It is a clay tablet five centimeters thick by 15 centimeters high and 12 centimeters wide, bearing a cuneiform text written in Akkadian of inestimable value: that of the oldest known epic, written there 4,000 years, therefore 1,000 years before Homer’s Odyssey, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the story of a king half-man, half-god, who sets out in search of immortality. This tablet is only a fragment of the Epic. It is the poem on the dream of Gilgamesh, which was found by archaeologists in the 19th century in the ruins of the library of King Ashurbanipal, a room that belonged to Iraq, until 1991 therefore, when the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein unleashed the United States’ response to the international coalition, led to war, and the looting that goes with it.
The Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, the 3,600-year-old religious text shows a section of a Sumerian poem in Akkadian from the Epic of Gilgamesh, is back home. A Sumerian sheep dated back to 3rd millennia and unknown tablet are also on display at the Foreign Ministry. #Iraq #history pic.twitter.com/xT92XP88gg
– Sinan S. Mahmoud (@sinansm) December 7, 2021
Like other major archaeological pieces, the tablet has disappeared. And then, in 2001, it was sold in England to an American art dealer, who himself resold it in 2003 to a private collector, before in 2014, the Bible Museum in Washington did so. repurchases for 1.6 million dollars. But the provenance calls out to one of the museum’s curators, the papers are doubtful, he informed the American authorities who seized the work in 2019 and decided this year to return it to the Iraqi State, like 17,800 other stolen pieces. , lost and suddenly found. Because it’s not just this tablet. The 2003 US invasion of Iraq and more recently ISIS terrorism led to the large-scale looting of hundreds of thousands of treasures torn from this cradle of Eastern civilization and resold illegally.
“This day represents a victory in the face of the attempts of those who try to steal our great History and plunder our ancient civilization”
Fouad Hussein, Head of Iraqi Diplomacyin Baghdad, at a press conference
Tuesday, December 7, in Baghdad, during the presentation of the tablet, the head of Iraqi diplomacy hailed this victory because we have much more than a piece of clay. The Epic of Gilgamesh is the story before the Bible, before the Odyssey, before the Koran. There are many adventures that have inspired other texts, such as the story of the Flood, or the crossing of hell. That is why its place is not in a private collection, but in a museum. An Iraqi museum, in Mesopotamia.