CAMBODIA, December 12, 2017 (Le Point, translated from French): A set of Angkor gold jewelry was returned to Cambodia on Saturday with a procession through Phnom Penh held for the occasion, decades after their looting from a famous temple of the ancient city. The 10-piece collection, consisting of a crown, earrings, bracelets and chest ornaments, was stolen from the Angkor Wat Temple in Cambodia during the 1970s civil war and reappeared in an online catalog by a London art dealer in 2016. These objects probably date from the Khmer Empire, a once powerful dynasty that extended over much of Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and modern-day Laos between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. Once the objects were found in Britain, Cambodia lobbied for their return. Specialists spent more than a year inspecting them to ensure their authenticity.
Jonathan Tucker, the London-based Asian art dealer, agreed in April to return the jewelry, which now have to be evaluated by experts in Cambodia. The pieces will join a multitude of other stolen antiquities stolen returned back home in recent years. Many of these were on display in Western museums or offered by art dealers. Last year, an American museum sent to Cambodia a sandstone sculpture of the 10th century Hindu God Rama, which was missing its head, arms and feet. It had been stolen in the 1970s. In 2015, a statue of the Hindu God Hanuman, which had been looted in the same temple as Rama’s, was returned by the Cleveland Museum of Art.