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A 2,000-year-old bust of a Roman general will soon return home to Germany after a Texas-based antiques dealer discovered it under a table at a thrift store priced at $34.99 (£28.23), The Independent reports.

Antique dealer Laura Young told The Art Newspaper that she was looking for potential treasures when she spotted the bust in 2018 “on the floor, under a table,” at a Goodwill in Austin, Texas.

A Goodwill employee even helped her carry the bust to her car, Ms Young said, where it was strapped into her backseat with a seatbelt.

The bust, which she said “looked pretty dirty”, turned out to be more than 2,000 years old, however, and was thought to have been of Roman general Drusus Germanicus – and looted by an allied soldier in the Second World War.

That realisation only came after Ms Young tried to sell the ancient bust at Sotheby’s, a London auction house, which advised her it could not be sold legally in the US when theft is involved, she told the newspaper.

A Sotheby’s expert said the bust of Germanicus – the adopted son of Roman emperor Tiberius and father of Roman emperor Caligula – was dated as far back as the first century AD and was previously on display at a museum in Aschaffenburg, Germany.

The museum, which was known as the Pompejanum, was built by Bavarian King Ludwig in the 1840s to house artefacts and other objects but was badly damaged when Aschaffenburg was heavily bombed during the Second World War.