The giant carved stone obelisks raised over royal tombs at Aksum in northern Ethiopia around the third and fourth centuries CE, cut to look like multi-storey towers with false doors and windows. The tallest ever attempted, weighing over five hundred tons, fell and broke. A twenty-four-metre stele was looted by Fascist Italy in 1937, shipped to Rome, returned to Ethiopia in 2005, and re-erected at Aksum in 2008, making it a landmark case in the modern fight over looted heritage.
A single block of stone, longer than a ten-storey building is tall and heavier than a fully loaded passenger jet, lies broken on the ground at Aksum. It probably never stood for long. Most likely it snapped the moment its builders tried to stand it upright, and they left the pieces where they fell. Beside it, others did go up and still stand, their faces carved to mimic timber beams, locked doors, and rows of windows climbing toward a rounded crown. These were tombstones for kings, made to look like the palaces those kings had lived in. One of them did not stay at Aksum. An army carried it off to a foreign capital, and it took most of a century, and a long argument about who owns the past, to bring it home.