Cambodia Celebrates Return of 70 Ancient Artifacts

Cambodia’s prime minister led a celebration of the return of dozens of precious artifacts from museums and private collectors abroad, and said his government will continue working to bring more home.

Hun Manet , who became prime minister last year when he succeeded his long-serving father Hun Sen, said the 70 returned statues symbolically reunited the Cambodian people with their ancestral souls. 

Many, if not all, the pieces were looted during a long period of civil war and instability while Cambodia was ruled by the brutal communist Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s.

Cambodia has benefited from a trend in recent decades that has seen the repatriation of art and archaeological treasures taken from their homelands. These include ancient Asian artworks as well as pieces lost or stolen in turmoil in places such as Syria, Iraq and Nazi-occupied Europe.

“A total of 70 Khmer cultural objects have been returned through a range of different processes, including voluntary returns, negotiations, seizures and legal proceedings, from different collections such as from the Lindemann family, Jim Clark, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and other private collectors in the United States,” the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts said in a statement.

The statement said the returned items include important Hindu and Buddhist masterpieces from the 9th-to-14th-century Angkor period and earlier, “especially priceless stone statues such as a mythical warrior from the Hindu epic Mahabharata, statues of Shiva and Parvati, and the statue of Ardhanarishvara from the ancient capital of Koh Ker.”

From 1996 until last month, 1,098 artifacts had been returned to Cambodia, 571 from private collections and 527 from foreign institutions and governments.

The 70 items displayed included 14 that arrived from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in early July; the remainder, from private collectors, arrived in late July.