As reported by CNN, and announced by the US State Department a 2,700 year-old Persian artifact has been returned to Iran.  In a tweet the US State Department announced the return of a silver chalice, the ancient Persian artifact to its homeland. The ceremonial drinking vessel or rhyton was confiscated in a U.S. customs warehouse many years ago. The chalice had been in New York since 2003, when an art dealer smuggled it into the country from Iran.  Customs officials have long wanted to return the rhyton to Iran, according to a New York Post report. But decades of bad diplomatic relations between Tehran and Washington made it impossible.

The decision to return the artifact came after President Obama called the Iranian President, Hassan Rouhani, as he was on his way to the airport in NYC and returning to Iran after the UN meetings.  The rhyton, which takes the shape of a mythical beast with the body of a lion and the head of a bird of prey, was fashioned in the Achaemenid era, the early Persian Empire, around 700 BC. The U.S. officials handed it off directly to the Iranian delegation, who BBC reports have already met with officials from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art about potential exhibitions of Iranian artifacts.  It is still not clear if Iran will ever put more restrictive measures in place in order to stop the smuggling of Persian artifacts out of Iran.