BAGHDAD: Iraq unveiled on Sunday a 2,800-year-old stone tablet returned by Italy, as the war-ravaged country works to recover from abroad antiquities looted from its territory.

The tablet — whose text is written in cuneiform, the Babylonian alphabet — bears the insignia of Shalmaneser III, the Assyrian king who ruled the region of Nimrod, in present-day northern Iraq, from 858 to 823 BC.

The circumstances surrounding the tablet’s arrival in Italy remain unclear, but the Italian authorities handed it over to Iraqi President Abdul Latif Rashid during a visit to Bologna over the past week.

“I would like to thank the Italian officials for their efforts and cooperation in bringing back this piece,” Rashid said during a ceremony on Sunday at a Baghdad presidential palace to hand the artefact over to the national museum.

The tablet had arrived in the 1980s in Italy, where it was seized by police, said Laith Majid Hussein, director of Baghdad’s council of antiquities and heritage.

Iraqi Culture Minister Ahmed Fakak al-Badrani said the circumstances behind its discovery were unclear.

“Perhaps (it was found) during archaeological excavations or during work on the Mosul dam,” Iraq’s biggest built in the 1980s, he said.

He underlined the importance of the piece, “whose cuneiform text is complete”.

Modern Iraq’s territory is the cradle of the Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian civilisations, to which humanity owes writing and the first cities.

Published in Dawn, June 19th, 2023