CLEVELAND, OHIO—The Cleveland Museum of Art has returned a tenth-century statue of Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god, to Cambodia. The 800-pound sandstone sculpture was purchased in good faith by the museum in 1982, but officials recently learned that the sculpture’s base matched a pedestal at the east gate of the Prasat Chen Temple at Cambodia’s Koh Ker archaeological site. The statue was probably looted from the temple during the Vietnam War and the Cambodian civil war. Excavations at the site uncovered the statue’s missing earring and other fragments. The Cleveland Museum of Art and the National Museum of Cambodia have now entered an agreement to facilitate joint projects. “I’m very optimistic that the conversations we have begun will result in cooperation of various kinds, and we are continuing to explore those possibilities,” William Griswold, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, told The Plain Dealer. “Our research revealed a very real likelihood that it was removed from a site enormously important to the kingdom of Cambodia during a terrible time and its return was completely consistent with the highest legal and fiduciary standards,” he said. To read in-depth about archaeology in Cambodia, see "A Storied Landscape."
