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. The two statues were removed from display after the Met learned they were stolen, local media reported.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A pair of rare idols stolen from Nepal three decades ago were returned to the country Wednesday by New York’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-publications"],"yoast_head":"\n