TEHRAN — This evening, when the Iranian presidential plane landed in Tehran, it purchased the fourth batch of Achaemenid clay tablets from the United States, where they had been kept on loan for nine decades.
A total of 3,506 Achaemenid tablets were repatriated by the plane carrying President Ebrahim Raisi, who addressed the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly during his visit to New York.
The recovered collection includes 836 small tablets written in Aramaic and 2,670 large tablets with Elamite cuneiform inscriptions, CHTN reported.
“Thanks to the appropriate monitoring of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts Organization, the Permanent Mission of Iran to the United Nations in New York and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the tablets of the Achaemenid Empire, which were kept in the United States and the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS) for 84 years were repatriated to Iran. The tablets were initially supposed to stay there for three years for study purposes,” Raisi told reporters upon his arrival at Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport.
“One might wonder why the tablets were in the possession of Americans. The scientists who worked on the tablets are of Iranian origin and have been carrying out studies on them for over 10 years,” he said.
The Iranian president said the clay tablets would be delivered to Iranian museums for display.
The royal tablets were shipped in nine boxes, each weighing 75 kg, according to the report. They are believed to have been produced during the reign of Darius I, commonly known as Darius the Great, who was the third king of kings of the Achaemenid Empire, reigning from 522 BC until his death in 486 BC.
Earlier in August, Iran’s deputy minister of cultural heritage said the United States was preparing to return more than 20,000 Achaemenid clay tablets to Iran within months. “The good news is that more than 20,000 Achaemenid tablets belonging to Persepolis will be returned from the United States by the end of this year,” Ali Darabi said.
So far, hundreds of these tablets (and fragments), loaned since 1935 by Iran to the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, have been repatriated. For example, in 2019, Iran received 1,783 of these important objects housed at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago.
In February 2018, after years of ups and downs, the fate of these ancient Persian artifacts was left in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of Iran.
Archaeologists affiliated with the University of Chicago discovered the tablets in the 1930s during excavations in Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Persian Empire. However, the institute has resumed its work in collaboration with Iranian colleagues, and the return of the tablets is part of an expansion of contacts between researchers from the two countries, said Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
These are very important sources of information revealing economic, social and religious data about the Achaemenid Empire (550-330 BC) and the wider Near East region in the 5th century BC.
Persepolis, known locally as Takht-e Jamshid, was the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire. It ranks among the unparalleled archaeological sites, given its unique architecture, urban planning, construction technology and art.
Accounts say that Persepolis was burned by Alexander the Great in 330 BC, apparently in revenge against the Persians, as it appears that the Persian king Xerxes had burned the Greek city of Athens around 150 years earlier. It was the largest and most durable empire of its time, stretching from Ethiopia, through Egypt, to Greece, Anatolia (modern Turkey), Asia central and India at its peak.
AFM
