The Debtera and the Ethiopian Magic Scroll

Scrolls seldom outlived their owners, so the oldest documented examples are those gathered into nineteenth-century European collections, and the oldest Ethiopian books of protection date from about the fourteenth century. Ethiopian manuscripts looted by the British at Maqdala in 1868 remain a live restitution question.

Jacques Mercier, Ethiopian Magic Scrolls (1979); the British looting of Maqdala (1868)