The Prince and the Plunder: How Britain took one small boy and hundreds of treasures from Ethiopia

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The Prince and the Plunder: How Britain took one small boy and hundreds of treasures from Ethiopia

The Prince and the Plunder: How Britain took one small boy and hundreds of treasures from Ethiopia

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One of six ecclesiastical manuscripts from Maqdala, currently part of the Queen of England’s personal collection in the Royal Library in Windsor Castle.

the horn has a cover inscribed: “THE DRINKING HORN OF KING THEODORE’S WAS TAKEN FROM MAGDALA by Lieut C M Davidson ADJUTANT 4TH KINGS OWN ROYAL REGIMENT 13th April 1868”. There is a shied on the front inscribed: “TO Lieut Colonel Edmond A Shuldham OF COOLKELURE FROM HIS FRIEND Capt C M Davidson”. In just two days his father’s empire had been emphatically destroyed, and Alamayu was surrounded by enemies - British and other Ethiopians opposed to Tewodros, as his own Grandfather had been. Her reaction was fairly typical - even though she was sympathetic and friendly, she was also intensely interested in his physical differences to other white Europeans. She wanted to slot him into the racial hierarchy that dominated British thinking at that time: how far down the scale should he go? Late Night Live - Separate stories podcast: The Prince and the Plunder – a tragic tale of colonial pillage Each volume includes a line identifying it as the property of the Church of Madhane Alam at Magdala. Thay are all written in the ancient Ethiopian language of Geez. All but one are described in the Royal Library catalogue as “profusely illustrated”.Listed in the Inventory of the oriental manuscripts of the Library of the University of Leiden – part 2: manuscripts Or. 1001-Or. 2000 Remarkably Alamayu seems to have remained even tempered and open hearted throughout his short life. Lootany

Prof Richard Pankhurst, AFROMET vice chair, described the six illuminated books as “six of the finest Ethiopian religious manuscripts in existence”. He added: “These were specially selected for Queen Victoria, and are therefore, from the artistic point of view, virtually without equal anywhere in the world.” Mr Franks has the honour to report that two cases have been received from the India Office, containing various fragments of marble excavated by the British troops in Abyssinia. They appear to have been chiefly found amid the ruins of a church at Adulis, near Annesley Bay, a view of which has been published in the ‘Illustrated London News’ for September 5, 1868. The British Museum database entry has a picture and reads: “Copper alloy coin. (whole) Head and shoulders bust right, in circle. Area inside circle gilt. Cross at top. (reverse) Head and shoulders bust right, flanked by two wheat-stalks. Cross at top. (obverse).”Tewodoros shot himself in the face of defeat, while his young wife, Tirunesh, was to die of disease barely a month later. This left their seven-year-old son, Alamayu, the subject of Andrew Heavens’ worthy if ultimately unsatisfying biography. It starts reasonably well, with the interesting – and thankfully well-documented – tale of Britain’s early engagement with Ethiopia, formerly a repository of fantasies inspired by tales of the Queen of Sheba and Prester John. Full Book Name: The Prince and the Plunder: How Britain took one small boy and hundreds of treasures from Ethiopia Yet the book comes alive in its final third, when Kuper confronts the consequences for museums of the current obsession with identity politics – ironically, an import from the culturally colonising United States, to whose fads, pieties and loose relationship with facts Anglophone countries are especially susceptible.

In this fascinating, haunting book, which takes us from a high mountain plateau in Ethiopia to Osborne on the Isle of Wight where Prince Alamayu met and charmed Queen Victoria, and all too soon to the catacombs of St George’s Chapel Windsor, Andrew Heavens tells the astonishing story of the uprooting of this lost boy.” So why, while it has learned to contextualise the Koh-i-noor, does the palace still assert proprietorship of a child victim of conquest? Since they’re safe from a rush on prince-restitution that would leave mausoleums empty, the greater risk for the royals would seem to be in sabotaging, with this intransigence, their own claims to have changed. Unless they really have lost him?Andrew Heavens takes us through the traumatic events of Alamayu’s early childhood and subsequent life in Britain as a ward of the state, where he was placed into the care of Captain Speedy, a 2 metre tall eccentric ginger Scottish adventurer. Below is his report, as it appeared in the official record of the expedition, compiled by Holland and Hozier. Returning Heritage “A deeply moving account of a life cut short and the fate of a kingdom’s treasures … Heavens’ book tells this remarkable and unhappy story with authority and skill … surely the most definitive study of Alamayu and Maqdala to date … tragic, authoritative and deeply moving.” A story of adventure, trauma and tragedy, The Prince and the Plunderis also a tale for our times, as we re-examine Britain’s past, pull down statues of imperial grandees and look for other figures to commemorate and celebrate in their place. The basics

Few families can have devoted as much attention as UK sovereigns to re-arranging, rehousing and relocating ancestral bodies, with some batches transferred to Frogmore, all at no recorded cost to the “dignity of the departed”, albeit that community cannot speak for itself.Alamayu never had the chance to write his own memoirs so almost all of the time we see Alamayu through other people’s eyes - whether they are British journalists, members of the public, or his classmates speaking on his behalf. All we have directly from Alamayu are a few scraps of writing and letters written for the moment.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
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