ngl I keep forgetting that Hobby Lobby is a real store that people go to. That people actually think of it as a craft store and not as a crazy Christian mass artifact smuggler. I google “Hobby Lobby” and get a page full of results that make me go “wtf is this craft supplies and operating hours shit, I thought we all knew this place for smuggling looted cuneiform tablets out of Iraq”
#sorry what??? #I knew them as the store with the Christian right wing owners that refused to pay for employee birth control as part of health insurance #what is this about cuneiform tablet looting
They are also that! And it comes from the same place.
Since 2009, the billionaire owners of Hobby Lobby started taking advantage of the wars in Iraq to buy stolen and looted cuneiform tablets and clay artifacts from ancient Mesopotamia. A lot of them were suspected to have been stolen from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad in the chaos of the US invasion in 2003. The Hobby Lobby owners used HL profits to smuggle these artifacts into the US (taking them out of Iraq is illegal so they listed them as tile samples from Turkey and Israel, more friendly nations to the US). Eventually the customs officials seized them, and the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in 2017 when the news really broke about just how many ancient Middle Eastern artifacts were smuggled into the country. They were doing this to stock their “Museum of the Bible” that purports to prove the literal truth of the Bible… using stolen Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, somehow. Idk.
They also had sixteen Dead Sea Scrolls that turned out to be forgeries but that’s only tangentially related.
Hobby Lobby and its owners were fined and ordered to return, again, thousands of artifacts back to Iraq. For years they KEPT finding more artifacts of Hobby Lobby’s that turned out to be stolen, looted, and smuggled. It’s one of the biggest artifact smuggling scandals in recent history. And it separated artifacts from their context and permanently damaged the ability to learn new things from them, even though archaeologists subsequently have been trying.
The court case was called “United States v. Approximately Four Hundred and Fifty Cuneiform Tablets.”
The name of that court case is making me explode
I know there’s probably a legalese reason it’s worded that way but holy god
I’m imagining the text on the tablets has suddenly shifted to channel the thousand-year-old wrath of Nanni and Arbituram, taking a brief break from chewing out Ea-Nasir… just to tell the United States and Hobby Lobby both exactly what they think of all this
Hi, I opened the notes to see if anyone else had already linked to the case and I saw your comment at the top. If you’d actually like to know, read on; if you’re just frustrated please ignore me!
Civil forfeiture cases are always named United States of America (or a state, like Montana or Wyoming) vs. (object(s) that is/are allegedly wrongfully held or used in commission of a crime), because legally the government is technically suing the property, rather than the person holding the property, as the subject the government is asserting jurisdiction over. It is called in rem jurisdiction.
It can be used to seize the property faster and without needing to go through a lengthy criminal trial, which can be especially important in the case of animals or especially fragile things (like, presumably, fragile Mesopotamian tablets). Criminal forfeiture, where the state seizes property from a criminal directly related to their crime, requires that it is proven beyond reasonable doubt that this particular person committed this exact crime which caused them to hold this particular piece of property, which must still be in their possession. This is an incredibly high bar to clear!
Civil forfeiture only requires a preponderance of evidence and, because it is taken against the property, it allows property to be seized from parties who themselves didn’t do anything illegal. For example, if these approximately 450 tablets had been given as a gift to an unrelated third party, they would still be recoverable through the civil forfeiture process despite no longer being in the direct possession of the smugglers.
Of course, civil forfeiture is not always used by the state to retrieve smuggled materials by Christian fundamentalists, and we should be inquisitive and critical of how our governments assert this power, but in the case of smuggled property that has changed hands multiple times, it’s usually a good thing that the government can seize smuggled goods without needing to prosecute the person currently holding them.
Aside from “United States of America vs. Approximately Four Hundred Fifty (450) Ancient Cuneiform Tablets; and Approximately Three Thousand (3,000) Ancient Clay Bullae,” it also leads to a lot of other funny case names!
- United States of America vs. Forty-Three Gallons of Whiskey (which is the precedent-setter for in rem nomenclature being used in civil forfeiture cases—also racist, so watch out when reading that one) (1883)
- United States v. 11 ¼ Dozen Packages of Articles Labeled in Part Mrs. Moffat’s Shoo-Fly Powders for Drunkenness (1941)
- Nebraska v. One 1970 2-Door Sedan Rambler (Gremlin) (1974)
- United States of America vs. An article of hazardous substance consisting of 50,000 cardboard boxes more or less, each containing one pair of clacker balls, labeled in part: (Box) “* * * Kbonger * * It’s Fun Test Your Skill It Bounces It Flips Count The Hits * * * Specialty Mfg. Co., Seattle, Wash. * *” (1976)
- United States of America vs. One Lucite Ball Containing Lunar Material (One Moon Rock) and One Ten Inch by Fourteen Inch Wooden Plaque (2003)
And my favorite:
DELIGHTFUL
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