Stein described the tablets as providing "the first chance to hear the Persians speaking of their own empire". Charles Jones, Research Associate and Librarian at the Oriental Institute and tablet expert, compared them to "credit card receipts". Most current knowledge about the ancient Persian empire comes from the accounts of others, most famously the Greek storyteller Herodotus. Stein added: "It's valuable because it's a group of tablets, thousands of them from the same archive. It's like the same filing cabinet. They're very, very valuable scientifically." The Oriental Institute had been returning them to Iran in small batches. Since the 1930s, the Institute had returned several hundred tablets and fragments to Iran and were preparing another shipment when the legal action began. An appeals court later overturned the order, and in 2018, the United States Supreme Court affirmed the subsequent ruling that the collection cannot be taken from the Oriental Institute to satisfy the judgement.