three million dollar penalty in a settlement with the Justice Department and to return thousands of clay tablets that had been illegally imported. In March 2020, two months before the forfeiture complaint was filed, Steve Green announced that the Museum of the Bible would return 11,500 objects to Iraq and Egypt. Green has said publicly that he knew little about collecting when he began buying in 2009 and did not adequately ensure that he was not buying stolen items.

A settlement with a penalty is not a conviction, and a voluntary return of 11,500 objects is not an adjudication that all 11,500 were stolen. But the pattern is the context in which the Dream Tablet was bought, and it is the reason the museum's cooperation with the investigation - which the government acknowledged - reads as a policy rather than a gesture.

What a diligent buyer could have done, and what it costs

Every red flag in this case was visible from the buyer's side of the table in July 2014, and the museum's own registrar spotted two of them within days: on 22 July 2014 she emailed the auction house to say that the invoice carried neither a date for the tablet nor a country of origin, and asked for the auction listing. The listing could not be produced because the sale it referred to had nothing to do with this object.

The available checks were not exotic. A 1981 Butterfield and Butterfield catalogue is a findable document; Lot 1503 could have been looked up and its description read, and the question asked how a clay tablet came to be inside a box catalogued as bronze. The seller could have been asked for the name of the deaccessioning museum. The chain could have been asked to produce one owner, in person, for the twenty-five years the catalogue claimed. Instead the buyer asked the seller, and the seller asked the man who had written the letter, and the answer came back that the letter was correct.

The market's habitual defence is that these standards are impossible - that dealers are being asked to prove ownership from the moment of excavation. That is a real objection in many cases and it deserves a hearing. It has no application here. Nobody needed a chain back to antiquity. They needed one document, from 1981, that existed or did not, and the party best placed to check was the party who was paid 1,674,000 dollars.

What is still unsettled

The tablet is in Baghdad and its legal position is closed. Almost everything else about it is open.

The findspot is unknown and, absent a confession, unknowable: the object carries no excavation number and the 1991 museum-looting account has never been tested. The scholarly reading of the object is only beginning, because for its entire modern life it has been a chattel in litigation rather than a text in a collection. The commercial dispute between the buyer and the auction house was, at the last public account located, mired in an argument about whether the sale contract compelled arbitration; this record does not assert an outcome it has not seen.

And the dealer who wrote the letter has never been named in a public filing. The government's papers call him the Antiquities Dealer. He bought for fifty thousand, sold for fifty thousand, supplied on request a fiction that added a million and a half dollars of value to somebody else's object, and appears in the record of the case as a role rather than a person.