In an attempt to reestablish ties with Iranian scholars and archeologists, the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago is returning up to 300 ancient clay tablets that provide information of the daily life in the Persian empire. This is described as the first U.S. return of loaned Iranian artifacts since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The tablets, inscribed with cuneiform writing from about 500 B.C., were among tens of thousands of such documents discovered by Chicago archaeologists that were lent to the institute in 1937 for translation and study.