University of Chicago Persian Antiquities Crisis - Background On University of Chicago's Artifacts

Background On University of Chicago's Artifacts

The Achaemenid (or Persepolis) clay tablets were loaned to the University of Chicago in 1937. They were discovered by archaeologists in 1933 and are legally the property of the National Museum of Iran and the Iran's Cultural Heritage Organization. The artifacts came with the understanding that they would be returned to Iran. The tablets, from Persepolis, the capital of the Persian Empire, date to about 500 B.C.

The tablets give a view of daily life, with things like daily rations of barley that were given to workers in nearby regions of the empire. These tablets were sent to the capital to keep track of how they were paying workers. Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, said that details largely concern food for people on diplomatic or military missions. Each tablet is about half the size of a deck of Playing cards and has characters of a dialect of Elamite, an extinct language understood by perhaps a dozen scholars in the world.

Stein called it "the first chance to hear the Persians speaking of their own empire." Charles Jones, Research Associate and Librarian at the Oriental Institute and tablet expert compared them to "credit card receipts." Most of our current knowledge about the ancient Persian empire comes from the accounts of others, most famously the Greek storyteller Herodotus. Stein added, "It's valuable because it's a group of tablets, thousands of them from the same archive. It's like the same filing cabinet. They're very, very valuable scientifically."

The university's Oriental Institute had been returning them to Iran in small batches. The Institute had already returned 37,000 tablets and fragments to Iran and were preparing another shipment when Strachman intervened.