Looted Obelisk Returned to Ethiopia

Sept. 4, 2008 -- A herculean engineering feat has put an end to a decades-long diplomatic dispute between Italy and Ethiopia over a looted obelisk.

The Axum obelisk, one of Ethiopia's national treasures, has finally returned home after a 70-year stay in Rome.

The event is celebrated today in Axum with song, dance and processions.

"It's the beginning of Ethiopia's rebirth," a spokesperson for the Egyptian government said at the ceremony, in which Ethiopian and Italian authorities signed the official return of the 160-ton granite pillar.

A symbol of national identity to Ethiopians, the 79-foot funerary stele was built 1,700 years ago in Axum. The monument is one of a group of obelisks erected when Ethiopia adopted Christianity in the 4th century A.D.

The ruins of the ancient city of Axum mark the location of the Kingdom of Axum, regarded as one of the four great kingdoms of the between the Eastern Roman Empire and Persia.

Some 1,000 years ago, the obelisk collapsed on Ethiopian ground following an earthquake and broke into five fragments.

Troops of the Italian dictator Mussolini, who had invaded Ethiopia in 1935, shipped the fragments to Italy and then reassembled the obelisk in Rome in 1937 as a symbol of fascist power.

For more than six decades, the obelisk stood where Mussolini put it: in front of the Ministry of the Colonies, today the headquarters of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

Today's ceremony comes at the end of a long negotiation process.