North Carolina Museum Of Art

Federal prosecutors in New York disagreed with Sotheby’s claims. They launched a forfeiture action, which allows the federal government to seize property it believes is linked to illegal activity, and demanded that the public sale house relinquish the Duryodhana so it could be returned to Cambodia. The prosecutors in the end claimed it had been looted in the early Nineteen Seventies and would have been protected by Cambodian legislation even before that date. After being taken out of the country, they said, the Duryodhana and its counterpart, the Norton Simon’s Bhima, had been “obtained by a well-known collector of Khmer antiquities” who knew they’d been stolen from Koh Ker. “The collector then attempted to sell on the worldwide art market,” consigning it to a British auction home, which in the end discovered the Belgian buyer. They loaded the artifacts onto oxcarts, straining to lift the …