This is not a recent discovery, but some recent news about an Assyrian inscription on a gold tablet discovered in 1913 (that some may not have heard of).  It is amazing how ancient this example is of using gold for preserving texts. My thanks to Jim Davila for bringing us all the latest and greatest news. The appearance of the small gold plate reminded me of the Orphic gold tablets that I wrote about a while back: see here and here and here and here.

VIA JIM DAVILA’S PALEOJUDAICA:

A GOLD TABLET inscribed with Assyrian cuneiform ended up in the estate of a Holocaust survivor and there is now a legal ruling that the the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Germany, from where it came, cannot reclaim it. The 13th-century BCE tablet was excavated at ancient Ashur early in the 20th century. Click on the link to see a photograph of this remarkable object. I’ve never seen a cuneiform tablet made of gold, although gold tablets from about 500 BCE inscribed with Phoenician and Etruscan have been recovered at Pyrgi (see here [JSTOR] and here).

The legal ruling of the New York court can be downloaded as a pdf file here.