In 2010, the Oklahoma-based Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores was caught smuggling thousands of ancient artifacts into the United States from war-torn Iraq. Hobby Lobby President Steve Green and his family are avid collectors of Biblical-era artifacts; the pieces may have been destined for the Green-supported Museum of the Bible, which opened last year.

An "expert on cultural property law" had warned Hobby Lobby that artifacts from Iraq, including cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals, could be stolen from archaeological sites. The expert also told the company to search its collections for objects of Iraqi origin and make sure that those materials were properly identified. But despite that warning Hobby Lobby arranged to purchase thousands of antiquities — including cuneiform tablets and bricks, clay bullae and cylinder seals — for $1.6 million. Some artifacts from the UAE bore shipping labels that falsely described them as "ceramic tiles" or "clay tiles (sample)" originating in Turkey. Other items were sent from Israel with a false declaration that they were from there.

The company agreed to a $3 million and the artifacts were turned over to the U.S. government; despite what customs officials have identified as "a deliberate attempt by employees of the company to avoid using a customs broker" and intentional efforts to disguise the origin and contents of the shipments, however, no officers of the company have been prosecuted.

On Wednesday, 3,800 of the received artifacts were returned to Iraq by U.S. customs officials.

Many of the tablets can be shown to come from the ancient city of Irisagrig. The tablets, primarily from the Ur III and Old Babylonian period (2100-1600 BCE), are mostly legal and administrative documents, but also include an important collection of Early Dynastic incantations and a bilingual religious text from the Neo-Babylonian period. Two clay cones are inscribed with royal inscriptions from the Early Dynastic Lagash II periods (mid-third millennium BCE). The clay bullae include artifacts believed to be of Parthian or Sasanian date (late 2nd cent. BCE – early 7th cent. AD).

The exact location of the ancient Sumerian city remains unknown to archeologists, but artifacts apparently from the same or related sites have been appearing in the marketplace since at least the late 1990s.

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