In the complaint, Special Agent John Paul Labbat with the United States Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security Investigations, cited that the object was stolen Iraqi property introduced into the United States contrary to 18 U.S.C. § 2314, the stolen property act.  This act serves as an independent basis for the forfeiture of any stolen property that moves in interstate or foreign commerce and which is utilized whether the object in question was stolen overseas or inside the United States.

The ancient clay object, originally part of a larger six-column tablet, contains seventy-four lines of Middle Babylonian cuneiform text, and is known to be one of only thirty known surviving fragments from the Epic of Gilgamesh created during the old and middle Babylonian periods.  Written almost 4,000 years ago, the Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the oldest known literary works in the world. The earliest parts of the poem were first discovered in the ruins of the library of the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal, in Nineveh, Iraq in 1853. 

Based upon the facts as set out in the Verified Complaint in Rem, on July 30, 2014, Hobby Lobby wired $1,674,000 to an unnamed auction house as payment for the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, having purchased the artifact for donation or display at the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC.  This was the same year that the company's fundamentalist president, Steve Green, persuaded the United States Supreme Court that it deserved a religious exemption from a federal requirement under which employers in the country are made to provide their workers with access to contraceptives.  It is also the same month that the Egyptian Exploration Society gave Dirk Obbink an ultimatum: cut ties with the Green family or lose his editorship of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, several fragments of which are now part of a separate ongoing investigation into another illegal sale in the United Kingdom.

Three months earlier, in April 2014 Manchester-based papyrologist Roberta Mazza had already published a blog post after visiting the Green's exhibition Verbum Domini II in Rome, Italy.  There, Professor Mazza recognized that another ill-advised Green purchase, a papyrus fragment of the Coptic codex of Galatians 2:2-4, 5-6, was one which had earlier been identified by Brice Jones and Dorothy L. King as having passed through the hands of a middleman trafficker on eBay, a gentleman going by the pseudonym Ebuyerrrrr, Yasasgroup, and later Mixantik.  As the investigations into the Green's buying habits progressed, Mazza, would be integral in determining that the Turkish middleman was Yakup Ekşioğlu, a name kept discreetly amongst researchers while investigations were undergoing.

Not long after the payment for the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet was finalized, the firm affiliated with the sale shipped the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet to their New York branch and then arranged for one of their representatives to hand-carry the tablet to Hobby Lobby in Oklahoma City, in order to avoid incurring a New York sales tax. The cuneiform tablet was subsequently transferred to the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC, where it drew concerns with one of the Museum's curators, in the lead up to the museum's grand opening. This unnamed curator queried the parties involved in the object's history post-sale, looking for evidence that would establish the artifact's legitimacy; an act of due diligence that should have been done by the prospective buyer before the tablet was purchased, and not after.  Those involved were anything but helpful.

This likely explains one of the reasons why the cuneiform tablet, once on display on the 4th floor of the DC museum in the History of the Bibles Galleries, was displayed with no provenance information whatsoever.

On 24 September 2019, the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet was seized as part of this civil investigation.  As the complaint released demonstrates, the importance of export documentation, for potential owners and dealers, or the lack thereof is a useful tool for researchers, law enforcement, and customs agents who monitor and prevent the trafficking of cultural property, none of which was remotely in keeping with this particular object.

But where was the Dream Tablet before? 

As background to the case, the US document cites that the tablet was first seen by an unnamed antiquities dealer in 2001 on the floor of a London apartment belonging to antiquities dealer Ghassan Rihani originally from Irbid in northern Jordan.

Prior to Rihani's death as well as after, a substantial portion of his "collection" of Iraqi objects began appearing on the London ancient art market. Many were believed to have been illicitly exported out of Iraq during the Gulf War following the 2003 invasion of Iraq and then recycled as being part of the not well documented Rihani family collection, something his son has denied in an interview with the New York Times.
By March/April 2003 the same dealer returned to London with a cuneiform expert and again viewed the tablet, this time with members of Rihani's family.  It is at this visit, where the dealer agreed to purchase the cuneiform table along with other items for a total of $50,530.  These items were subsequently mailed back to the United States and sold onward to two other dealers in ancient art for $50,000 along with a preliminary translation of the inscription.

By March 2007, false provenance documents had been created which omitted any mention of Rihani or the United Kingdom transaction.  Instead, the would-be provenance documentation proclaimed that the tablet had been purchased at a 1981 Butterfield & Butterfield auction in San Francisco, listed as LOT 1503.  All of which was blatantly untrue, as was the claim that the tablet had been deaccessioned from a small museum.

