Metropolitan Museum Returning Two 10th Century Statues Looted from Cambodia

One of two “Kneeling Attendants” the Metropolitan Museum of Art is returning to Cambodia.

Breaking news from the New York Times:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has agreed to return to Cambodia two 10th-century Khmer statues that Cambodian officials had declared were looted from a jungle redoubt and given to the Met in stages more than 20 years ago.

On Friday the museum confirmed accounts from Cambodian officials that it intended to repatriate the statues, known as the “Kneeling Attendants,” life-size sandstone masterpieces that flanked a doorway in the Met’s Southeast Asian galleries.

No timetable has been set, but the museum told Cambodian officials in a letter last month that it hoped to send them as soon as “appropriate arrangements for transit can be mutually established.”

Thomas P. Campbell, the director of the Met, said the agreement — one of the more significant in a recent spate of often controversial cultural repatriations — followed new documentary research by the museum that corroborated Cambodian claims that the works had been improperly removed from their site at the Koh Ker temple complex.