Hobby Lobby Sues Christie's, Wants Us to Feel Sorry for Them [View all]

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The evangelical Green family (founders of the Bible Museum) have sued Christie’s for allegedly duping them. It caps off a charm offensive that even duped the New York Times.

Candida Moss
Updated May. 19, 2020 4:18PM ET

In March, the Wall Street Journal ran an article about how Steve Green, the CEO of Hobby Lobby and President of Museum of the Bible, plans to return 11,500 illicit Iraqi and Egyptian artifacts currently owned by the company or museum to their countries of origin. Among this vast collection of undocumented items that the museum was voluntarily returning is the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet an ancient clay tablet that, among other things, records part of history’s oldest creation story. One detail Green left out of the story? The tablet had been seized on September 24, 2019 by the Department of Homeland Security and Homeland Security Investigations. Now, Hobby Lobby wants the $1.6 million it spent on the tablet back.

The story, as it can be pieced together from the government’s complaint and Hobby Lobby’s filing, begins in 2001 when a dealer and unnamed cuneiform expert identified the tablet on the floor of the apartment of London based Jordanian antiquities dealer Ghassan Rihani. At the time it was unreadable and was purchased for $50,000. The antiquities dealer brought the tablet to the US where it was worked on by a then unnamed professor at Princeton.

In 2007 the antiquities dealer sold the tablet on to two other dealers for pretty much what he had purchased it for. When these unnamed dealers asked for provenance, the antiquities dealer used, the suit claims, a “False Provenance Letter [that] indicated that the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet was purchased at a 1981 Butterfield & Butterfield auction in San Francisco as part of lot 1503.”

Why does the date matter? Because if it hadn’t legally been in the US for decades then the tablet would have been illicit. Under the UNESCO convention items of cultural and historical interest discovered after 1970 cannot be removed from their countries of origin except under special agreement. The false provenance letter suggested that the tablet had been in the US for decades.

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/hobby-lobby-sues-christies-wants-us-to-feel-sorry-for-them

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If you've got time, this is a very interesting read and no, I don't feel a bit sorry for Hobby Lobby.