One day before U.S. forces arrived and occupied Baghdad, Iraq on April 9, 2003, the staff of the National Museum of Iraq vacated the museum. The museum staff returned on April 12, but between April 10 and April 12, an estimated 15,000 items were looted from the museum.

Smithsonian Magazine writes that American troops eventually arrived to protect the museum on April 16, having been busy bringing down the statue of Saddam Hussein, but by that point the damage was already done. However, thanks to the prudence of museum staff, the damage was slightly mitigated, according to The Conversation. Before vacating the museum, staff members had safely removed and stored almost 9,000 artifacts and thus spared them from the looting. Although up to 7,000 of the stolen items have managed to find their way back, either being recovered in raids or reappearing in other museums, up to 8,000 items are still missing.

In “A Brief History of Iraq,” Hala Mundhir Fattah and Frank Caso write that the National Museum of Iraq wasn’t the only cultural institution that suffered due to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The main building of the Iraq National Library and Archives went up in flames, resulting in a loss of 25% of the library’s collection and 60% of the archive collection. Military helicopters also damaged numerous archeological sites, including the 6th century B.C. temples of Nabu and Ninmah.

In December 2010, Hobby Lobby purchased over 5,500 cuneiform tablets, cylinder seals, and other artifacts for $1.6 million. The acquisition was reportedly “fraught with red flags.” Hobby Lobby was given conflicting information about where the artifacts were kept before being transported to the United Arab Emirates, and when Hobby Lobby’s president Steve Green and his acquisition advisor, Scott Carroll, arrived to inspect the artifacts on July 15, 2010, the pieces were displayed without protection. Sellers claimed to have acquired the artifacts “in the late 1960s from ‘local markets,'” according to the Center for Art Law.

When the packages arrived from the UAE-based dealer to three different corporate addresses in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, they didn’t have the required accompanying customs entry documentation and were misleadingly labeled as containing “ceramic tiles” or “hand made clay tiles (samples).”

Since the requirements for a package’s customs clearance is based on its value, by valuing each package as less than $2,500, a buyer or seller can ensure an item is cleared under a more informal entry process. Hobby Lobby declared that the packages it imported were valued between $250 and $300 each, but when Customs and Border Patrol seized the packages, they discovered that the contents of each package was valued between $14,000 and $84,000.

Carroll’s assistant reportedly told the UAE dealer that “[a]s long as you keep the value of each package under $2,000, they will not have to forward it to our broker to clear it through Customs.”

In January 2011, Customs and Border Patrol intercepted approximately half of the 10 packages Hobby Lobby was sent that month, and all of their shipping labels falsely declared the artifacts’ country of origin to be Turkey. In September 2011, Hobby Lobby received another package from the same purchase, containing roughly 1,000 clay seals. This one also came with a false declaration, which claimed that the artifacts’ country of origin was Israel.

Al Jazeera reports that the false Israeli export license on the package of clay seals “must have been issued by an Israeli [government official],” which is an additional cause of concern.

Meanwhile, Hobby Lobby didn’t even directly pay the UAE dealer, who was the supposed owner of the artifacts, and instead wired money to “seven different personal bank accounts of five other individuals,” according to “Fighting the Illicit Trafficking of Cultural Property.” This was supposedly done based on instructions from another dealer.

Hobby Lobby ultimately agreed to forfeit the artifacts in addition to paying a $3 million fine, claiming that it was an unintentional oversight. According to the statement released by Hobby Lobby, the company claimed that it was “new to the world of acquiring these items, and did not fully appreciate the complexities of the acquisitions process.” It said that this “resulted in some regrettable mistakes” and claimed that the company “imprudently relied on dealers and shippers who, in hindsight, did not understand the correct way to document and ship these items.”

Hobby Lobby’s president, Steve Green, also insisted that Hobby Lobby cooperated with the government throughout the investigation and that with the announcement of the settlement, he considered the matter to be resolved. However, the approximately 450 ancient cuneiform tablets and approximately 3,000 ancient clay seals wouldn’t be the only objects that the United States government had to seize from Hobby Lobby.

In May 2020, Hobby Lobby filed a lawsuit against Christie’s, claiming that while it had been offered assurances of the artifact’s legitimate provenance, Christie’s knew that the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet’s provenance was fake. Meanwhile, according to the government’s forfeiture suit, the woman who headed Christie’s antiquities department was told that “the provenance was not verifiable and would not hold up to scrutiny in a public auction,” per Reuters.

The Art Newspaper reports that Hobby Lobby is looking for a refund of the $1.67 million it paid for the tablet, as well as attorney’s fees and interest. A spokesperson for Christie’s claims that the auction house had absolutely no knowledge of the illegal importation or original fraud associated with the tablet, and that any illegal activity “predated Christie’s involvement,” per Forbes.

Hobby Lobby also claims that Christie’s fraudulently sold them a gospel manuscript that was looted during World War II from a Greek monastery. In October 2020, Hobby Lobby announced that it was going to return the manuscript to the Greek Orthodox Church.

In 2020, Steve Green announced that he was also in the process of repatriating up to 11,500 items from antiquity to the Egyptian and Iraqi governments. Telling the Wall Street Journal that he “knew little about the world of collecting,” Green decided to return thousands of artifacts because their provenance can’t be verified. Although the Museum of the Bible often spins these stories as a gracious return, it’s worth wondering why Green was even purchasing such artifacts in the first place.

According to Artnet, Green claimed that the Museum of the Bible was going to return 5,000 ancient papyrus scraps and 6,5000 ancient clay pieces. However, The Daily Beast reports that the proposed agreement between Hobby Lobby, the Museum of the Bible, and organizations in Iraq has been described as “exploitative and degrading.”

In addition, in 2020, Hobby Lobby promised $15 million to fund “a program to help strengthen the institutional, technical, and human resource capacities of Iraq’s antiquities sector.” But Dr. Zainab Bahrani, professor of art history and archeology, questions whether or not Hobby Lobby is even qualified to assist in anyway, considering that “this company and its museum have been involved in the illicit trade in antiquities, and that scholars associated with it have participated in destructive practices with ancient artifacts that would be condemned by the international community of scholars and scientific conservators who are experts in this field.” It’s unclear if the program was created, but the items were returned.