ARTDAILY
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| An 11th-century statue of the deity Shiva, known as the Uma Maheshwor idol, that was returned to Nepal from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, is pictured in its delivery crate at the Department of Archaeology in Kathmandu on April 4, 2018. Gopen RAI / AFP. |
KATHMANDU (AFP).- A pair of rare idols stolen from Nepal three decades ago were returned to the country Wednesday by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The two statues -- one of Buddha and the other of the Hindu god Shiva and his wife Parvati -- were stolen in the 1980s when rampant looting saw many important artifacts whisked out of Nepal and into the hands of private collectors. "The government was unaware of the whereabouts of the statues until historian Lain Singh Bangdel mentioned (in a book) that the statues were on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York," Shyam Sundar Rajbanshi of Nepal's Department of Archaeology told AFP. The 11th-century Shiva statue, known as the Uma Maheshwor idol, was given to the Met in 1983 while the Buddha -- estimated to be around 700 years old -- was donated by a private collector in 2015. [
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| A 700-year-old standing statue of the Buddha, that was returned to Nepal from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, is pictured in its delivery crate at the Department of Archaeology in Kathmandu on April 4, 2018. A pair of rare idols stolen from Nepal three decades ago were returned to the country April 4 by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The two statues -- one of the Buddha and the other of the Hindu god Shiva and his wife Parvati -- were stolen from Nepal in the 1980s when rampant looting saw many important artifacts whisked out of the country and into the hand of private collectors. Gopen RAI / AFP. |
