Hobby Lobby Bought The Gilgamesh Dream Tablet For $1.6 Million — The US Government Seized It

A 3,600-year-old fragment of the Epic of Gilgamesh — the hero describing his dreams to his mother, a goddess, who reads them as prophecy — surfaced in London in 2003, encrusted in dirt, with no history before that moment. It was sold with a fabricated provenance claiming it had sat in a private collection since 1981, and that invented past traveled with it through dealers and auction houses for nearly two decades. In 2014, the Green family — owners of Hobby Lobby — bought it at Christie’s for $1.67 million to display in the Museum of the Bible, until federal agents seized it in 2019 and a court ordered it returned to Iraq. But the Dream Tablet wasn’t the anomaly — it was the most famous item in a pipeline that moved tens of thousands of ancient Mesopotamian tablets into private American hands, and nobody has ever mapped where the rest of the haul went.