University of Chicago Oriental Institute - Controversy

Controversy

A collection comparable to the Institute's treasures could not be assembled today, since Middle Eastern governments no longer allow foreign archeologists to take home half of what they find. This had been the typical arrangement in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when most of the holdings were excavated, until the 1930s, when new antiquities laws were instituted.

In 2006, the Oriental Institute became the center of controversy when U.S. federal courts ruled to seize and auction its valuable collection of ancient Persian artifacts. The proceeds were to compensate the victims of a 1997 bombing in Ben Yehuda Street, Jerusalem, an attack which the United States claimed was funded by Iran. The ruling threatened the university's invaluable collection of ancient clay tablets; held by the Oriental Institute since the 1930s, it is officially owned by Iran. The Achaemenid (or Persepolis) clay tablets were loaned to the University of Chicago in 1937. They were discovered by archaeologists in 1933 and are legally the property of the National Museum of Iran and the Iran's Cultural Heritage Organization. The artifacts were loaned based on the understanding that they would be returned to Iran. The tablets, from Persepolis, the capital of the Persian Empire, date to about 500 B.C.

The tablets give a view of daily life, itemizing such elements as the daily rations of barley given to workers in nearby regions of the empire. The tablets were sent to the capital to provide a record of what they were paying workers. Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, said that details largely concern food for people on diplomatic or military missions. Each tablet is about half the size of a deck of playing cards and has characters of a dialect of Elamite, an extinct language understood by perhaps a dozen scholars in the world.

Stein described the tablets as providing "the first chance to hear the Persians speaking of their own empire." Charles Jones, Research Associate and Librarian at the Oriental Institute and tablet expert, compared them to "credit card receipts." Most of current knowledge about the ancient Persian empire comes from the accounts of others, most famously the Greek storyteller Herodotus. Stein added, "It's valuable because it's a group of tablets, thousands of them from the same archive. It's like the same filing cabinet. They're very, very valuable scientifically." The university's Oriental Institute had been returning them to Iran in small batches. The Institute had already returned several hundred tablets and fragments to Iran and were preparing another shipment when David J. Strachman intervened.