The mosaic of Saint Mark, dating back to the 6th century AD., has been repatriated to Cyprus from the Netherlands. The repatriation was made possible through the coordinated actions of all involved authorities. More

Kuwaiti authorities have handed over to Egypt the lid of a rare antique coffin that had been smuggled into the Gulf state last March, according to KUNA. The vintage casket lid was given to the Egyptian embassy after Kuwait’s National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters completed a probe into how the relic was smuggled into the country. The lid is believed to have belonged to a sarcophagus, a decorative coffin in which ancient Egyptians buried their dead. More

An ancient marble engraved column of Attica style was repatriated to Greece. The column dates back to 340 BC. and comes from an ancient cemetery in Attica.
The Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports using information from the prosecution authorities and in cooperation with the judicial authorities, took all the necessary actions for its claim. The column was handed over by the auction house to the London Metropolitan Police in order to be returned to Greece.
The column was delivered to the Epigraphical Museum. More

US government official returned archaeological objects to Libyan officials, a collection of the pottery artefacts originated from the ancient city of Germa. The collection has been acquired in the 1960s by Mr Howard Meadows who worked for US Dept. of State in Libya.

The objects were received by Libyan Ambassador to the United States who expressed her profound appreciation and gratitude to the US Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security for their cooperation. More

A joint effort between the Mexican Foreign Ministry and the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) allowed Mexico to recover two 3,000-year-old archaeological pieces, explained María Villarreal, National Coordinator of Legal Affairs at INAH, to the Notimex Agency.

Ms. Villarreal said the diplomatic and judicial efforts to recover this Olmec heritage took 10 years. The pieces have already re-entered the country. She also highlighted the work of attorney Robert Kugler, who was in charge of the legal process. 

Rupert Gebhard, Director of the Museum of State Collections of Antiquities of Munich, presented the pieces to Villareal and the Mexican Ambassador to Germany, H.E. Rogelio Granguillhome. More

Following an investigation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE), Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), New York’s Cultural Property, Arts and Antiquities (CPAA) group, in coordination with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office (DANY), three marble statues originally excavated from the Temple of Eshmun in Lebanon were repatriated to their home country. The Consul General of Lebanon in New York accepted the return of the artifacts on behalf of Lebanon. More

Guatemala successfully repatriated 18 pre-Columbian archaeological objects, which were illegally exported from the country in the 60s and located in Germany, Italy and Switzerland. More

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., announced the return of a collection of ancient artifacts to the Italian Republic during a ceremony. More

The Republic of Korea returned 11 dinosaur fossils that were smuggled into the country from Mongolia.
The fossils include those of Tarbosaurus Bataar, a large carnivorous dinosaur whose remains are found only in Mongolia. The Supreme Prosecutors’ Office held a ceremony on 7 April to return the fossils, which were illegally brought into the country in 2014. More

A stolen Etruscan vessel will be returned to Italy thanks in part to the efforts of a hunter of looted antiquities.

Last month, Christos Tsirogiannis, a Greek-born researcher who has spent more than a decade poring over auction and antiquities catalogs trying to identify stolen Greek and Roman artifacts, spotted an Etruscan amphora for sale at a Midtown Manhattan gallery.

Mr. Tsirogiannis, of the Scottish Center for Crime and Justice Research in Glasgow, combed through an archive of 13,000 photos and documents seized in 2002 from an Italian antiquities dealer, Gianfranco Becchina, who was convicted in 2011 of trafficking in looted objects. He spotted several photos of the very same vase.  More

Two valuable paintings of former Dutch masters, despoiled by the Nazis in the late 1930s, were returned to the beneficiaries of a German Jewish art dealer exiled to Canada.

The paintings, "Ships in Distress on a Stormy Sea," by the marine artist Jan Porcellis (1584-1632), and "Landscape with Goats" by the animal painter Willem Buytewech the Younger (1625-1670), were recovered from an auction in Germany, which facilitated their restitution.

They were presented to the Max-Stern Foundation and its three beneficiary institutions, Concordia and McGill universities in Montreal and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. More

Germany returned to the Republic of Iraq a Sumerian clay cuneiform tablet on 14 January 2016. It dates from 2049 B.C. and records the distribution of flour to the crew of a ship. The tablet was offered in an online auction, in violation of the ban on trade with Iraqi cultural property in the EU, and seized by a criminal police office in the State of Schleswig-Holstein. More

The President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz) handed over a 2,600 years old clay brick, with an inscription of the Babylonian King Nebukadnezar, to his Excellency the ambassador of the Republic of Iraq in Berlin. This object had been illegally removed from Iraq in 1975 by an individual, who had recently donated it to the Foundation.

