CAIRO—Battles over ancient artifacts have made quite a few headlines recently, but at least one is a happy story. Egypt’s antiquities department has announced that New York’s Metropolitan Museum is returning to the country a fragment of a pharoanic shrine that it bought from a collector expressly for that purpose.

Zahi Hawass, the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) declared that the return of the piece of red granite, known as a naos, was "great deed" and the first time that a museum has purchased an item solely to return it to the location of its creation. "It is also a kind gesture from the newly appointed Met director Thomas Campbell," he said.

Hawass, who has run the SCA since 2002, has been a vocal and aggressive advocate for Egypt in the archeological world in recent years, working to recover 5,000 objects that he says were plundered from Egyptian land and museums.

Read more at the Associated Press.