In search of the Ethiopian Emperor's treasures (and hair)
After the quest for Da Vinci's secrets, whilst in Edinburgh, pop into the historic university which boasts a good selection of ancient manuscripts grabbed from countries around the world which it guards carefully. Whether they give any useful clues as to the location of the “real stuff” I cannot say, but certainly Edinburgh's Episcopal Church, until very recently, had a piece of the Ethiopian box where Moses was said to have kept the Ten Commandments—or a “tabot,” as it is known in the trade. Alas for us, the Reverend McLuckie (no less) decided to return it in 2004. So the quest leads to Waverley Station and a train to Kings Cross London.
It might seem odd that Ethiopia's treasures should be found in London, but it should not. After all, the British Museum is home to the collected booty of one of the world's largest empires. Still there are the famous Elgin Marbles, the Benin Bronzes, etc. etc.
And perhaps one of the most curious stories is that of the raid over 130 years ago by British troops on the unfortunate Emperor of Ethiopia. He had offended English public opinion by taking some British soldiers hostage whilst demanding a reply to his letter to the Queen of England. “Your Queen can give you orders to visit my enemies, and then to return to Massowah, but she cannot return a civil answer to my letter to her. You shall not leave till that answer comes,” the King had threatened the British discontentedly. When it came, the reply was not a letter, but “the battle of Magdala,” in which most of the King's army was massacred and the British troops went on a looting rampage. The King himself only avoided being captured by shooting himself with a silver pistol (ironically enough, a present from Queen Victoria). The thing about all this was that later several thousands of the best “objets trouvés” were auctioned to raise “prize money” for the troops. These in large part duly made their way back to Britain where they ended up in various venerable national collections.
So London's Ethiopian treasures include:
In 2005 the Ethiopians at least celebrated the return of a final section of a 200-year-old granite obelisk from Rome, but, the English might say, it's easy for the Italians to return things, they have lots of their own art. In England, the government rightly fears that once you start returning things to their rightful owner, you may soon have very little left. So, ever since the demands for the return of the 11 tabots in the British Museum, they have been moved out of the “ethnography store” at Hackney to a more glamorous location in the basement of the main British Museum building. The Art Newspaper retells what happened next. The tabots were carried
by a senior member of the Ethiopian Church in Britain and were covered during the transportation. Once inside the special room and alone, the priest placed the tabots, wrapped in a cloth, on a shield covered with conservation-quality [no less] purple velvet. No museum staff, not even curators or conservators, is permitted to enter the locked room.
As the paper notes, “it is of course somewhat pointless for a museum to hold objects that can never be seen by scholars, let alone by the general public.” “Delicate discussions,” it says, are underway to resolve the apparent paradox and find a long-term solution, probably involving renewable loans of the items to the Ethiopian Church, but even then, only the one in London.
How did the tufts of hair get there? King Theodore, as has been noted, shot himself rather than surrender to the British. The British love fox hunting, and it is tradition to take the tail of the fox after its kill. Here, deprived of the kill but finding the body of the king, according to Clements Markham, “they gave three cheers over it as if it had been a dead fox and began to pull and tear the clothes to pieces until it was nearly naked.” They then pulled out his hair in tufts as souvenirs. After a quick loot round, they loaded up no less than 15 elephants and 200 mules and left the palace.
The British Prime Minister, perhaps reflecting the Queen's disquiet, told Parliament that he “deeply regretted” that the articles were ever brought from Abyssinia, and could not “conceive” why they had been. The official record states that he “deeply lamented, for the sake of the country and for the sake of all concerned, that those articles, to us insignificant, though probably to the Abyssinians sacred and imposing symbols, [the tabots] or at least hallowed by association [the king's tufty hairs] were thought fit to be brought away by the British army.”
Nonetheless, few of them were returned.
There is a risk of catastrophe if the holy tabots are seen by non-believers. Nowadays this is less likely to happen, but poor attention to this rule earlier could well explain the various disasters of the 20th Century.