Ethiopia asks Queen to give back treasure (Sunday Times - requires subscription outside U.K)
Peter Conradi and Justin Sparks
THE QUEEN is being asked to hand over manuscripts that have been kept at Windsor Castle since they were looted from Ethiopia by the British Army more than 130 years ago. The campaign for the return of the documents is being led by Professor Richard Pankhurst, whose grandmother Emmeline was the suffragette leader.
Pankhurst, who teaches at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, has written to the Queen pointing out that his home country is now capable of looking after its own treasures. He says the documents � dating from the 16th and 17th centuries and all richly illustrated � are �six of the finest Ethiopian religious manuscripts in existence�.
They are part of a treasure trove of documents and artefacts seized after the battle of Magdala in 1868.
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without ever saying what texts are in the manuscripts! I wonder if they even asked.
According to this allAfrica.com article, there are some 350 Ethiopic manuscripts in Britain which were taken after the battle of Maqdala. The contents of only one is described:
But by far the most valuable item is one of two copies of the Kebra Negast, or Glory of Kings, a 1,000-year-old history of the origins of Ethiopia's Solomonic line of kings, which is currently in possession of the British Library.
A number of very important ancient texts survive in full only in Ethiopic (e.g., 1 Enoch, Jubilees). Does anyone know if any biblical manuscripts or apocrypha or pseudepigrapha are among the Maqdala texts?
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