Stolen Legacy- Ep04 (Magdala: the books they took)
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Stolen Legacy- Ep04 (Magdala: the books they took)
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About this listen
On April 13, 1868, British troops entered Magdala, a mountain fortress in Ethiopia and the stronghold of Emperor Tewodros II. The expedition, led by Sir Robert Napier, was a military campaign. The British won and then looted the city.
They moved through Magdala taking items systematically. Churches and monasteries were stripped of large numbers of handwritten manuscripts written in Ge’ez, covering religion, law, medicine, governance, history, and astronomy. Crowns, ceremonial crosses, royal objects, and sacred tabots were also taken.
After the looting, the city was burned.
Following the invasion, stolen items were divided among officers, auctioned to soldiers, or shipped to Britain. Over time, many of the manuscripts and objects ended up in British institutions such as the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Bodleian Library at Oxford, while others entered private collections.
Ethiopia was never colonized, so this was not administration but invasion and theft. The removal of books and sacred objects helped erase evidence of Ethiopia’s long tradition of written knowledge and scholarship, making it easier to later claim that Africa lacked recorded history and intellectual systems.