Ancient tablets trigger looting debate

At first glance, the ancient Babylonian tablets on view for the first time at a Jerusalem museum look like nothing more than pockmarked lumps of clay.

But the 2,500-year-old treasures from present-day Iraq have become part of a thorny archaeological debate over how to handle historically significant relics thought to have been dug up in the fog of war by Middle Eastern antiquities robbers.

Experts in cuneiform writing, one of the world's earliest scripts, say the collection of 110 cracker-sized clay tablets provides the earliest written evidence of the Biblical exile of the Judeans in what is now southern Iraq, offering new insight into a formative period of early Judaism.