TASHKENT - The Louvre museum in Paris will display dozens of artefacts from Uzbekistan that its experts helped restore, including a 2,000-year-old Buddha statue and a fragment of an 8th century Quran, the Uzbek government said on Friday.

A total of 70 restored artefacts will be shown in the Louvre between Nov. 23 and March 6, the state-run Culture and Arts Development Foundation said in a statement.

The Quran fragment, it said, had been stored for centuries in the village of Katta Langar and is one of the oldest copies of the Muslim holy book in existence.

(Reporting by Mukhammadsharif Mamatkulov; Writing by Olzhas Auyezov; Editing by Mark Porter)