Originally published at: Hobby Lobby Surrenders Ancient Gilgamesh Tablets To The US Government | Boing Boing
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I just hope they aren’t covered in craft glue and glitter now.
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They are probably happy to get rid of it. Most of what they smuggled in tended to be fake, but if this is real it is a problem. The story is thought to predate the bible/genesis, and includes a flood story many scholars believe is the source of the Noah story. Now they don’t have to do acrobatics at their bible museum to convince young earth creationists that the Gilgamesh flood was mythology but an identical event written about later really truly happened, and the resulting genocide was evidence of how much god loves us.
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Hobby Lobby smuggling an early copy of Gilgamesh. What a time to be alive.
Just another step toward the Snow Crash future. I’m assuming that, after much study, the Xtianists at Hobby Lobby couldn’t find the nam-shub they were looking for on the tablet.
From Teh Wiki:
The book presents the Sumerian language as the firmware programming language for the brainstem, which is supposedly functioning as the BIOS for the human brain. According to characters in the book, the goddess Asherah is the personification of a linguistic virus, similar to a computer virus. The god Enki created a counter-program which he called a nam-shub that caused all of humanity to speak different languages as a protection against Asherah (a re-interpretation of the ancient Near Eastern story of the Tower of Babel).
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So my question was: why would they be doing this in the first place? Are they intending to open some sort of museum?
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So the takeaway is that we know the “store bought over 5,500 relics”, and the government confiscated ONE?!?!
That’s the kind of preferential treatment / wrist-slap that encourages crime.
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And
https://www.startpage.com/do/search?q=hobby+lobby+artifacts&segment=startpage.brave
The entire page is links to stories about their artifact smuggling.
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Can I buy it now in the boing boing store?
I notice that the boing boing store has disabled comments. Where’s the fun in that? And won’t this result in boing boing store traffic falling off?
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my dear brother, archeologist and curator of near east antiquities at University of Pennsylvania, was one of the cuneiform experts called in to DC to verify some of these artifacts.
I find it all quite fascinating and I take particular pleasure knowing that BlobbyBlobby got busted! gotdamm tomb raider shit. fuck those guys!
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The perspective seems weird-- everything seems slightly out of alignment,
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Am I the only one that finds the references to “Hobby Lobby” being the criminal here curious? “Hobby Lobby” didn’t decide to purchase and later surrender artifacts, some Xtianist shitbag(s) associated with the corporation did.
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No, it’s literally the corporation that imported the stolen artifacts on behalf of the museum.
PS: the article contains this fun document attesting to the existence of a case called “United States vs approximately 450 ancient cuneiform tablets” …
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Came here to mention Snow Crash. Hobby Lobby are more or less the villains from that book in a really dumb way.
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Also on the upside, Hobby Lobby got swindled from fake Dead Sea Scroll excerpts.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/museum-of-the-bible-dead-sea-scrolls-forgeries
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Turns out when you really want to believe something you’re an easy mark for con artists giving you exactly what you want to be true…
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dude, they are one and the same.
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See, this is what I find really astounding about xtian pretzel logic (even though I grew up with it and shouldn’t be surprised at all). To them, this proves the flood story as a corroborating account, not another widespread cross-cultural myth.
Note to self- stop looking for logic where there is none!
To be fair, it’s probably the only authentic one. There’s no law against getting scammed.
Also, if anyone here hasn’t seen Don Verdean, I highly recommend it. It’s no masterpiece, but is all about these fake xtian relic scammers and the suckers who fund them.
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A bit confused why Christian fundamentalists would want the story of Gilgamesh - by its very existence it proves that the myth of Noah cannot be literally true and is just one of many flood myths.
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