United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York

United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York

United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York

Hobby Lobby, the US crafts supply company known for its pro-Christian branding, apparently has a side interest in smuggling rare archaeological artifacts.

The company made headlines when it won a Supreme Court case in which it argued that the family-owned company should not have to pay for birth control for employees under the ACA, because doing so violated the owners' religious freedom as Christians. Apparently their Christian values did not extend to concerns about smuggling rare artifacts from the dawn of Western civilization.

After a multi-year investigation by US Customs and Border Protection agents, the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York sued Hobby Lobby for almost a decade of smuggling activity. The company has agreed to pay a $3 million settlement and return more than 5,500 artifacts.

For the past eight years, Hobby Lobby has been negotiating with various antiques dealers in the Middle East to gain access to thousands of rare stone tablets covered in cuneiform writing. Cuneiform was common throughout the Mesopotamian region during the Bronze Age and was a combination of phonetic symbols, like letters, and ancient Egyptian-style pictograms. Though cuneiform was used to record many languages and dialects, our first examples come from roughly 5,000 years ago in Sumeria.

Because cuneiform was the first written language in the West, every sample of it represents a valuable cultural artifact that is virtually priceless. Strict laws regulate exports of these kinds of antiquities because many have been looted from protected archaeological sites.

The president of Hobby Lobby, Steve Green, was collecting cuneiform tablets and related items because he believed they came from the "Biblical era." Ironically, most cuneiform writing originated in cultures that had nothing to do with Judeo-Christian beliefs. Some, like the Assyrians, were actively hostile to the tribes whose progeny became part of the Judeo-Christian tradition. A cuneiform artifact from 690 BCE, the Sennacherib Annals, gleefully records the Assyrian destruction of Jerusalem in pretty grisly terms. But most cuneiform writing involves mundane records of business deals, agricultural land use, architectural plans, and local laws.

It's obvious that Hobby Lobby executives were trying to import the tablets secretly because they were shipped with false documentation claiming they were "ceramic tiles." As the US District Court put it in a release:

With Hobby Lobby's consent, a UAE-based dealer shipped packages containing the Artifacts to three different corporate addresses in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Between one and three shipments arrived at a time, without the required customs entry documentation being filed with [US Customs], and bore shipping labels that falsely and misleadingly described their contents as "ceramic tiles" or "clay tiles (sample)." After approximately 10 packages shipped in this manner were received by Hobby Lobby and its affiliates, [US Customs] intercepted five shipments. All of the intercepted packages bore shipping labels that falsely declared that the Artifacts' country of origin was Turkey.

Green, Hobby Lobby's president, had even been warned by an attorney in 2010 that he was at risk of buying looted artifacts. But Green decided to buy them anyway. He claimed he intended to put the tablets on display at some point. It's not clear whether he had any idea what was written on the tablets or whether they were in any way relevant to Christianity (it's likely they weren't, since the very last example of cuneiform writing we have comes from only a couple of decades after Christ's death).

After paying the $3 million settlement, Green issued a statement saying he was "new to the world of acquiring these items and did not fully appreciate the complexities of the acquisitions process."

Listing image by United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York