The cuneiform table would eventually make its way into the hands of Michael Sharpe, who published the object in his Rare & Antiquated Books catalog, where the object's constructed pedigree took a back seat to it's highlighted importance.



Like many cases before it, the multiple transactions surrounding the sales of the stolen Gilgamesh Dream Tablet reflects the inadequacy of the due diligence performed by intermediary dealers, the auction house, and the Green family themselves.  A simple check of the Butterfield & Butterfield auction records would have noted that LOT 1503 does not match the description of a terracotta cuneiform tablet from Iraq.  That alone should have given someone reason to pause.

At best, all of these dealers' behavior, the auction house's behavior and the collector's continued nonchalant attitude towards the object agreed to he purchase should be characterized as negligent. At worst, it shows the complicity of market actors, including those anonymously helping law enforcement post-facto, in prioritizing profits and plausible deniability as a masquerade for stewardship and collecting ethics.

As a result of this case, never shy Hobby Lobby has deflected its own ethical responsibilities towards due diligence by filing suit against Christie's, alleging fraud and breach of warranty in connection with the private treaty sale allegedly after the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet's provenance failed to stack up. This move confirms the auction powerhouse as the intermediary auction house, unnamed in the civil forfeiture complaint. That case has been listed as Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. v. Christie's Inc. (1:20-cv-02239) to be heard in the Eastern District of New York and names Georgie Aitken, Head of the Antiquities Department at Christie's in London from 2009-2016 and Margaret Ford, the Senior Director, International Head of Group, Books and Science at Christie's.

In closing, it is interesting to note that in the past Christie's has voiced a willingness to work closely with law enforcement agencies and ministries of culture to resolve issues when suspect antiquities passing through their organization, but reading the emails detailed in the civil forfeiture complaint for this cuneiform tablet show acting employees of the firm being anything but that. Instead, Christie's appears to have been trying to extract itself from the difficult situation it found itself in, having failed to so their advance homework prior to accepting the object for consignment or at any point up to the final sale.

Yet guarding our past for the future, is also going to be a tough sell for the Oklahoma-based retailer/donor.  In 2017 Hobby Lobby was fined $3 million after federal authorities alleged that the firm bought thousands of historical artifacts that were smuggled out of Iraq.  In 2019 the Museum of the Bible deaccessioned and restituted a number of stolen EES papyrus fragments removed illegally from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri housed at the Sackler Library in Oxford and in 2020 the museum relinquished 11,500 antiquities to the Iraqi and Egyptian governments, which had been acquired with a lack reliable provenance, or ownership histories.

Then there is that Galatians fragment Dr. Mazza has been asking about for years now, as well as many other pieces, have been tied back to Dr. Dirk Obbink and his private antiquities enterprises. 

At the time of the last restitution Mr. Green stated:

“One area where I fell short was not appreciating the importance of the provenance of the items I purchased.” 

One would question just how many legal entanglements it will take before Mr. Green starts to acknowledge that he is a significant contributor to the problem and not merely an innocent victim.  His failure to have engaged in serious due diligence of the artifacts he has purchased has already caused the Museum of the Bible to suffer by their own hands.  Likewise, due diligence of looted antiquities, especially those that could be from conflict-based countries, must be meaningful and not superficially plausible, in the furtherance of a sale's commission.  Partially-documented histories in an object's collection background, do not necessarily always point to fresh looting or illegal export but when an antiquity's background looks murky, as is the case with this important cuneiform tablet, the art market and wealthy donor collectors need to step up their game, by no longer participating in the laundering and by allowing researchers access to past sales details so that wrongs can be righted.

By:  Lynda Albertson

In an article in today's UK Times, the London newspaper reported that a review of Christ Church college's annual reports indicate that there was an equity-sharing arrangement with Dr. Dirk Obbink for £434,000 in 2018 in order for the professor to purchase a property. 

Agreements of this type are not unusual per se and are even written into the Statutes of Christ Church Oxford:

While The Times didn't give an exact date of the execution of this financial arrangement with Obbink, we know that by 4 June 2018, in a statement issued by the Egyptian Exploration Society that they had questioned Dr. Obbink about the sale of P.Oxy. 5345, the so-called First Century Mark fragment.  The EES has repeatedly affirmed that this papyrus fragment has never been for sale and was allegedly sold without their consent or knowledge along with other fragments determined to be missing from the collection held at Oxford University’s Sackler Library, all of which made their way into the collections at the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC.

