I Think I Solved This Problem

[Razors Edge ★]

...how about you? Same solution or different?

 

In a small windowless room in the basement of the British Museum sit some of the holiest relics of the Ethiopian Orthodox church: 11 small wooden plaques called Tabots that are considered by Ethiopian Christians to contain God’s presence. Each is meant to represent the biblical Ark of the Covenant.

So holy are the pieces that they cannot be publicly displayed—Ethiopian Orthodox believers say only priests should look at them—and not even the director of the British Museum can view them. Covered in pieces of cloth, the 14-inch tablets with carved inscriptions have hardly been seen since they were looted from an Ethiopian fort in 1868 by invading British forces. 

The Ethiopian church has asked for them back. The British Museum says no and has offered to lend them instead.

A delegation of Ethiopian priests last made the pilgrimage to the museum basement in Bloomsbury to pray with the plaques back in 2018. It is “a very small room to hold such great things,” said Samuel Berhanu, a deacon at the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in London, who accompanied the group.  

The fight over the Tabots is part of a wider social shift that has heaped pressure on museums across the Western world to hand back treasures acquired during the age of empire during the 19th century, when European powers built global colonies that stretched across Africa and Asia.

 

[Zephyr]

Give them back, problem solved

[maddmaxx ★]

Cut them in half.

[MoseySusan]

Give them back. How is this even a problem.

[Tizeye]

They are not real. Somebody with an early 3D printer centuries ago played an April Fools joke.

[Airehead]

Give them back