Historic artefact saved from eBay sale

A 4,000-year-old clay tablet, probably smuggled illegally from Iraq, was saved from being sold on eBay for a few hundred dollars by an alert scientist.

It was taken from the website just minutes before the close of the online auction after a German archaeologist spotted it.

Criminal proceedings have been launched against the seller, identified only as a resident of Zurich.

The archaeologist saw the tablet bearing wedge-shaped cuneiform script on the Swiss version of the site.

He alerted German authorities, who passed the tip onto their Swiss counterparts.

EBay stopped the auction “a few minutes before the end” of its bidding deadline, The offering price listed on eBay was between $360 and $430. It was not clear if any bids had been made.

Zurich police confiscated the small tablet – about the size of a business card - from a storage facility.

The tablet, which dates from around 2000 BC, was “with great probability” smuggled out of Iraq illegally, government officials said in a statement.

Cuneiform tablets were used throughout the Middle East and ancient Persia during the last three millennia for recording everything from great deeds of leaders to routine correspondence and bookkeeping.

They are included on the International Council of Museums’ “red list” of especially endangered Iraqi cultural objects.

The Iraqi National Library is believed to have lost numerous objects after it was burned and looted following the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The National Museum also was looted following the fall of Baghdad.