According to the EES statement, when questioned Obbink acknowledged having shown P.Oxy. 5345 to Scott Carroll, at the time affiliated with the MotB and the Green Collection's point person for purchases, as well as to Oxford students in his college rooms but had "insisted that he had never said the papyrus was for sale, and that while he did receive some payments from the Green Collection for advice on other matters, he did not accept any payment for or towards purchase of this text."

How this equity arrangement with Christ Church will be effected by Obbink's legal troubles, if at all remain to be seen.   

One also has to wonder what the impact will be, if any, of Obbink's legal entanglements on the publicly funded research grant he obtained through the UK's Research and Innovation (UKRI) on Living Virtually: Creating and Interfacing Digital Surrogates of Textual Data Embedded (Hidden) in Cultural Heritage Artefacts.  Funded from May 2019 through April 2022 for £845,579 Dr. Obbink is listed as the project's Principal Investigator.

One thing the Times article did clear up is that it was Professor Obbink's legal team, and not Christ Church College, who contacted The Oxford Blue newspaper and threatened legal action for them having named the professor in reporting his arrest on 2 March 2020.  That contact has resulted in the student newspaper amending their original article, which is now back online.

On 16 April Lois Helsop at The Oxford Blue broke the news of that Thames Valley police had arrested American papyrologist Dr. Dirk Obbink, an associate professor in papyrology and Greek literature at Oxford University, on 2 March 2020.  ARCA, as well as prominent news outlets, picked up on this news notice, and in our case, linked back to Helsop's original article and directed our readers also to earlier ARCA postings (see this running thread) of this professor and the buying and selling of ancient texts.   

Professor Obbink has been the focus of much journalistic attention regarding the unauthorised sale of papyrus from the Oxyrhynchus collection, which is owned by the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) and housed at Oxford's Sackler Library, pieces of which were discovered to have been purchased by the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC. 

Today that Oxford Blue article has been removed.  Replaced by a brief statement which reads:

One has to ask, whose lawyer's rattled the young newspaper's cage?  Was it Oxford University's or Dr. Obbink's? While official guidance over whether arrested suspects’ names should be published ahead of charge is mixed, it is poor form to intimidate journalists for reporting facts on a high profile case, knowing a student newspaper doesn't have the funds to fight a litigious battle.  Luckily, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, a service that preserves web pages, has a copy of the original story archived, at least for now, or until they too receive a lawyerly take down request. 

Archived news articles are indispensable research resources as they can help reconstruct events, even the distasteful ones, which are necessary for historical and comparative research.  Often they are the last trace we have before knowledge is locked away in private nondisclosure settlements, or worse, when reporting is removed to avoid threats, legal and otherwise.

Here's to a universal access to all knowledge and if you have not already PDFed this webpage to memorialise the material for your own research, then now might be a good time, especially if you are following the interrelated cases of ethical behaviour in the museum and academic worlds as closely as we are.

Issued on 26 March 2010 and uploaded quietly to the Museum of the Bible website here. 

Statement on Past Acquisitions Published: Mar 26, 2020 

Museum of the Bible’s Chairman of the Board, Steve Green, makes the following statement on past acquisitions: 

In 2009, when I began acquiring biblical manuscripts and artifacts for what would ultimately form the collection at Museum of the Bible, I knew little about the world of collecting. It is well known that I trusted the wrong people to guide me, and unwittingly dealt with unscrupulous dealers in those early years. One area where I fell short was not appreciating the importance of the provenance of the items I purchased. 

When I purchased items in those early years, dealers would make representations about an item’s provenance, which the consultants I employed would say was sufficient. As I came to understand taking a dealer at his or her word was not good enough, I cut ties with those consultants. When I engaged with new advisors, I acquired a better understanding of the importance of verifying provenance and we developed a rigorous acquisitions policy that would help avoid repeating those early mistakes. 

For the past several years, the many dedicated curators at Museum of the Bible have quietly and painstakingly researched the provenance of the many thousands of items in the collection. That work continues. 
While this research was proceeding, beginning in late 2017, we also engaged with officials in several countries, including Egypt and Iraq, to open a dialog regarding items that likely originated from those countries at some point, but for which there was insufficient reliable provenance information. Those discussions have been fruitful, and continue to this day. 

I long ago made the decision that when our research revealed another party had a better claim to an item, I would do the right thing and deliver such items to that party. We have already proactively made several such returns. 

