Iraq recaptures Gilgamesh’s ancient tablet from US after three decades

According to the visual correspondent of Fars News Agency, quoted by France 24The Gilgamesh plaque was unveiled on Tuesday by Iraqi officials, who hailed its return as a “victory” over those who stole the country’s “history.”

Baghdad (AFP) AFP – The 3,500-year-old tablet depicting Gilgamesh’s Mesopotamian epic, known as the “Mesopotamian Gem,” was returned to Iraq three decades after it was stolen and smuggled into the United States.

The cuneiform clay tablet was stolen from an ancient site in Iraq in 1991 during the First Gulf War.

The tablet contains excerpts from Gilgamesh’s epic, one of the world’s oldest literary works, and tells the story of a powerful Mesopotamian king in search of immortality.

The Gilgamesh tablet was found in the UK in 2001 and was purchased by an American art dealer in 2003 from a Jordanian family living in London. He then sent the tablet to the United States without specifying the nature of the package, and in 2007 sold it to antique dealers for $ 50,000. The tablet was eventually sold to the owners of the Bible Museum in Washington in 2014 for $ 1.67 million.

The Iraqi Foreign Minister announced the return of three antiquities returned from the United States and Britain to the Iraqi Minister of Culture at a press conference in Baghdad on Tuesday. These three works include the Gilgamesh tablet, the head of the Sumerian ram and the Sumerian tablet.

Iraqi Minister of Culture and Antiquities Hassan Nazem told AFP that the Gilgamesh tablet is important because it is one of the oldest literary texts in Iraqi history.

In the past year, Iraq has reclaimed nearly 18,000 artifacts from the United States, including 17,899, dating back about 4,000 years.

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