Hi everybody,
What brings me to a much bigger stick :
Should we ask the French to give back the obelisk standing on the Concorde Square in the middle of Paris ?
In fact, it looks better than the guillotines the revolutionaries used to set up there. To the great despair of the ones that would like to see me under their blade
, I would say no.
I was remembered not long ago that this obelisk was not stolen by Napoleon during his Egyptian campaign, but was offered to France by the sultan of Egypt, Mohammed Ali, in 1830.
So if this one was a gift and legally entered France, that other one was not : the obelisk of Axum that used to stand in Roma till last year and that had been looted from Ethiopia by the Italian army in 1937. See this article
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4458105.stm**
By the way, I just realized that we could celebrate these days the first anniversary of the return of this cultural relic in its country.
Best,
yuanzhumin