Iran and the US working together?

As tensions grow between Iran and the US over Iran's nuclear ambitions, there is a topic that the two governments agree upon.

A 1997 bombing in Jerusalem that killed five US tourists and claimed by Hamas eventually initiated a lawsuit by American lawyers against the Iranian government, a backer of Palestinian Hamas. The plaintiffs were awarded $423.5 million in damages in a ruling that the Iranians ultimately ignored.

The leader of the plaintiff's group has decided to seek a collection of Persian tablets that were discovered in the 1930s during excavations of Persepolis and have been housed at the University of Chicago ever since for research purposes.

Some of the tablets have been returned to Tehran, as a show of good faith to the Islamic Republic's government in the hopes that the researchers can keep them a little longer, but calls for the tablets to be auctioned off by and for the winning litigants have increased. A federal court has put an injunction on the auctioning off of the tablets because of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 which protects foreign assets that aren't commercial.

The case is kind of at a standstill as of now, with both governments not really wanting to get involved, but agreeing that they'd like to keep the tablets from being auctioned.

The tablets have been an important resource in explaining the daily intricacies in the Persian government and daily lives of nobles and peasants alike. They've also been important in popping some myths that have been concocted about Persia, especially concerning they're views on slavery.