LETTER FROM BAGDAD
Foreign tourists, families and Iraqi schoolchildren once again roam the aisles of the Baghdad National Museum. After three years of closure, in the wake of the anti-power protest of October 2019 and the Covid-19 pandemic, the institution founded in 1926 reopened its doors in March 2022. Over the galleries, visitors go back five thousand years of Mesopotamian history. Two imposing lamassous, winged bulls, found on the site of Nimrod, in the palace of Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 BC), sit majestically in one of the rooms. Pieces that have been missing for decades have been rediscovered, such as the Dream Tablet of Gilgamesh, a Mesopotamian jewel more than 3,500 years old.
Once considered one of the richest in the world, the collection of the National Museum in Baghdad was looted during the Gulf War of 1991, then the American invasion of 2003. More than 15,000 pieces were then stolen, including a third have since been returned to the Iraqi authorities. “Over the past two years, our efforts have intensified to recover artefacts stolen from Iraq and smuggled out of the country”, explains the director of the Iraqi Council of Antiquities and Heritage, Laith Majid Hussein. In 2021, Iraq recovered nearly 18,000 artifacts, including 17,899 pieces returned by the United States. Other pieces were returned by Lebanon, Japan, the Netherlands, Italy, Great Britain…
A real epic
The story of Gilgamesh’s dream tablet is an epic in itself. The clay tablet contains fragments of I’Epic of Gilgamesh, written in cuneiform characters. Considered one of the oldest literary works of humanity, it narrates the adventures of this king of Mesopotamia in search of immortality, who would have reigned over Uruk, in southern Iraq, between 2,800 and 2,500 This Sumerian epic, written on eleven tablets, was discovered in 1853, in an archaeological site later identified as the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, in Nineveh, Iraq. In the tablet of dreams, King Gilgamesh describes his dreams to his mother, who interprets them as the announcement of the arrival of a new friend, who will become his companion. The other tablets are kept in the British Museum, London.
No one knows what happened to the tablet of dreams between its theft in 1991 from an archaeological site or an Iraqi museum and its reappearance in London in 2003. An American art dealer then bought from a Jordanian family. He then sent it to the United States without specifying to customs the nature of the package and sold it to antique dealers in 2007 for 50,000 dollars, with a false certificate of origin. It was sold in 2014 for $1.67 million to the owners of the Museum of the Bible in Washington. In 2017, a museum curator was concerned about the provenance of the tablet, deeming the documents provided at the time of purchase incomplete.
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