Sculpture of Greek goddess suspected to have been illegally excavated during 2011 civil war An illegally trafficked, incredibly rare 2,000-year-old marble statue of a Greek goddess has been returned to Libya after a long-running repatriation case involving experts at the British Museum. The well-preserved marble statue, dating from the second century BC and probably depicting Persephone, would have been fixed to a tomb in a cemetery in the ancient Libyan city of Cyrene. She has snake bracelets carved into her wrists and is holding a small doll, making it, the museum said, “one of the rarest of the Cyrenaican funerary statues”. Continue reading...