Italy returns millennium-old Assyrian royal tablet to Iraq

Iraq on Sunday unveiled a nearly 2,800-year-old cuneiform tablet, just returned by Italy, during a ceremony held at a presidential palace in Baghdad. The tablet bears the insignia of Shalmaneser III, an Assyrian king who ruled the region of Nimrod in northern Mesopotamia from 858 to 823 BCE.

“I would like to thank Italian officials for their efforts and their cooperation which made it possible to bring this piece back,” Iraqi President Abdel Latif Rachid said on Sunday, before sending the tablet to the National Museum in Baghdad. This restitution comes at a time when Iraq is intensifying its efforts to recover from foreign countries the antiquities looted from the many archaeological sites that punctuate its territory.

The circumstances of the arrival in Italy of the tablet of King Shalmaneser remain obscure. The object was recently seized by the Carabinieri, after which the Italian authorities returned the piece to Abdel Latif Rachid during a visit by the Iraqi president to Bologna on June 14. Iraqi Culture Minister Ahmed Fakak al-Badrani acknowledged that the circumstances in which the tablet was discovered remained unclear. "Perhaps during archaeological excavations or during the work of the Mosul dam," he said. The director of the Iraqi Council of Antiquities and Heritage, Laith Majid Hussein, mentioned that the tablet “came to Italy in the 1980s”.

Small in size, the archaeological piece is no less important, said Fakak al-Badrani. “Its cuneiform text has been fully preserved,” rejoiced the minister. The tablet “bears the titles of King Shalmaneser III and those of his father Ashurnasirpal II and his grandfather. Just as it recalls the construction of a ziggurat”, imposing building with degrees in the region of Nimrod, also indicated Laith Majid Hussein to AFP. During his long reign, Shalmaneser III continued the aggressive policy of territorial expansion of Assyria initiated by his predecessors, towards the Anatolian plateau and the Zagros Mountains, in present-day Iran.

Cradle of the civilizations of Sumer, Akkad, Babylon and Assyria, to which humanity owes writing and the first cities, Iraq has suffered for decades from the looting of its antiquities. The phenomenon increased in the chaos of the American invasion of 2003, then during the rise of the Islamic State (IS) group in 2014. “We will continue to work to recover from abroad all the archaeological pieces in Iraqi history, promised the Iraqi President. We want to make the Iraqi National Museum one of the best museums in the world and we will work on it”.

In May, New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg returned two ancient sculptures to Iraq: a Mesopotamian limestone elephant and a Sumerian alabaster bull from the archaeological city of Uruk. The figurines, stolen during the Gulf War, arrived clandestinely in New York in the late 1990s, according to a press release from the prosecution. The bull was part of the private collection of Shelby White, an 85-year-old billionaire, trustee and Met donor.