The bas-relief, which depicts a Persian guard, was seized in October by investigators for the Manhattan district attorney’s office from the Park Avenue Armory, where it was being offered for sale at an art fair, then a New York Supreme Court judge ordered it to be returned to Iran after more than 80 years in late July.
The bas-relief is an eight-inch-square piece of carved limestone that was part of a long line of soldiers depicted on a balustrade at the central building on the Persepolis site. It dates to the Achaemenid dynasty — or the First Persian Empire — and experts said it was made sometime between 510 and 330 BC.