Tripoli, April 3 / BNA / The Libyan authorities said, Thursday, that they had received 9 ancient artifacts, including funerary stone heads, urns and pottery, which were returned by the United States after being smuggled from the North African country.
All of the pieces were illegally excavated and shipped to the United States, but they were identified by archaeologists working with the Manhattan Attorney General’s Office in New York and returned to the Libya Museum in Tripoli, Reuters reports.
“It was not stolen from museums and it was not registered with us,” said Mohamed Faraj Mohamed, head of the Libyan government’s Department of Antiquities.
“But because it has such a distinct style, the retrieval process was fairly simple,” he added.
The greatest pieces brought back to Libya were the four funerary heads, and marble busts including a statue whose sculptor added a thin stone veil that seemed to flow across the face.
The pottery contained patterned jars. All the pieces are now in the museum located in the center of Tripoli, the palace of King Idris, which was toppled in 1969, and which has been closed to the public since the 2011 uprising.
Once a major province of the Roman Empire and home to picturesque coastal ruins, Libya has a wealth of archaeological sites and its museums boast an array of ancient treasures.
However, during the years of chaos that followed the 2011 uprising, some of its museums and many sites were looted by treasure hunters who dug into the ground.
After large-scale antiquities were looted in the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and in Syria during the war after the 2011 uprising, militant groups raised money through the antiquities trade, resulting in greater police involvement.
“The process of returning cultural monuments is incredibly complex. It requires a huge partnership. In this case, there was a partnership with the US authorities,” said Antonia Marie de Meo, director of the United Nations Institute for Crime and Justice Research.