The Cleveland Museum of Art will return a rare ancient icon to Libya
While excavating an ancient Greek palace in eastern Libya in the 1930s, an archaeologist unearthed a large terracotta vase, looked inside, and noticed something unexpected: a 2,200-year-old sculpture of a bearded man carved from basalt, a dark volcanic stone.The half-meter-tall antiquity, most likely carved during the Ptolemaic dynasty of ancient Egypt, was a rare find. Known as a male figure walking forward, it is one of only 33 similar statues known, Egyptologists say.But it wasn't long before thieves took possession of the bearded figure and took her on an illicit odyssey that landed her, in 1991, at the Cleveland Museum of Art.On Wednesday, after curators examined extensive evidence of the object's theft from Libya, including photos displayed in the 1940s at a small museum nea...