US to return thousands of Achaemenid tablets to Iran

The United States will return thousands of historical tablets of the Achaemenid Empire to Iran within months, an Iranian official announced on Monday.

Meanwhile the public relations department of deputy Cultural Heritage of the Ministry of Handcraft and Tourism tweeted on Monday,

“The good news is more than 20,000 Achaemenid tablets belonging to Persepolis will be returned from the US to our country by the end of this year,” referring to capital of the empire.

The tablets were sent to the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago on loan nearly 90 years ago.

In 2019, a batch of the clay tablets was returned as part of thousands of fragments kept at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History and the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute.

The tablets give an insight into the economic, social, and religious history of the Achaemenid Empire, the largest and most durable empire of its time that stretched from Ethiopia, through Egypt, to Greece, to Anatolia, Central Asia, and India in the 5th century BC.

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