RFI

Sat 30 November 2024 at 11:59 am GMT

France on Saturday began the return of some 3,500 archaeological artefacts to Ethiopia, which Paris held since the 1980s for study. This came during a visit to the region by the new Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot handed over two prehistoric stone axes, called bifaces, and a stone cutter to Ethiopia’s Tourism Minister Selamawit Kassa, during a visit to the national museum in Addis Ababa.

The tools are “samples of nearly 3,500 artifacts from the excavations that were carried out on the Melka Kunture site”, a cluster of prehistoric sites south of the capital that were excavated under the direction of a late French researcher, Barrot said.

France and Ethiopia hold a longstanding bilateral agreement on cooperating in the fields of archaeology and paleontology.

A handover, not a restitution

The artifacts, currently stored at the French embassy in Addis Ababa, will be delivered in their entirety to the Ethiopian Heritage Directorate on Tuesday.

“This is a handover, not a restitution, in that these objects have never been part of French public collections,” Laurent Serrano, culture advisor at the French embassy, told AFP.

“These artifacts, which date back between 1 and 2 million years, were found during excavations carried out over several decades at a site near the Ethiopian capital,” he added.