The Ethiopian Heritage Authority (EHA) is the governmental department that oversees Ethiopia’s cultural patrimony and museums including the National Museum of Ethiopia.
The new model establishes stewardship, research, and future care of cultural heritage through a long-term, research-led partnership to jointly determine the ownership of the collection in the future, notably the restitution of hundreds of works over the duration of the agreement starting with further repatriations within the next five years.
Photo Brooklynn Russel
This partrnership of cross-border institutional partnerships offers a long-term solution to one of the sector’s central challenges: “orphan objects,” works with incomplete provenance that have no evidence of legal or illegal acquisition, limiting opportunities for research, documentation and public access.
Many private collectors built their collections before established industry provenance guidelines were in place and now face limited options beyond recirculating them in the market, as institutions have been hesitant to engage.
TMA has identified three other ancient works, that will soon be returned to Ethiopia.
TMA:
- “Too often, the discourse around cultural heritage is framed as a binary choice between acquisition and restitution. Our partnership with the Ethiopian Heritage Authority allows us to preserve these objects, deepen our understanding of their histories and appropriately determine what their future stewardship can look like. We hope that this partnership can offer a constructive model for others.”
