A rare 2,000-year-old marble statue of a Greek goddess which was illegally trafficked has returned to Libya after a long-running repatriation case involving experts at the British Museum. The sculpture, taken from Cyrene in north eastern Libya, was seized by Border officials at Heathrow airport in London after being brought into the UK from Libya illegally by a dealer. It was finally returned last month.
The well-preserved marble statue, dating from the second century BC and probably depicting Persephone, would have been fixed to a tomb in a cemetery in the ancient Libyan city of Cyrene. She has snake bracelets carved into her wrists and is holding a small doll, making it, the museum said, “one of the rarest of the Cyrenaican funerary statues”.
Peter Higgs, a curator, recalled going to Heathrow and knowing straight away what it was and where it was from. “It is stunning,” he said. “It is a beautiful, three-quarter-length statue, very well preserved with just a few fingers missing. It is technically brilliant in the way it has been carved, with very sharp details, and the face is very well preserved considering many Greek statues have lost noses.”
Museum officials gave evidence for the prosecution in a court case in 2015 when the judge ruled that the sculpture was owned by “the state of Libya”. Experts at the BM confirmed that the statue was a “genuine archaeological artefact due to its distinct recognisable marble”, say officials from the Libyan embassy. “Since 2009 we have helped to repatriate over 2,300 antiquities, to Afghanistan, to Uzbekistan, and to Iraq,” says a BM statement.
The doll figure probably represents a keepsake taken into the afterlife, while the bracelets showing snakes are associated with death and rebirth. The freshness of the statue’s surface suggested it had been illegally excavated only recently, and it was probably exported during the upheavals of 2011 when the dictator Muammar Gaddafi was deposed and killed.
Hartwig Fischer, the director of the British Museum, said: “An important part of the museum’s work on cultural heritage involves our close partnership with law enforcement agencies concerned with illicit trafficking. This case is another good example of the benefits of all parties working together to combat looting and protect cultural heritage”.