Smuggling ancient Iraqi artifacts via Israel/UAE

I am so sorry

According to court documents, Hobby Lobby agreed to forfeit thousands of Iraqi artifacts and pay a $3 million fine to resolve the civil action the Justice Department brought against the company.

Ancient cuneiform tablets and clay bullae from modern-day Iraq were smuggled into the United States through the United Arab Emirates and Israel, Justice officials said. With Hobby Lobby's consent they were falsely labeled as "ceramics" and "samples" and illegally shipped to Hobby Lobby stores and two corporate offices, according to the DOJ.
Cuneiform is an ancient system of writing on clay tablets that was used in Mesopotamia, according to the DOJ, and clay bullae are balls of clay on which seals have been imprinted.

>>132558596
>I am so sorry

For the format.

CONTINUED BELOW

>From the article:
Five shipments that were intercepted by federal customs officials bore shipping labels that falsely declared that the artifacts' country of origin was Turkey.

If you look at a map, these countries are all around the general region where giant sets of tablets are being uncovered as we speak... One of these sets originating from a site being uncovered at this moment, less than 30 miles outside of Aleppo.

The Ebla tablets are a collection of as many as 1800 complete clay tablets, 4700 fragments and many thousand minor chips found in the palace archives of the ancient city of Ebla, Syria.
The tablets were discovered by Italian archaeologist Paolo Matthiae and his team in 1974–75 during their excavations at the ancient city of Tell Mardikh. The tablets, which were found in situ on collapsed shelves, retained many of their contemporary clay tags to help reference them.
They all date to the period between ca. 2500 BC and the destruction of the city ca. 2250 BC. >Today, the tablets are being held in the Syrian museums of Aleppo, Damascus, and Idlib.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebla_tablets

So, the tablets and crazy languages being uncovered and subsequently shipped around places such as Israel may be worth looking into at some point in future... just keep it in mind if you care to, I suppose. Photos seem to be available online.