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posted by martyb on Friday July 07 2017, @11:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the how-did-THOSe-get-here? dept.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hobby-lobby-hands-over-5500-illegally-imported-artifacts-180963969/

Big-box arts and crafts retailer Hobby Lobby will surrender some 5,500 artifacts it purchased illegally and pay $3 million after federal prosecutors filed a civil complaint in New York yesterday, reports Dan Whitcomb at Reuters.

The objects are believed to come from Iraq, where they were smuggled into other Middle Eastern countries. In 2010, they were sent to the United States falsely labeled as clay tiles.

[...] The items include 144 cylinder seals, used to roll decorative images onto clay, as well as clay bullae, which were used to create wax tokens to authenticate documents. The majority of the items are cuneiform tablets. Cuneiform is a type of writing developed about 6,000 years ago in what is now southern Iraq, Smithsonian.com's Anne Trubek reports. Over time, the writing, which looks like a series of lines and triangles impressed into palm-size pieces of wet clay, was used for over a dozen ancient languages, much like the Roman alphabet for most European and Romance languages.

So, why was a craft chain buying ancient Iraqi artifacts in the first place? Whitcomb reports that company president Steve Green is the founder of the Museum of the Bible, now under construction in Washington, D.C. He began acquiring artifacts for the museum, including the forfeited items, in 2009.

Also at NYT. DoJ and Hobby Lobby statements.


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  • (Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @07:32PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @07:32PM (#536236)

    Look, those were going to a nice and secure museum.

    Now they will go back to where they came from. They might temporarily go into a museum. Don't kid yourself: they won't stay there.

    Best case, they get sold on the black market again. More likely, they are destroyed because they are unislamic.

    Here is an awkward thing to ponder. Remember how the Taliban and ISIS use explosives to destroy things that are many thousands of years old? That shit is coming to Egypt. If we want mummies and other ancient Egyptian stuff to survive another century, we need to get it out of the middle east. Given the birth rates and immigration, on a longer time scale this might also apply to the artifacts currently housed in France.

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  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday July 07 2017, @10:14PM

    by butthurt (6141) on Friday July 07 2017, @10:14PM (#536287) Journal

    > More likely, they are destroyed because they are unislamic. [...] Remember how the Taliban and ISIS use explosives to destroy things that are many thousands of years old?

    That could happen. The Islamic State reportedly destroyed the Mosque of the Prophet Yunus (Jonah), which was an Islamic mosque in Mosul.

    http://edition.cnn.com/2014/07/24/world/iraq-violence/ [cnn.com]

    At the museum in Mosul,

    [...] a massive fire in the building’s basement has reduced hundreds of rare books and manuscripts to ankle-deep drifts of ash.

    -- http://www.cbsnews.com/news/isis-mosul-museum-ruins-iraq-forces-advance/ [cbsnews.com]

    > That shit is coming to Egypt.

    Citation, please?

    > If we want mummies and other ancient Egyptian stuff to survive another century, we need to get it out of the middle east.

    Or, perhaps, don't destabilise the Middle East quite so much?

    > Given the birth rates and immigration, on a longer time scale this might also apply to the artifacts currently housed in France.

    Or the Elgin marbles, perhaps? There might be fewer immigrants if there were fewer people fleeing the Middle East (see my previous suggestion).

    The Iraqi government has the option of storing its antiquities outside the country. Were the United States to insist on that, there could be adverse consequences for the U.S.