Three months after trustees at the British Museum were sent a letter requesting the return of the Museum’s collection of sacred Tabots to Ethiopia, the signatories of this letter have still to receive a reply.

Today, a follow up letter sent to George Osborne, presses the Museum’s new Chairman to make use of this season of goodwill and reach a formal decision by the end of January 2022 to restore the Tabots to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

Unlike other appeals to repatriate looted objects from the Museum’s collection, the return of these eleven sacred altar tablets known as Tabots will comply rather than breach the British Museum’s governing Act. Acting for The Scheherazade Foundation, organiser of both letters, a legal opinion written by Samantha Knights QC of Matrix Chambers made clear that Section 5 of the British Museum Act allows for the return of objects deemed by the trustees to be ‘unfit to be retained’ and no longer relevant to the Museum’s purpose.

Perhaps no other group of objects in the British Museum meets these stringent requirements.

Section 3 of the same governing Act makes it a duty of the trustees to make objects in the collection available for inspection. However, since entering the Museum (eight of the Tabots were acquired in 1868, directly after the looting that took place at the Battle of Maqdala), the Tabots have never been placed on public display – and never will. No student, curator or even trustee is ever permitted to view them and they cannot be photographed.

Never has a group of objects been so irrelevant to the Museum’s purpose, yet appeals for their return continue to meet with silence.

The Museum readily acknowledges the sanctity of these objects to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, where they are used to sanctify and consecrate a church building. This is why the Museum can never claim that conditions for their future display and study will ever change. But it's also why appeals for their return cannot be so lightly dismissed.

The Foundation’s first letter was sent to trustees in September this year and was signed by former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey, together with other leading members of the House of Lords, the former British Ambassador to Ethiopia Sir Harold Walker and other high profile British supporters of the campaign. It coincided with the appointment of George Osborne as the new Chairman of the Board.

In the absence of any response by the Museum’s trustees, the second letter appeals to Osborne to use this time to comply with the Act and return the Tabots to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

“What better time of year and what better way to signal the beginning of his role as Chairman of the British Museum could there be for George Osborne than to ask the trustees to authorise the return of these precious religious objects,” says Tahir Shah, CEO of the Scheherazade Foundation.

“We hope that in the spirit of the season and, as our letter says, in the spirit of building bridges between Britain and Ethiopia, that Mr Osborne will agree to the restoration of the Tabots to the country where they belong.”

Photo: George Osborne

Courtesy of Flickr