© UNESCO/Michel Ravassard
Aksum, July 2008: the steel tower waiting for its obelisk.

The Return of the Aksum Obelisk

Aksum, Ethiopian site listed as World Heritage since 1980, regains its status as a hub of African culture this month. A number of eminent personalities from culture and politics are converging on it - as they did at the beginning of our era when the Kingdom of Aksum rivalled Rome, Persia and China - to pay tribute not to a king, this time, but to an obelisk! The 24-metre, 152-ton monolith sculpted in Aksum 17 centuries ago, which has become a symbol of the Ethiopian people’s identity, has returned to its original home after 70 years of exile.

The inauguration ceremony for the Aksum Obelisk (or Stele 2 for the experts) coincides, give or take a few days, with the end of the second Ethiopian millennium. The year 2001 begins on 12 September in Ethiopia, which still uses the Julian calendar replaced in the West by the Gregorian in the 16th century. The African Union has decided to make the new Ethiopian millennium a “millennium for all Africa”, in tribute to a country that was never colonized.

In March 2005, UNESCO announced to the world the return to Ethiopia of the Aksum Obelisk, in Rome since 1937. Mussolini’s troops had found it lying on the ground, broken into three pieces, and hauled it back to the Italian capital.

It took extensive negotiation to bring about the stele’s return, called for by the peace accords in 1947. The largest aircraft in the world, the Antonov, had to be hired to transport the three enormous granite sections in three stages. The Aksum airport had to be modernized and two bridges reinforced for the convoy to reach its destination. Above all, what had to be ensured was that Stele 2’s reinstallation would not damage the archaeological site, which comprises a royal necropolis from several pre-Christian dynasties. (The UNESCO team carried out “non-destructive” remote sensing exploration that makes it possible to see what is underground without digging.) Finally, it was necessary to consolidate Stele 3, standing not far from its famous neighbour. Among the decorated monoliths in situ (most of them are not engraved), Stele 3 is the only one still standing. It leans slightly, however, like the Tower of Pisa.

What an adventure!
Three photos

In short, after two years of work, UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre signed an agreement in June 2007 with the construction company Lattanzi for the reinstallation of the obelisk. It executed the engineering project designed by the Italian firm Croci Associati, in collaboration with Ethiopian experts, notably the archaeologist Tecle Hagos and the engineer Messele Haile Mariam.

A platform with rails was installed, in order to slide the three pieces of the stele up to an immense steel structure, only one-tenth the size of the Eiffel Tower but equally impressive. Using a hemispheric hinge and a mobile crane, the first block was hauled up the tower then dropped inside it, on top of its new eight-metre reinforced concrete foundation.

“That way it won’t fall down again!” jokes the Italian technician Mauro Cristini, who emphasizes he’s no expert on “obelisk erection”. How’s that? He’s the head of the project team! “Have you seen many obelisks erected recently?” he says with a smile. True, the subject is no longer taught in schools.

Much more seriously, he explains how each block is attached to the other: “At the end of the 1930s, the three parts of the stele were patched back together using metal bars 18 cm in diameter. This time we’ve added four perforations in each block that are only 5 cm in diameter, and inserted synthetic fibre bars to improve the stele’s seismic resistance.”

When the second block was placed within the tower on top of the first one, the synthetic fibres – Kevlar bars – were inserted in the new holes before the surfaces of the two blocks were sealed by a resin-based mortar. Same procedure for the third block. A technological feat, to say the least.

The scale of this operation led by UNESCO is reminiscent of its first world heritage safeguarding campaign 50 years ago in Nubia. At that time, the Abu Simbel and Philae Egyptian temples were cut up into blocks and moved to a new location to avoid their being submerged after the construction of the great Aswan Dam.

This latest project cost close to five million dollars, just for the studies and construction. The funding, also covering the dismantling of the obelisk in Rome and its transport back to Aksum, is entirely provided by the Italian government.

Aksum is thus recovering little by little its ancestral grandeur, lost for the first 1000 years of our era. The obelisk is majestically enthroned in the middle of this little town, once the capital of an empire and a centre of Christianity. Aksum’s cultural wealth belies the town’s small size: a labyrinth of royal tombs, ruins of ancient palaces likely to include the Queen of Sheba’s, ruins of 4th century churches…Aksum’s fabulous treasures will be revealed in our next issue, devoted to the Ethiopian sites inscribed on the World Heritage List.

Jasmina Šopova

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Photo 2: © UNESCO/Jasmina Šopova
Mauro Cristini, head of the technical team, responsible for the obelisk’s reinstallation.

Photo 3: © UNESCO/F. Bandarin
Partial view of the main stele site; start of the work to reinstall the Aksum Obelisk.