Their original owners, in what is now Iran, probably saw them as ordinary records of day-to-day transactions, like today’s ATM statements or store receipts. More than two millenniums later, however, clay tablets housed at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute have assumed extraordinary significance, as both objects of archaeological study and sources of modern conflict.
In addition to being crucial sources of information about the ancient empire that produced them, the tablets, as well as other Persian relics, have become prizes in complex legal battles. The disputes pit American colleges and museums against victims of terrorism in the Middle East, and have the potential to greatly hinder efforts by American scholars and museums to borrow art and artifacts from other nations.
In lawsuits pending in federal courts in Boston and Chicago, Americans harmed by terrorist attacks linked to the Islamic Republic of Iran are asserting claim to artifacts they believe belong to that nation, in their quest to win more than $4-billion in damages. The institutions that hold the artifacts, which include Harvard University and the University of Chicago, have been joined by an unlikely set of allies—the Iranian government, the U.S. Justice Department, and the National Iranian American Council—in arguing against using the archaeological finds to settle the lawsuits’ claims.
The lawsuits are expected to drag on for several more years, and some legal analysts familiar with them believe the U.S. Supreme Court will eventually be asked to weigh in, especially since the disputes involve questions related to the federal government’s power to grant or deny foreign nations immunity from having their assets here seized.
Eventually, however, there is a very real possibility that at least some of the artifacts at issue will be auctioned off to satisfy claims against the Iranian government, says Patty Gerstenblith, a professor of law at DePaul University and president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation, a nonprofit advocacy group that promotes the lawful exchange of cultural objects. If the collection of clay tablets held by the University of Chicago were sold off, she says, the loss to scholars of ancient Persian history “would be very tragic.”
The confiscation of artifacts could also set a troubling precedent, some scholars say. Other countries might become reluctant to lend cultural objects to institutions in the United States, and the United States could become more vulnerable to having its own cultural objects seized when they are on loan in foreign countries. The controversy already appears to be putting a damper on efforts by U.S. institutions to borrow cultural materials from other nations. Citing uncertainty over whether such objects would be subject to seizure, the Syrian government withdrew a 2008 offer to lend the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, artifacts for a major exhibition.
Jennifer Anglim Kreder, a professor of law at Northern Kentucky University and a co-author of an analysis of the litigation in a forthcoming issue of the Washington University Global Studies Law Review, says the loss of access to such artifacts would hamper American universities’ efforts to teach students about the Middle East.
But Thomas Fortune Fay, a lawyer representing one set of plaintiffs—families of the victims of the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, Lebanon—argues that his clients are owed compensation for damages. The people and institutions voicing concern about the possible sale of the artifacts, he says, are “being played for suckers” by the Iranian government. His clients are going after such artifacts, he says, only because the Iranian officials, who have the money to pay the judgments against their nation, have refused to do so.
“If they would cough up that amount of money and pay up the judgments, they would not have to worry about their tablets,” Mr. Fay says. If Iran refuses to pay, he says, the tablets might “end up on coffee tables.”
An Archive From Ruins
The collection of ancient Persian tablets at the University of Chicago, known as the Persepolis Fortification Archive, was excavated and shipped to the university, on loan from Iran, in the 1930s. Chicago archaeologists excavating Persepolis, capital of the Achaemenid Empire (also known as the first Persian Empire), found most of the relics in a gatehouse in one of the city’s defensive walls, where they had been sealed in place in about 330 BC, during the destruction of the city by the army of Alexander the Great.
Although some of the tablets are stamped with administrative seals, many are etched with writing in Aramaic, an ancient Semitic language, or Elamite, an extinct language widely used in the Persian Empire from about 550 B.C. to 330 BC. Essentially bureaucratic records from the ancient empire at its height, the tablets convey information such as where livestock was being moved and how much people of a given status were to be rationed. They have offered researchers an unprecedented chance to try to construct a people’s history of an empire previously known mainly through biblical, Egyptian, and Greek accounts of the actions of its rulers.
“The importance of this collection is that it was found as an archive,” which offers scholars “a holistic view” of Persian life at that time, says Touraj Daryaee, who follows research on the tablets as associate director of the Center for Persian Studies at the University of California at Irvine. The tablets are “like a jigsaw puzzle,” he says. “We have to study all of them together.”
The University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute had been shipping the tablets it has already processed and studied back to Iran since the late 1940s. It had just returned another shipment in 2004 when it received legal documents demanding that it surrender any remaining Iranian artifacts to the plaintiffs in the lawsuits against Iran. The university still has about 8,000 Persepolis tablets and 11,000 tablet fragments that could be subject to seizure if the plaintiffs prevail.
The university is also fighting to prevent the seizure of two other groups of artifacts: the Chogha Mish collection, consisting of clay-seal impressions excavated in southwestern Iran and shipped to the Oriental Institute in the 1960s, and a collection of artifacts sold to the Oriental Institute, as well as to Chicago’s Field Museum, by Ernst Herzfeld, a German archaeologist who took them out of Iran in the early 1900s. In the case of the artifacts known as the Herzfeld collection, the plaintiffs in the lawsuits against Iran argue that Mr. Herzfeld snuck the items out of Iran illegally and and so remain the property of that nation.
