Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg Jr. has sent 59 antiquities back to Italy, Iraq and Indonesia after multi-year investigations by his office's Antiquities Trafficking Unit. The items were returned at separate ceremonies in New York this week and ranged from ancient Greek pottery and a marble fish plate to two Sumerian gypsum sculptures and two sacred Dayak skulls. The repatriations highlight a growing push by Manhattan prosecutors and foreign governments to track looted cultural property and get it home.
Dozens Traced Back To The Metropolitan Museum
The office said it repatriated 48 antiquities to Italy, with a collective value of more than $300,000, and that 45 of those pieces had been seized from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. According to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, the works entered U.S. collections through dealers including Robert Hecht, Jonathan Rosen and Fritz Burki and were identified during criminal investigations into trafficking networks.
Highlighted Objects: A Krater And A Fish Plate
Two standout pieces at the Italian handover were a terracotta psykter-column-krater attributed to the Troilos Painter and a marble fish plate from Magna Graecia, both formerly in the Met's collection until they were seized earlier this year. Details about those objects, including the krater’s reported restoration by Sandro Cimicchi and its consignment to Christie’s London, were set out by ArtDependence.
Iraq Handovers Included Millennia-Old Sumerian Sculptures
The office also repatriated nine antiquities to Iraq, with a combined value of nearly $300,000, and highlighted two Sumerian gypsum sculptures of a male and a female worshipper dating to Iraq’s Early Dynastic II period (about 2750–2600 B.C.E.). The Manhattan DA’s statement notes that both statues first appeared on the market in 2015 and that prosecutors secured a seizure warrant for them in June 2026. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office directed the investigations.
Indonesia Received Two Sacred Dayak Skulls
Indonesia’s share of the returns consisted of two carefully preserved human skulls from Borneo’s Dayak people, described as sacred heirlooms and guardians of community memory and valued at roughly $15,000. As ArtDependence reports, the skulls were seized by the office in 2024 and repatriated during a ceremony with the Indonesian consulate in New York.
Part Of A Broader Crackdown
Prosecutors and museum officials frame the latest handovers as one more step in a years-long campaign by Bragg’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit to dismantle international smuggling schemes and restore cultural property to its countries of origin. Earlier this year, more than 650 items were returned to India in a large April operation that underscored both the unit’s global reach and the huge volume of material moving through Western markets. The Art Newspaper provides additional context on that India repatriation.
Legal Context And Ongoing Cases
Bragg’s office says the Antiquities Trafficking Unit has secured convictions in multiple cultural property cases and is still pursuing extraditions of alleged traffickers as investigations continue. Coverage of earlier large-scale returns and the unit’s recovery totals, which reports say now run into the thousands of objects and hundreds of millions of dollars in estimated value, points to the legal and diplomatic follow-through that comes after each seizure. Business Standard and other outlets have documented those previous figures.
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