Maybe it's a cursed tablet.
Not that his Akkadian text, engraved in cuneiform characters in Mesopotamian clay around 1600 BC.
AD, is particularly malicious - it contains a beautiful fragment of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
And impossible to attach to it crisp stories of premature disappearances or vapors shrouded in mysteries.
No, if this so-called "Gilgamesh's dream" tablet seems cursed, it is because it has been poisoning relations between the Washington Museum of the Bible and the Christie's auction house for nearly a year.
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On display in the sulphurous Washington Museum, the 12 x 15 cm tablet was confiscated by the US federal government in September 2019 on the grounds that it was illegally imported into the United States from Iraq in the 2000s. The Washington Bible Museum had acquired it for $ 1.64 million in a private sale at Christie's New York in 2014, through distribution company Hobby Lobby, also owned by billionaire David Green, also. founder of the Museum of the Bible.
Another snub for the decidedly damaged reputation of the museum and that of David Greene who launched, last May, a lawsuit against the auction house for fraud and breach of warranty.
The case continues to develop with the identification, on February 1, of Israeli collector and businessman Joseph David Hackmey, the last owner of the tablet in question before it was put on sale at Christie's in London.
According to
The Art Newspaper
, Hobby Lobby's lawyer in charge of the case, Michael McCullough, said a telephone conversation between Georgiana Aitken - then head of the London Antiques Department at Christie's - and
a
suspected "
American merchant
" to have brought the object to the United States in 2003, proved a complicity of the auction house.
The latter must therefore, according to the lawyer, be aware of the provenance and uncertain route of the object.
A version that Christie's completely refutes.
According to a spokesperson quoted by
The Art Newspaper
,
"any allegation that Christie's had knowledge of the original fraud or the illicit importation is false."
To show white paw, the auction house claims to have relied on a certificate of provenance indicating that the object had been in the United States since 1981, and would therefore be in accordance with American law which prohibits the trade in cuneiform antiques. Iraqi women exported from the country after 1990. However, according to the documentation of the American authorities who seized the Mesopotamian tablet, this certificate dates from 2007 only, even before Joseph David Hackmey came into his possession.
The falsification is said to be the work of a first merchant who kept the tablet between 2003 and 2007 and who, by reselling it, would have forged a completely different origin for antiquity.
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An exodus of antiques
If the precise conditions by which the tablet was able to leave Iraq are not yet known, it is documented for the first time in 2001 in the London collections of the Jordanian art dealer Ghassan Rihani, which indicates that it would predate the time of the American invasion.
In the wake of Saddam Hussein's fall in April 2003, the Baghdad National Archaeological Museum was ransacked;
around 15,000 objects - including several national treasures - were then stolen, an inestimable loss compared to the historical collections of the museum.
Several thousand Iraqi objects have since been found or returned, especially from the United States.
Severely damaged, the Baghdad Museum reopened in 2015, in response to the looting then carried out by the Islamic State group in Mosul.
While waiting for the conclusions of the case, the progress of which is being slowed down by the pandemic, the opacity of the origins of the “Gilgamesh dream tablet” remains.
If a potential legal origin is not yet completely ruled out, the object appears, in all likelihood, to have been the subject of fraudulent trafficking according to the analysis of the law firm Greenberg Traurig.
In this case, it could come from looting carried out since the Gulf War, in 1990. Less devastating for Iraqi heritage than the following war, the conflict had nevertheless caused the loss of nearly 2000 historical objects, as is the case. lamented in 2003 the
New York Times
which pointed out, then, the role played by Ghassan Rihani in the traffic of these antiques.
A gloomy fate in the end, that of this ancient tablet bearing the epic of Gilgamesh. Faced with repeated looting, trafficking, war, falsifications, appetites and trials, the dream of the legendary king of Uruk must have turned, for many ages, into a sorrowful nightmare.