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.

The world’s oldest bridge is to be saved for future generations thanks to a pioneering project as part of the British Museum’s Iraq Emergency Heritage Management Training Scheme. The bridge at Tello, in the south of Iraq, was built in the third millennium BC and will be preserved by British Museum archaeologists and Iraqi heritage professionals who are being trained to protect ancient sites that have suffered damage at the hands of Daesh (or the so-called Islamic State). Working with the Iraq State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, it is hoped that restoring the 4,000-year-old bridge will be a potent symbol of a nation emerging from decades of war and could one day lead to the site welcoming tourists from around the globe to learn about Iraq’s rich heritage. The bridge will be restored in the latest phase of the successful Iraq Emergency Heritage Management Training Scheme, or simply ‘Iraq Scheme’, cre

Entire libraries have been devoted to cultures of the past, but no book, no matter how painstakingly researched, can convey the story of an ancient society quite as vividly as the objects and art its people left behind. “The tools, weapons, clothing, jewelry, implements and everyday wares of any given culture are, in the truest sense, a gift of living history for the generations that follow,” said Teresa Dodge, executive director of the specialist auction house Artemis Gallery. The company’s Thursday, April 5 Spring Variety Auction of Ancient & Ethnographic Art, which invites absentee, phone and Internet live bidding, is a virtual timeline of the most significant civilizations of the past 4,000 years. As with all of its sales, Artemis Gallery has organized the upcoming auction in a chronological manner, starting with Ancient Egypt and traveling through the centuries in an exploration of Greek, Roman, Near Easter

Museum Folkwang is presenting a retrospective on Swiss artist Hans Josephsohn (1920–2012), featuring 120 of his works. Josephsohn is one of the major sculptors of European Modernism, and throughout his life grappled almost exclusively with the human figure and its sculptural composition. This will be the largest Josephsohn exhibition ever held in Germany. In his work, Josephsohn concentrated on a few fundamental forms of the human physique: the head, the half figure, the standing figure, and the reclining figure. “Sculpture cannot do much,” he once said. Nevertheless, he strove throughout his life to capture human existence through the means of sculpture. The search for the correct form defined his work. The sculptor worked largely from models, always seeking the perfect balance for each work between figuration and abstraction. Some of his early works are like slender stelae, while others deliver more accu