The Gilgamesh Dream Tablet
About 3,600 years ago a scribe wrote down Gilgamesh telling his mother his dreams. In 2001 the tablet was lying on the floor of a London flat. It later picked up a forged letter saying it had been sold at auction in 1981, and its price went from $50,000 in 2007 to $1,674,000 in 2014. In 2021 an American court took it, and it went home to Iraq.
Based on the original, Iraq Museum, Baghdad.
Found: unknown: nobody recorded where it was dug up; the court record first sees it in a London flat in 2001.
What it is
A clay tablet about fifteen by thirteen centimetres, written in Akkadian cuneiform. It holds a piece of the Gilgamesh story: the hero tells his mother two dreams, and she reads them as a promise that a friend is coming. Oddly, on this tablet the names Gilgamesh and Enkidu are swapped for the gods Sin and Ea. It is dated to around 1600 BC, the time of the First Sealand Dynasty in southern Iraq; that date comes from the style of the tablet, not from anything written on it. It is widely identified with an unusual tablet the Assyriologist Andrew George published in 2007.
How it travelled
This part comes from the US government's court filings. In 2003 an American dealer bought it with other tablets from the family of a dealer in London, posted it to the United States, and had it baked and cleaned. In 2007 it sold for $50,000, and at some point it gained a forged letter claiming a 1981 auction sale. In 2014 an auction house sold it to Hobby Lobby, the American craft-store chain, for $1,674,000. Federal agents seized it in Washington, D.C. in 2019, a court ordered it forfeited in July 2021, and it was handed back to Iraq that September.
What nobody can tell you
Where it was found. Someone dug it out of the ground without writing that down, and that record is the thing a looted object loses forever. The words on the tablet survived. The place it came from did not.
- United States v. One Cuneiform Tablet Known as the 'Gilgamesh Dream Tablet', E.D.N.Y. 1:20-cv-02222: Amended Verified Complaint (2020) and Decree of Forfeiture (2021)
- US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, news releases of 18 May 2020 and 24 September 2021
- George, 'The civilizing of Ea-Enkidu: an unusual tablet of the Babylonian Gilgameš epic', Revue d'assyriologie 101 (2007), 59–80
- George, The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation (Penguin, 1999)
- Picture: rendered from our own 3D model, the one on the workbench: a reconstruction, not a record of how it looked.