A rare pre-Incan funeral shroud was displayed on June 16 as part of the first lot of ancient Paracas textiles that Sweden is returning to Peru 80 years after they were taken by a diplomat.

The shroud measures 41 inches by 21 inches and 88 other textiles were donated to a museum in Gothenburg in the early 1930s by Swedish consul Sven Karell.

He had secreted them out of Peru after they were discovered in the Paracas Peninsula, according to AP.

Despite the fact that it is over 2,000 years old, "it is perfectly preserved," said Krzysztof Makowski, a University of Warsaw archaeologist who has studied the shroud as a professor at the Catholic University of Peru. "Across the world, the discoveries of textiles of this age are much rarer than any precious metal."

"If you wanted to find a Roman textile, you won't find anything because nothing was preserved," Makowski said, according to AP. "Textiles are very fragile. There are very few countries in the world that have conserved fabrics. Peru is one of them."

The Shroud of Gothenburg is "uniquely complex includes some 8- different color tones and subtones like blue, green, red, orange, and yellow. It is divided into 32 frames decorated with items resembling condors, frogs, cats, corn, cassava and human-like figures. 

Some of the researchers believe that the shroud could be a calendar related to the tracking of farming seasons, Jahl Dulanto, an archaeologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaigne who leads the Paracas investigation team at the Catholic University of Peru.

Dulanto said experts still don't understand how the shroud's creators attained the combination of sewing techniques and pigments.

The shroud and at least three other pieces were flown to Peru last week, thus fulfilling a friendly agreement reached with the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg in 2013.

The rest of the Paracas textiles will return to Peru over the next seven years.

Peruvian officials have been working to reclaim its cultural antiquities from other countries, according to AP.

In June, it found over 3,800 pre-Incan items held in Argentina. Back in 2011, Yale University returned 366 pieces from the Incan city of Machu Picchu that it had held for over a century.

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