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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: 2) by butthurt on Friday July 07 2017, @08:56PM

    by butthurt (6141) on Friday July 07 2017, @08:56PM (#536261) Journal

    > [...] natality [...] pollution [...]

    Were people in Western societies to adopt biblical principles, they might be less materialistic but birth rates might increase. We do a great deal of damage to the environment just to feed ourselves; adopting an ascetic lifestyle would reduce some kinds of pollution, but we must still eat and drink. A greater population would entail increased fishing and agriculture, and those would increase pollution such as nitrate, nitrogen oxides, pesticides and greenhouse gases (among other harm). I know there's an exhortation against gluttony, but that only goes so far. At some point, a greater population means more food is needed. According to a 2005 study, 40% of the Earth's land area was being used for agriculture.

    http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/12/1209_051209_crops_map.html [nationalgeographic.com]

    Malthus (a Christian) observed that human fecundity could easily exceed improvements in human productivity. He wrote:

    The happiness of a country does not depend, absolutely, upon its poverty or its riches, upon its youth, or its age, upon its being thinly, or fully inhabited, but upon the rapidity with which it is increasing, upon the degree in which the yearly increase of food approaches to the yearly increase of an unrestricted population.

    -- https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_Population/Chapter_VII [wikisource.org]

    Genesis 1:28 has been interpreted as asking us to take care of the Earth and its creatures, but it also asks us to "be fruitful and multiply." Are there passages that anticipate the need to limit our fecundity?

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