Some claims against the relics at the University of Chicago, by Americans affected by a 1997 bombing attack in Jerusalem, are pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Among the questions at issue there is whether a lower court erred in handing down a default judgment against Iran after its government claimed immunity from such legal proceedings and did not show up in court to defend itself.
William Harms, a spokesman for the University of Chicago, cited the continuing litigation in declining requests for interviews with administrators and scholars who oversee the Persian artifacts. The university issued a statement saying it “has the greatest sympathy for the victims of this tragic attack, but disagrees over their legal right to seize cultural artifacts in American museum collections or on loan for academic research here.”
Gil Stein, director of the university’s Oriental Institute, issued a separate statement in which he described the institute’s Persian artifacts as having “unique historical and cultural value.”
“It is our responsibility as scientists and responsible citizens to preserve and protect this cultural heritage,” he said.
Purchased or Plundered?
Elsewhere, in the U.S. district court in Boston, Harvard University is fighting to maintain possession of nearly 500 Persian artifacts. Most are archaeological specimens at its Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The list of contested items also includes coins and pieces of art at the Harvard Art Museums and two bas-reliefs, from the great palace of Persepolis, kept at the Harvard-affiliated Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections, in Washington.
In contrast with the University of Chicago, which says most of the Persian artifacts being sought from it belong to Iran, Harvard is asserting ownership of all of the Persian artifacts in its possession. Administrators declined to comment on the pending litigation, but the university argued in a memorandum submitted to the federal court in October that Harvard had acquired its Persian artifacts legally, and that the Iranian government had never disputed the university’s ownership of the items. The memorandum also argued that several of the items in dispute may have been produced and excavated outside Iran, from parts of the former Persian Empire that lie in modern Afghanistan, Armenia, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, or Turkey.
The plaintiffs in the litigation are staking their argument that the artifacts housed at Harvard do belong to Iran mainly on a 1930 Iranian law that, they say, gave that nation’s government title to any antiquities within its borders.
Harvard is arguing that the 1930 Iranian law dealt with the excavation and transfer of antiquities but did not automatically give the government title to them. The university also says that the law is unenforceable outside Iran, that many of the artifacts in its possession were taken out of Iran before 1930, and that, regardless, most would be covered by a Massachusetts law establishing a three-year statute of limitations for legal efforts to recover stolen goods.
Congress opened the door to these kinds of lawsuits in 1996, when it amended the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act in ways that narrowed the immunity of other nations from lawsuits filed in the United States in federal or state courts. The amendments—named for Alisa Flatow, a Brandeis student killed in a 1995 terrorist attack in Gaza—provided that nations listed by the United States as state sponsors of terrorism could, for the first time, be sued in U.S. courts by the victims of terrorist acts carried out with the sponsors’ support.
The following year, three suicide bombers in the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, staged an attack on a Jerusalem market in which five people were killed and more than 200 wounded. Several Americans wounded in the attack were joined by family members in filing lawsuits against the Iranian government, a financial and military supporter of Hamas. The plaintiffs obtained more than $400-million in default judgments when lawyers for Iran, which has asserted immunity from such litigation, failed to appear in federal court in Washington to contest the claims.
David J. Strachman, a Rhode Island lawyer representing plaintiffs in the lawsuits, which have been combined, declined to be interviewed for this article. In 2009 he told the Associated Press that injuries suffered by many of the bombing victims had been “absolutely life-changing.”
A separate set of lawsuits, filed on behalf of family members of the Marines killed in the 1983 Beirut bombing, has resulted in more than $4-billion in default judgments against Iran. Now, however, the plaintiffs are in the position of vying with the victims of the Jerusalem marketplace bombing for compensation.
Confiscating artifacts from other nations as a means of repaying terrorism victims of would bring an array of bad consequences, the U.S. government and some scholars argue. In statements submitted in federal court, the Department of Justice has argued that the confiscation and sale of the Iranian artifacts would harm the U.S. government’s foreign-policy interests, by undermining its power to set the terms of relations with other nations.
Ms. Kreder, the Northern Kentucky law professor, says the default judgments against Iran would remain even if its current regime were overthrown, potentially complicating American efforts to build relations with any new government there.
The Archaeological Institute of America has issued a statement opposing the sale of artifacts to satisfy court judgments and urging Congress to amend the law to protect cultural exchanges from such litigation. “It should be possible for nations to share their cultural heritage without fear of loss,” the institute said.
Ms. Gerstenblith, of DePaul University, says the auctioning off of the Persian artifacts at issue in the cases would not begin to generate enough money to pay off the default settlements anyway, and she is not sure that objects such as the Persepolis tablets would fetch much from art collectors, given that their value lies mainly in the information they contain.
But Mr. Fay, the lawyer for the Beirut bombing victims, says there could be a market for the artifacts, particularly among museums around the world.
In the meantime, researchers at the University of Chicago have sped up their efforts to photograph and analyze the Persepolis tablets, aware that the window into the past afforded by the artifacts might close.
