Trundling Musso’s stolen obelisk back to its African home

Not many people know much, or indeed anything, about the civilisation of Aksum. A pity: it is one of the jewels in Africa’s crown and absolutely genuine too, unlike most of the phoney cultures made a fuss of during the decolonisation years. Aksum is a town about 400 miles north of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. Between the 1st and the 8th centuries ad it enjoyed great wealth derived from spices, gold, ivory, emeralds and selling slaves (mark the last point: no civilisation is innocent). Standing at the crossroads of the caravan routes between the basin of the Nile and the Red Sea, it enjoyed contact with imperial Rome and adopted some of its ideas.

The Roman emperors had admired the giant obelisks hewn by the craftsmen of the pharaohs from the living rock, and shipped several of them, with enormous difficulty, to Rome to adorn their squares. The kings of Aksum erected obelisks or stelae to mark their reigns, especially during the 3rd and 4th centuries, when the kingdom reached its apogee. About 200 of them survive. Six are of great size and interest, for they have carved on them representations of multistorey buildings. One, about 70 feet high, is still on its original site, upright. Four, including one originally well over 100 feet, have fallen down and bits lie scattered about, delightful for those who love ruins. The last and finest, made of basalt and about 90 feet high, was seized by Mussolini in 1937 as part of the booty of his conquest of Ethiopia and in revenge for the destruction of the Italian expeditionary force at Adowa by the forces of Menelik II, Negus of Ethiopia, in 1896. Musso, determined to recreate the Roman empire in flamboyance as well as conquest, had the obelisk pulled down and dismantled, piled on trucks and taken to the port of Massawa on the Red Sea, along 300 miles of roads specially constructed by Italian army engineers.