Abstract
The University of Chicago's Oriental Institute returned a set of 300 ancient Iranian tablets, documents that provide details of the inner workings of the administration of the ancient Persian Empire, to the Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization, the national antiquities department, in the first return of loaned archaeological items there since the 1979 revolution. The 300 tablets, made of clay and impressed in cuneiform, record administrative details of the Persian heartland fromabout 500 B.C. They are among a group of tens of thousands of tablets and tablet fragments that were loaned to the University's Oriental Institute in 1937 to be studied. A group of 179 complete tablets were returned in 1948, and another group of more than 37,000 tablet fragments were returned in 1951.