As shown on the plan, the building was erected east and west; at the last end there are the remains of may once have been an altar, and the masonry exposed leads to the supposition that the last end was shaped in the form of an apex. Alamayu headed to India with Speedy when the latter was appointed a District Superintendent in what is now Uttar Pradesh, and later to Penang, when the guardianship was questioned by Robert Lowe, Chancellor of the Exchequer. Ultimately, Speedy and Alamayu would separate, as the latter entered Cheltenham College, where the boys called him “Ali”, and he did not prosper. Fundamentally though it is a human story, about a small child cast adrift - about his fall from the mountain-top, to become “one of us”, to know good and evil.

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. What: Gold disc “from the cross on the altar at Magdala” showing the crucifixion, bought from Col W J Holt For the first time, Andrew Heavens tells the whole story of Alamayu, from his early days in his father's fortress on the roof of Africa to his new home across the seas, where he charmed Queen Victoria, chatted with Lord Tennyson and travelled with his towering red-headed guardian Captain Speedy. The orphan prince was celebrated but stereotyped and never allowed to go home.For the first time, The Prince and the Plunder tells the whole story of Alamayu, from his early days in his father’s fortress on the roof of Africa to his new home across the seas, where he charmed Queen Victoria, chatted with Lord Tennyson and travelled with his towering red-headed guardian Captain Speedy.The orphan prince was celebrated but stereotyped and never allowed to go home. What: Gold disc “from the cross on the altar at Magdala” showing an angel, bought from Col W J Holt Presumably it’s the palace’s intention for Ethiopian petitioners to picture, as you do from euphemisms like “others in the vicinity”, scenes of such ghastly Hadean mayhem that they will tactfully withdraw. British subjects may, on the other hand, wonder if expert accounts, with diagrams, of what would become of the late queen’s body, disguised the fact that the royal vault is actually a chaotic ossuary in which unidentifiable parts of foreign princes are so carelessly jumbled up with those of Charles’s forebears that only DNA testing could positively tell them apart (some hair of Alemayehu’s father is in fact available, courtesy of Lord Napier’s pillaging Victorians). It would certainly accord with an earlier royal excuse for inaction that “identifying the remains of young Prince Alemayehu would not be possible”. This may sound a bit dry but it is actually fascinating because it allows us to see how central this story of Tewodros and Alamayu is to modern Ethiopians and how much these artefacts mean to them - and how incidental they are to most people in Britain. 2 Remarkably Alamayu seems to have remained even tempered and open hearted throughout his short life. Lootany

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? Heavens is a good storyteller and guides us with a sure pen through the events of 1868 and beyond. He sprinkles in first hand sources throughout the book so that people who met or knew Alamayu, like Queen Victoria, can speak to us directly. The Daily Mail “I am very excited about this extraordinary and thrilling bookand more importantly by the thought of everyone who will read it. The Battle of Maqdala and its fallout should be known to every man, woman and child.”PDF / EPUB File Name: The_Prince_and_the_Plunder_-_Andrew_Heavens.pdf, The_Prince_and_the_Plunder_-_Andrew_Heavens.epub Full Book Name: The Prince and the Plunder: How Britain took one small boy and hundreds of treasures from Ethiopia Too bad: the palace wants Alemayehu kept where he was put, on Queen Victoria’s instructions. Since it can hardly say the request is over-ambitious – Philip’s mother’s body was flown from Windsor to Jerusalem 19 years after her death – its refusal, reported by the BBC, cites both practical and propriety-related objections. “It is very unlikely,” the palace says, “that it would be possible to exhume the remains without disturbing the resting place of a substantial number of others in the vicinity.” It said the chapel authorities had “the responsibility to preserve the dignity of the departed”.

What: Fragment of a 6th century white marble relief sculpture carved with a cross within a wreath, taken during Britain’s Abyssinian Expedition during a hit-and-run archaeological dig at Adulis in modern day Eritrea I can recommend comedian James Acaster for a 3 minute run-through of the arguments for and against repatriation on this youtube video. ↩︎

For the first time, Andrew Heavens tells the whole story of Alamayu, from his early days in his father’s fortress on the roof of Africa to his new home across the seas, where he charmed Queen Victoria, chatted with Lord Tennyson and travelled with his towering red-headed guardian Captain Speedy. The orphan prince was celebrated but stereotyped and never allowed to go home. For a service template, how about something like the memorial ceremony in 2013, when the Serbian royal family was allowed – Queen Elizabeth having authorised the exhumation – to repatriate Queen Maria of Yugoslavia from Frogmore? Few families can have devoted as much attention as UK sovereigns to re-arranging, rehousing and relocating ancestral bodies What: An Aksumite coin, dated c. 350-450, taken during Britain’s Abyssinian Expedition during a hit-and-run archaeological dig at Adulis in modern day Eritrea What: Fragment of a white marble relief sculpture carved with a cross in a circle, taken during Britain’s Abyssinian Expedition during a hit-and-run archaeological dig at Adulis in modern day Eritrea 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.