Today, I am announcing that we have identified approximately 5,000 papyri fragments and 6,500 clay objects with insufficient provenance that we are working to deliver to officials in Egypt and Iraq respectively. As discussions with officials in Egypt and Iraq continued, we also engaged with officials in the U.S. government to determine the best way procedurally and logistically to make the deliveries, and are appreciative of their assistance. We are working to finalize the deliveries in the near future. We also hope to finalize agreements with organizations in Egypt and Iraq that will allow for us to provide technical assistance, and support the ongoing study and preservation of their important cultural property. 

These early mistakes resulted in Museum of the Bible receiving a great deal of criticism over the years. The criticism resulting from my mistakes was justified. My goal was always to protect, preserve, study, and share cultural property with the world. That goal has not changed, but after some early missteps, I made the decision many years ago that, moving forward, I would only acquire items with reliable, documented provenance. Furthermore, if I learn of other items in the collection for which another person or entity has a better claim, I will continue to do the right thing with those items. 

I understand established museums, universities, and other institutions have evolved over the years and developed sound protocols for dealing with cultural property with insufficient provenance. I intend to continue to learn from the collective efforts and wisdom of those institutions, and support every person and organization possessing such items to continue their research into the provenance of their items. 

Steve Green Chairman of the Board Museum of the Bible

Takeaways:

This letter and these restitutions do not adequately address the negligence of the museum's management or the indiscretions of its philanthropists.  Nor do statements like these erase the indelible blemish on the museum's founding history.

Green claims to have unwittingly dealt with unscrupulous dealers without appreciating the importance of the provenance of the items he purchased. Does he want us to believe that HAD he appreciated the importance of provenance he would have walked away from the many once-in-a-lifetime pieces dangled before him?

Green explains that the consultants he employed were overly trusting of dealers, which is why he made mistakes and why he "cut ties" with those consultants. Emphasis on the word cut ties.  Fired? Let go? Contract not renewed? Swept under the rug? Who and When? What does "cut ties" mean exactly?

When he relates only his own story of events, it seems more like he is trying to control the narrative than do anything to actually make amends.

If we look back in the history of this scandal, it took Green an exceedingly long time to "cut ties" and when he did, we didn't see a great deal of improvement in the museum's operational model, purchasing due diligence, or its transparency.

January 3-5, 2011 is when US Customs inspected Five Federal Express antiquities-filled packages shipped bearing air waybills:

• No. 7286 2809 6729 from the UAE Dealer to the “[President] or [Executive Assistant]” at Hobby Lobby's Mardel’s address.
• No. 7286 2809 6751 from the UAE Dealer to the “[President] or [Executive Assistant]” at Hobby Lobby’s principle address. 
• No. 7286 2809 7162 from the UAE Dealer to the “[President] or [Executive Assistant]” at Hobby Lobby's Crafts, Etc!’s address. 
• No. 7286 2809 7173 from the UAE Dealer to the “[President] or [Executive Assistant]” at Hobby Lobby's Mardel’s address. 
• No. 7286 2809 7162 from the UAE Dealer to the “[President] or [Executive Assistant]” at Hobby Lobby's Crafts, Etc!’s address. 

But despite this embarrassing faux pas, by May 16, 2011 Hobby Lobby was still sticking to their guns that the plundered material was rightfully theirs.  To substantiate that claim, they had their attorney file an administrative petition with the CBP seeking the return of their seized property, which one can assume by all the lawyer fees that would have entailed, that at least on paper, Hobby Lobby still felt their claim to the ancient objects, was legit. 

As spring turned eventually to autumn, on September 7, 2011 Hobby Lobby was still defending its honor, submitting a supplemental petition to the CBP trying to satisfy the governments concerns about the payment methodology used in the purchase of the antiquities contained in these shipments.

The Supplemental Petition stated that the reason the payments for the order were made through “separate wire transfers was that various original owners were to be paid directly.” This explanation however proves inconsistent with the fact that Israeli Dealer #3’s provenance statement covered almost the entire order and Israeli Dealer #3 was not one of the payees. It was also inconsistent with representations made to Hobby Lobby about listing Israeli Dealer #3 in the purchase agreement “because the invoice is from [Israeli Dealer #3’s] family and the collection is the [Israeli Dealer #3] family collection.”

Two days after the Supplemental Petition on the problematic shipment, on September 9, 2011, still-consulting "Director" of the Green Collection, Scott Carroll, was out destroying mummy masks at Baylor University with washing up liquid.

Nine months after the problematic shipment, on October 15, 2011, still-consulting Carroll took the last flight out of Heathrow bound for Israel to retrieve still more "unknown, significant Hebrew biblical manuscripts", where upon arrival he poured over 1100+ scrolls spanning 700 years, and spent the day looking at someone's private collection of papyrus.



