Noxious scholarship? Publishing unprovenanced cuneiform tablets from Iraq

Brodie, Neil (2023) Noxious scholarship? Publishing unprovenanced cuneiform tablets from Iraq. In Neil Brodie, Morag M. Kersel and Josephine M. Rasmussen (eds), Variant Scholarship: Ancient Texts in Modern Contexts. Leiden: Sidestone, 95-112.

Abstract

During the early twenty-first century thousands of illicitly-traded cuneiform tablets from Iraq have been studied and published by scholars specialising in the study of cuneiform writing, who call themselves Assyriologists. This chapter investigates how formal and informal communications among Assyriologists might have been fundamental to the acquisition and ongoing trade of a group of First Sealand Dynasty cuneiform tablets. It examines the possible commercial consequences of this scholarly engagement with illicitly-traded cuneiform tablets and considers whether in consequence Assyriological scholarship could be subject to Debra Satz’s moral condemnation of ‘noxious’.