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Temple of Preah Vihear. (Explorer Cambodia) |
PREAH VIHEAR PROVINCE, Cambodia (AP) ― Rising out of the jungle on white pillars, the new Preah Vihear Museum’s largest building stands empty. But Cambodian officials hope that one day it will be the place where nine ancient statues depicting a dramatic battle scene are reunited from around the world.
They came a step closer to that goal last week, when Sotheby’s auction house in New York agreed to return one of the statues to Cambodia, ending a heated legal battle that began when the U.S. government filed a lawsuit last year at Cambodia’s initiative to press for its return.
The decision marks the latest progress in efforts to bring back together the nine figures that once formed a tableau in a tower of the 1,000-year-old Prasat Chen temple. The scene captured a famous duel in Hindu mythology in which the warrior Duryodhana is struck down by his cousin Bhima at the end of a bloody war of succession while seven attendants look on.
Experts say that looters hacked the life-sized sandstone figures off their bases during the country’s brutal civil war in the early 1970s. Some of the statues were apparently smuggled out of the country and eventually wound up in the hands of private collectors or in museums abroad, as did many statues from other temples that the Cambodian government now hopes to reclaim.
The footless figure of Duryodhana, valued at $2 million-$3 million, was placed in Sotheby’s auction catalog in 2011 after its former private Belgian owner’s widow gave it up for sale.
Discussions are now under way between the Cambodian government and the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, about the possibility of returning the statue of Bhima, which has been on display there for over 30 years.
“The spirits of the Khmer ancestors are not at peace when they see artifacts that were either looted or being commercialized, so we hope that others will follow the very good example of what Sotheby’s has done,” said Ek Tha, a government spokesman.
The figures of three onlookers to the duel are now in Cambodia, including two that were returned in June by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The remaining four are still missing.
The goal of the museum is eventually to recreate the scene as it stood for centuries in the Prasat Chen temple, one of many ruins within the sprawling Koh Ker complex, north of the country’s famous Angkor Wat temples.
Although repatriations of some Cambodian statues began in the 1990s, the high-profile Sotheby’s case has proved a catalyst for much of the recent momentum, said Anne Lemaistre, a UNESCO representative in Cambodia. The case “has been the red thread that has led us through an incredible scientific adventure,” she said.
A 2012 dig to gather evidence for that case unearthed the seven pedestals of the onlookers with some of the feet still attached, which archaeologists pointed to as evidence of pillaging, she said.
