Antiquities seized from Hobby Lobby

[rynathee]

So this is not a new story but was definitely news to me! Wondering if any of you know anything further regarding the items illegally purchased by Hobby Lobby (of all companies)? Thousands of items seized by the U.S. government. I'm curious to know what has been done with the items, hopefully given to academic experts and organizations to study?


www.courthousenews.com/feds-seize-thousands-iraqi-artifacts-hobby-lobby/

[us4-he2-gal2]

Yes, the entire Green collection (/ Hobby Lobby collection) situation is entirely regrettable. I know one of the cuneiform experts who was employed by the Green collection, he and others were curating the cuneiform tablets and preparing an inventory of the texts. I think there was even talk of opening a museum which would display some of the important texts and artifacts. Often I would speak of the Green collection with Prof. Frayne (now deceased), he became obsessed with the topic, as it was one of the few rays of sunshine (chances for new and exciting cuneiform material) in a fairly bleak Iraqi-wartime period.


The field is really split on what the policy should be about handling and publishing illicit texts (those potentially or obviously obtained on the black market or through dealers who distribute texts coming from looters). The archaeologists tend to passionately argue for zero tolerance toward illicit materials with no exceptions, the idea being to subdue the black market and to cut off financial returns to looters etc. They have the preservation of sites in mind. On the other side of things, some philologists (i.e. scholars mainly concerned with the study of the texts) feel that we should attempt to extract all available information from cuneiform documents regardless of where they came from and how they got there. They feel that a policy of boxing up thousands of tablets and shipping them back to Iraq will result mainly in the permanent loss of the tablets and the information on them (which seems quite possible to me).


The loss of the Green collection is, to my mind, a blow to the modern reconstruction of the Mesopotamian world, a reconstruction which (in large part) has been achieved by Western philologists gaining access to cuneiform tablets and using a hard won science to read the texts and publish the information recovered. Leaving the texts in Iraq is not the practice by which this lost civilization was recovered in the way that it has been.

[hukkana]

So what is going to happen to them and when will someone be able to go over them then ?

[rynathee]

Thanks for your feedback Bill! I can definitely understand both viewpoints - the archeologists vs. philologists. Of course no one wants to enable the black market. And surely a great amount of information is lost when an item cannot be traced back to its original location. However, I can't fathom the idea of boxing up items that are already in our hands and NOT studying them. Regardless of how they got here, once they're here I tend to feel we have an obligation to study them.
I'm not sure what our government intends to do with these items but I really hope that we will be able to study them and publish the material and/or findings.

[us4-he2-gal2]

So far as I know, a large portion of the cuneiform collection that would have been house at the new Bible museum (in Washington D.C., built to display the Green / Hobby Lobby collection, opened in 2017) remain compounded. I think legal proceedings are still ongoing. Despite that a large number of the cuneiform documents were compounded (and may ultimately be shipped back to Iraq), the Green collection retains a smaller number I think. Also, the collection still has a huge number of artifacts which were not impacted by this cuneiform seizures. They have a new website:



www.museumofthebible.org/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Collection