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A 3500-year-old plaque depicting the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh has been returned to Iraq three decades after it was stolen and illegally imported into the US.
The artifact was unveiled to the media in Iraq on Tuesday by authorities who welcomed the return as a “victory” over those who stole the country’s “history”. The clay slab contains cuneiform characters and is believed to have been stolen from an Iraqi museum in 1991 while the country was involved in the first Gulf War.
The Gilgamesh epic is considered one of the oldest works of literature in the world, telling the story of a Mesopotamian king in search of eternity. At a news conference in Baghdad on Tuesday, the Iraqi foreign minister presented the Minister of Culture with three artifacts found by the United States and Britain: the Gilgamesh plaque, the head of a Sumerian ram, and a Sumerian plaque.
The Gilgamesh epic “is of great importance, as it is one of the oldest literary texts in the history of Iraq,” Minister of Culture and Antiquities Hassan Nazim told AFP.
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