The Times Editorial 23 November 1998

On April 13, 1868, the bizarre plans of Emperor Theodore II of Abyssinia lay in tatters. His efforts to build a bulwark against Islam had been blocked by Queen Victoria, who had failed to reply to his proposals of marriage. When he had taken British hostages in order to attract her attention, the Queen had sent an army instead of a ring. Bebattled in his Magdala fortress, defeated, deranged and alone, he shot himself with a pistol, a gift from his inamorata.

Two days later the treasures of the Abyssinian Church and Crown were laid out on the hillside and auctioned off to reward the victors. It is thought that most of those manuscripts and antiquities are now in the hands of British museums. And Addis Ababa wants them back.

Booty has been a principal perk of war for as long as war has existed. Roman legionaries carried axes and chains to remove statues, while Wellington's soldiers packed pliers to pull the teeth of the dead. First World War Tommies did a brisk business in German helmets and belt buckles. State treasures have always been fair game.

The Koh-i-noor (or Mountain of Light) diamond was looted from Delhi by a Shah of Iran, surrendered to Sikhs by a refugee claimant to the Afghan throne, and seized by the Honourable East India Company on its annexation of the Punjab in 1849. Given to Queen Victoria, it is now the central stone in the Queen's State Crown. And the four horses of St Mark's in Venice, a durable symbol of Venetian independence removed by Napoleon in 1797, were Venetian booty from the sack of Byzantium in 1204.

It is by no means certain that Theodore did not amass his own collection by plunder from recalcitrant Abyssinian potentates.

Every museum in the country is under pressure to return items to their countries of origin. Many fear that exhibiting certain artefacts will simply remind aggrieved descendants of where they lie.

The long-running row over the Elgin Marbles, though unique in many respects, s not the only quarrel over ownership of the human past. China is making noises about the early Buddhist artefacts removed by Aurel Stein from Central Asia, while only last week Glasgow council decided to return a Ghost Dance shirt, a relic of the Wounded Knee massacre, to the Sioux of South Dakota.

The problem is a global one. The treasures Schliemann excavated from Troy disappeared from Berlin in 1945, only to reappear at the Hermitage in St Petersburg. Meanwhile, art collections all over the world are holding their breath, hoping courts will not force them to surrender legitimately purchased paintings confiscated by the Nazis from private collections.

Even the most scrupulous museums have obtained their collections from any number of sources. Every artefact will have been a trophy of war, bought for a derisory sum, or simply stolen, at some stage in its history.

The tragedy of Magdala is not that the people of Ethiopia have been denied their heritage - a trauma common to peoples all over the world - but that these treasures have, by and large, been hidden from the public for so long.

If the British institutions which hold the treasures of Magdala wish to retain them, they must put them on view. Ethiopia has too long and interesting a history for its glories to remain hidden from public view.