MORE ON THOSE IRANIAN CUNEIFORM TABLETS: Reuters has a longish article that gives lots of new details, including information on the contents of the tablets.

Iran wants disputed clay tablets returned from US
Wed Jul 12, 2006 10:12am ET12

By Edmund Blair

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran said on Wednesday it wanted to use diplomacy and cultural channels to ensure ancient clay tablets at the center of a compensation case are returned from the United States but said it was also ready for a legal fight.

The 2,500-year-old Persian tablets, which have been studied for decades at the University of Chicago, give a unique insight into the workings of the Persian empire with cuneiform etchings of payments and rations made to priests, guards and workers.

[...]

The tablets record barley and other payments inside the Persian empire from 509 to 494 B.C., around the height of Persian power at the time of Darius the Great, he said. Such information is not found on royal texts carved in stone.

The tablets include records of payments between priests and guards of different religions, a unusual account of such cooperation. Seals also depict artistic scenes from the period.

[...]

Although priceless historical pieces, scholars say the tablets would have limited value in the art market.

UPDATE: The Los Angeles Times has an article too ("Antiquities Stuck in Legal Limbo"). Excerpt:

Over the years, researchers in Chicago and in Iran discovered that the tablets were records of administrative details, including "salary and wages of government employees and workers, child benefit to mothers with babies, [and] offerings to gods and temples," said archeologist Shahrokh Razmjou.

Even the condition of the items offers a nod to the past: Some of them were broken when the army of Alexander the Great set fire to Persepolis in 330 BC, during the last of the wars between ancient Greeks and Persians.

Standing at a table in her windowless office in the basement of the Iran National Museum in Tehran, chief archeologist Zahra Jafar-Mohammadi carefully pulled out from a small wooden box a yellowish clay tablet, one that had been returned to Tehran from the Chicago museums. (University officials say that between 1948 and 2004, two-thirds of the collection was sent back.)

Most of the tablets are small enough to fit into the palm of a person's hand. Many were broken, forcing scientists to sift through thousands of shards to piece the tablets back together.

She's still waiting to see the estimated 5,000 tablets and 10,000 clay fragments that remain in Illinois.

"Auctioning off these pieces would be a catastrophe," Jafar-Mohammadi said.

It would indeed. The Justice Department seems to be trying to find a diplomatic solution. I hope they succeed.