For the Guardian I wrote a story about efforts by U.S. terrorism victims to seize ancient Persian artifacts to satisfy default judgments for hundreds of millions of dollars against the government of Iran. Read that here.
While the judgments have been discussed in the news at length, they were brought to the fore again by reports in Iranian state media that Iran's Ministry of Culture refused a loan request from the National Gallery of Art for a Gauguin painting. The National Gallery of Art neither confirmed nor denied the story, expressing that the museum could not comment on future exhibition planning.
What is known is that a judgment to seize the Persepolis Fortification Archive—a collection of rote administrative clay tablets that provide an exceedingly rare glimpse into the daily goings-on in Persepolis under Darius, Xerxes, and their successive Achaemenid Empire rulers—can do disastrous harm to U.S.–Iranian relations. Which are, I'll grant you, not all that warm. But they show signs of improving, with President Obama's holiday message and President Ahmadinejad's motions on behalf of Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi being examples of diplomatic overtures that would be unthinkable a year ago. Dividing and auctioning the Achaemenid tablets and other Persian artifacts would be a bad thing for improving relations, but also just a bad thing for world history.
It's tempting to pose that it's the judgments, not the fallout within the sphere of cultural lending, that pose the real block to relations. But the categorization of lending as a commercial transaction between sovereign nations is a new and mighty strained legal reading. Read on here.
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