The Economist 08 July 99

IT TOOK 15 elephants and 200 mules to carry off the loot from Ethiopia's old capital, Magdala. The brutal sacking of the mountain-top city in 1868, Britain's revenge on Emperor Tewodros for taking the British consul and a few other Europeans hostage, razed the city to the ground.

The hostages were released unharmed but the battle turned into a massacre and treasure hunt. Tewodros committed suicide and British soldiers stripped his body naked for souvenirs. They carted off his library and the treasures from a Coptic Christian church nearby. For £4, Richard Holmes, the British army's "archaeologist", acquired the crown of the Abun, the head of the Ethiopian church, and a solid gold chalice from a soldier who had looted them.

The booty was collected and auctioned off near Magdala. Holmes bought 350 illuminated bibles and manuscripts for the British Museum. Others books went to the royal library at Windsor and libraries at Oxford and Cambridge. They are still there, though odd treasures have been returned-usually the less valuable ones-as gestures, whenever the British needed to court Ethiopia. An old European painting of Jesus Christ, believed to be by a Flemish master, which had been treated as Ethiopia's most sacred icon for centuries, was supposed to go to Queen Victoria, but was stolen en route by Holmes. In 1905, a picture of the painting was shown in the Burlington Magazine, but it disappeared soon afterwards and has never been found.

A new society, with academics among its members, has recently been formed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital, to ask formally for the return of all Ethiopian property stolen by the British at Magdala, and by the Italians nearly 70 years later when Mussolini's army invaded Ethiopia and carried off truck-loads of booty to display in Rome. The Italians took a fourth-century obelisk from Aksum, the centre of Ethiopian Christianity, and dozens of other monuments, ecclesiastical crosses and crowns, manuscripts and paintings. They also seized an aeroplane built in Ethiopia for Emperor Haile Selassie by German engineers in 1935. This is now in the Italian Aviation Museum.

Although the peace treaty between Ethiopia and Italy at the end of the second world war specified that Italy should return all property looted from Ethiopia, it was only after much pressure that the Italians agreed to return it. Some loot seems to have been lost at the end of the war. Only in 1997 did Italy agreed to return the obelisk that has been standing outside the Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome. Its return has now been delayed by another war, that between Ethiopia and Eritrea.

If Britain and Italy do eventually agree to return all or some of the booty they seized, who should they return it to? Tewodros was himself a great looter of cultural property. Most of his library had been seized from monasteries in Gondar in western Ethiopia, after his conquests there a few years earlier. If the treasures are returned to Addis Ababa, other cities may stake their claim.