The 3,500-year-old clay tablet displays episodes from the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest surviving literary works in the world. In the Epic, the hero overcomes great odds to defeat strong enemies, some with the help of a fellow hero named Enkidu. The episodes on the 6-inch-by-5-inch tablet are written in cuneiform, in the Akkadian language. The tablet came to light during operations amid the ruins of the library of the famed Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. One of the three columns of script tells of five dreams experienced by the hero, Gilgamesh; thus it was dubbed the Dream Tablet.

The tablet was one of more than 17,000 artifacts that Iraq has recovered from Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States in recent months. Looters stole the tablet from an Iraqi museum during Gulf War in 1991, and the ancient artifact passed through a number of owners in a handful of countries, most recently the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. American authorities seized the tablet from that museum in 2019 and gave it back to Iraq earlier this year. Baghdad's National Museum now has the tablet on display.