The Smuggled Antiquities Case and Thousands of Returns

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Hobby Lobby was fined 3 million dollars by United States federal authorities in 2017 over smuggled Iraqi antiquities acquired for the Museum of the Bible, and more than 17,000 looted or undocumented artifacts were returned to Iraq and Egypt between 2018 and 2021 as a result of the settlement and the customs investigation that produced it. Among the returned items was a cuneiform fragment of the Gilgamesh epic, purchased at auction and later forfeited as looted material, one of the case's most widely reported single artifacts and a symbol of the wider collection's disputed origins.

The finding and the civil penalty attach to Hobby Lobby as a corporate entity rather than to any individual, and the matter was resolved by a 2017 settlement, a forfeiture of the disputed items, and the multi-year process of physically returning them to Iraqi and Egyptian custody. The episode stands as a well documented case of a major religious collecting institution confronting, under legal and public pressure rather than by its own early initiative, its own acquisitions practices in the years before the museum ever opened to visitors.