Toledo Museum to Return Five Objects to Ethiopia

The Toledo Museum of Art will return five objects to Ethiopia under a new 20-year agreement with the country’s Ethiopian Heritage Authority.

The objects—two manuscripts and three crosses—come from the collection of Bob McCarthy, a collector of medieval art who approached the Ohio museum about works in his possession that lacked documentation showing how they had left Ethiopia.

Research into the objects found that the two manuscripts were known to have remained in Ethiopia after 1970, when the Unesco convention against the illicit trade in cultural property was adopted, and were likely subsequently removed from the country. One is a 15th-century Book of Revelation with Horologium. McCarthy has also transferred the three crosses to the Ethiopian Heritage Authority.

The case raises a problem faced by museums and collectors holding antiquities acquired during a period when provenance standards were considerably less stringent. While the origins of such objects may be known, there can be little or no documentation establishing when, or under what circumstances, they were exported.

The agreement will allow the Toledo museum to work with Ethiopian scholars and museum professionals to research such objects before determining their ownership. Its first ten years will focus on research, training and restitution, followed by a decade considering the future custody of returned works.

The partnership grew out of the museum’s reinstallation of its medieval Cloister gallery, which is due to reopen next year with a display examining connections between Ethiopia, Armenia and the Byzantine and Islamic worlds.