The Swiss Federal Office of Culture returned to the Egyptian Embassy in Bern, a batch of 32 ancient cultural objects, dating from the Pharaonic and Roman periods. Four of the returned items are extremely rare and of remarkable aesthetic quality: the bust of a king wearing a crown, a fragmented stele in honour of  King Siptah depicting the patron goddess of Thebes from the era of the New Kingdom (approx. 1500-1000 B.C.), and two architectural fragments depicting scenes of worship dating back to the Roman period (approx. 753 B.C. to 476 A.D.).
More information (available only in French)

The Archaeology Museum in Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second biggest town, recovered in April 2015 a Roman Thracian silver mask and helmet, stolen in 1995 following an armed robbery. Following a successful investigation led by the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office in Bulgaria, the precious artifact was returned to the museum. The mask and helmet date back to 1st century AD, and belonged to a Thracian aristocrat from ancient Philipopolis (nowadays Plovdiv) in whose burial mound it was discovered in the early 20th century.

Between 2013 and 2015, Cambodia obtained the return of six of the nine statues of great cultural heritage significance, which were looted from Prasat Chen, Koh Ker and had been located abroad. UNESCO acted as a facilitator in the discussions. More information

During the visit of German State President Joachim Gauck to Peru an ancient ritual knife (“Tumi”) was handed over to the Government of Peru on 20 March 2015. The knife is around 800 years old and forms part of the rich cultural heritage of Peru. Probably it had been excavated illegally in the Lambayeque region. German authorities seized it in Berlin in 2013, where it had been offered for sale by an auction house.

On 22 January, the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum in Mainz (RGZM) handed over to Italy a collection of grave goods, dating back to the 5th millennium BC. The outstanding complex with a precious jadeite axe head sheds light on an early European elite, maintaining long distance relations between societies in Italy, Germany, Luxembourg, France and the British Isles. The seven artifacts were looted from a tomb near Laterza in Puglia, acquired by the RGZM on the art market in 1986 and now returned to the Soprintendenza per I Beni Archeologici della Puglia, which already has plans for an exhibition.

On 6 June, the state of Baden-Württemberg handed over two objects from the Cycladic culture - a marble figurine dating from 2700-2300 BC and a pan dating from 2700-2400 BC - to Greece. Both objects had been acquired by the Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe in the 1970s and were returned in the spirit of the 1970 UNESCO Convention.

An expertise conducted under the responsibility of the Ministry of Culture and Communication and the National Museum of Natural History of France made possible to determine that this statue seized in 2012 is a cultural object of the Nok civilization. This civilization appears in Nigeria in 1500 BC. and extinct at the end of the first millennium BC. J.-C., at the confluence of the Niger river and the Benue (center of Nigeria). This is a very advanced civilization, both in terms of its social organization and its refinement, at a time when the rest of Southern Africa entered the Neolithic era. Nok culture is considered to be the oldest terracotta producer in sub-Saharan Africa.

The statue was stored at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, which took care of it gracefully. It was handed over by the President of the French Republic to Nigeria on the occasion of his travel on 27 February 2014.

Thirteen ancient artifacts have been returned to Iraq, among them at least one object stolen from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad in 2003.

Among the objects seized by German law enforcement authorities were eight cylinder seals of up to 5000 years of age as well as several sculptures.

Respecting the instructions left in the will of a private individual, a group of heirs has conveyed a tablet of cuneiform script, that presumably originated from the Nimrod palace, to the Embassy of the Republic of Iraq, in Berlin.

These 6 objects were seized in 2010 and 2011. An expertise conducted under the responsibility of the Ministry of Culture and Communication and the National Museum of Natural History of France, made possible to determine precisely the origins of these six statues dated from the Neolithic and the 11th-14th centuries. They come partly from the collection of the Esi Museum (State of Kwara) and are inscribed on the ICOM Red List.

These works were handed on 14 July 2013 by Mr. Jacques de Labriolle, French Ambassador to Nigeria, to Mr. Yusuf Abdallah Usman, Director General of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments.