Iraq Antiquities Find Sparks Controversy

Italian researchers in Iraq claim to have stumbled upon an important cache of ancient clay tablets in one of the world's oldest cities. But others dispute the claim, and Iraqi authorities say the scientists have been acting illegally.

No archaeologist has been given permission to do excavations since the U.S. invasion in March 2003 toppled Saddam Hussein. But last month, Italy's National Research Council announced that it had discovered some 500 rare tablets on the surface of Eridu, a desert site in southern Iraq. The team was reconnoitering artifacts and architecture for an online virtual museum project.

According to team member Giovanni Pettinato, an assyriologist at Rome's La Sapienza University, the tablets date from 2600 to 2100 B.C.E. and hold inscriptions featuring an unusually wide variety of literary, lexical, and historical content. He thinks they may have been part of a library.

But the find, which was widely publicized in recent weeks, has puzzled and outraged archaeologists in Iraq and abroad. Eridu was largely abandoned during the period in question, and Elizabeth Stone, an anthropologist at Stony Brook University in New York, says most real libraries were created much later than the dates the Italian team suggests. Stone was part of a U.S. team that inspected the site a month after the war began. The group did spot ancient bricks stamped with kings' names, she says, but such bricks are common and offer little historical information.