U.S. Returns Thousands of Artifacts, Including Hobby Lobby’s Gilgamesh Tablet, to Iraq

The United States has sent back more than 17,000 objects to Iraq. Hasan Nadhim, the Iraqi culture minister, said that the repatriation was “the largest in the history of Iraq.”
Among the objects repatriated to the country was a tablet from the epic of Gilgamesh that was owned by Hobby Lobby, an Oklahoma-based craft store chain. U.S. authorities had been seeking its forfeiture since 2020.
The New York Times reported that cylinder seals, clay tablets, and more arrived in wooden crates