Such were the Green's buying power that on November 27, 2011, and despite an open investigation into their previous purchases, Carroll set off yet again on another international buying trip.  A voyage which would take him from West Africa, to Istanbul, and then on to London, where in addition to making purchases, he met with people in Oxford, in all probability, Dirk Obbink, regarding the Green Scholar Initiative.



Three and a half months later, on March 12, 2012, Carroll, still consulting for the MoTB, is quoted in the Toledo Blade saying:

“I tell the Greens that I trust them to know where to put a store, and they need to trust me to stock the shelves,”

Carroll goes on further to add:

“We’ve been extremely careful to vet everything acquired and are fully aware of the issues and problems,” declaring “I work closely with international and national agencies reporting suspicious items that come our way.” 

The Greens eventually cut ties with Carroll only in May 2012, yet the continued to put their trust in Dirk Obbink, whom they had purchased from since 2009.  Despite terminating their relationship with Carroll, by January 17, 2013 the Museum, had arranged to purchase four early gospel papyrus fragments from the Oxford-based scholar via a private sales agreement.  These turned out to be stolen from the EES Oxyrhynchus collection.  By November 2019, a total of 13 stolen fragments from the EES collection had been identified as having been purchased by the Museum of the Bible through various buying channels. 

Given all that, the fact that Green's press release statement yesterday, relays that they did not get around to speaking with the source countries of the looted material until 2017 is not surprising.  In an earlier Wall Street journal article, also by Crow, the Museum of the Bible's Vice Chairman of the board Robert E. Cooley indicated that the museum's board itself only learned about the government’s six-year smuggling investigation involving Hobby Lobby when the craft company was close to signing the settlement... so again, the year 2017.

Green purportedly did not tell the museum's board sooner because he considered it a Hobby Lobby matter which brings into question Green's statement yesterday about having "acquired a better understanding of the importance of verifying provenance... we developed a rigorous acquisitions policy that would help avoid repeating those early mistakes."

So this more vigorous acquisitions policy applies to the problems in Green's private collection or to the objects from that collection he donated onward to the Museum?

That said, it was around 2017 that the Museum's board hired cultural-heritage lawyer, Thomas Kline, to vet the pieces remaining in the museum’s collection.  One question which remains is whether or not they hired anyone else besides one busy lawyer, who does not have manuscript provenance experience.  If not, then that might explain why it took an additional three years for this next, and I suspect not last, round of at a snail's pace restitutions.
The final interesting statement is Green's letter is his hope that Egypt and Iraq will allow the Museum of the Bible to provide technical assistance, and support the ongoing study and preservation of their important cultural property.

Having (possibly) worn out their welcome with the EES, and having hooked their dreams on folks like Carroll, Obbink and company, Green now hopes that the very source nations their purchases robbed will see their better late than never restitutions and a single carefully-worded, reputation management letter from the Museum's principle donor as a sincere and real attempt at righting several wrongs.

For me it doesn't even start. 

It should not have taken this many years for Mr. Green to own up to his and his buyers indiscretions. He may have been blindsided by his consultants in the beginning, but throughout this process he has been the one to control the narrative.

If he truly wants to earn my trust, and really make meaningful amends, he could start by addressing the degrees of his own culpability, both for his actions (wantonly and  heedlessly purchasing objects without any due diligence consideration) and his inaction, (to get ahead of this, to his refusal to answer researchers questions about where and from and in what time frame he or his consultants purchased suspect material) from 2009 to present.

For now I remain skeptical and as unconvinced as my venting yesterday further explains.

Lynda Albertson

In continuing their internal investigation surrounding the illegal sale of papyri from their collection, The Egypt Exploration Society (EES) has issued a statement to members of Society at the Annual Gathering Meeting (AGM) which took place on 16th November 2019.  During that meeting, they indicated that it has determined that at least 120 pieces of papyri from Oxyrhynchus appear to be missing, from the EES collection, almost all from a specific group of folders.  

The EES collection is estimated to hold some half a million fragments so reviewing what is missing may take a considerable amount of time.  Previously it was announced that 13 of the missing pieces were determined to be in the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC.  An additional 6 fragments were located with a collector, Andrew Stimer in California.

This is the first time that the EES has mentioned that they are cooperating with the University of Oxford and the police to try to determine how papyri from their collection were illicitly sold on the art market. 

The EES stated that while the police investigation is in progress, they will not comment further "but will report on developments as and when it is possible."