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19-06-2023
BAGHDAD: A 2,800-year-old stone tablet has gone on display in Iraq after being returned by Italy following nearly four decades.
The artefact is inscribed with complete cuneiform text – a system of writing on clay in an ancient Babylonian alphabet.
Italian authorities handed it over to Iraq’s President Abdul Latif Rashid in the city of Bologna last week.
It is not clear how the tablet was found – or how it made its way to Italy where it was seized by police in the 1980s.
Iraqi Culture Minister Ahmed Badrani said that it might have been found during archaeological excavations of the Mosul dam, which was built around that time.
Iraq, often described as the “cradle of civilization”, is known, among others, for the world’s first writing.
Looting of the country’s antiquities intensified following the US-led invasion 20 years ago.
Iraq’s president praised the co-operation shown by Italy and said he would work to recover all the archaeological pieces of Iraqi history from abroad.
In year 2021, the 3,500-year-old Gilgamesh Dream Tablet has gone on display in Iraq for the first time in three decades.
The clay artefact bears part of the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the world’s oldest surviving works of literature.
It was looted from an Iraqi museum during the 1991 Gulf War and smuggled through many countries before ending up at Washington DC’s Museum of the Bible.
US authorities seized the tablet in 2019 and handed it over to the Iraqi embassy in September.
It is one of 17,926 artefacts recovered by Iraq from the US, UK, Italy, Japan and the Netherlands over the past year, according to Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
