Indiana Jones he is not, but a bespectacled Irish doctor has received a hero's welcome in Ethiopia for returning a replica of the Lost Ark of the Covenant, 135 years after it was raided by British imperial troops.
Dr Ian MacLennan stumbled across the small wooden artefact, known as a tabot, in a London bookshop last month, where it was described as a "wooden portable slab for altar use". But the Letterkenny, Co Donegal, native, who converted from Catholicism to the Ethiopian Orthodox faith about 10 years ago, recognised it as a sacred treasure.
After consulting with an Orthodox cleric he bought the sacred treasure for an undisclosed sum, wrapped it in a white cloth and quietly flew it back to Ethiopia last Sunday.
"It was quite emotional. A tabot is a very sacred thing; you can't look at it for long. I didn't feel I should be handling it," he said at his Addis Ababa hotel yesterday.
The return has been joyously hailed in Ethiopia, where the issue of stolen tabots is of national importance. When the first tabot was returned from Edinburgh last September, hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets of Addis Ababa to witness a four-hour procession from the city airport to the Trinity Cathedral.
"It's like getting the Book of Kells back from Timbuktu," said Dr MacLennan.
The tabot, the focus of worship in every Orthodox church, represents the original Ark of the Covenant which, according to the Old Testament, the Israelites used to carry the 10 Commandments to the Promised Land.
The search for the sacred ark inspired Hollywood's Indiana Jones films but the Ethiopian church claims it is held in the northern town of Axum, guarded by monks. Only Orthodox clerics are allowed set eyes on the ark or the tabots.
Dr MacLennan's gesture has renewed calls for Britain to return the many Ethiopian treasures stolen during colonial times.
The tabot he discovered was stolen in 1868 after British troops stormed Maqdala, the mountain citadel of the Emperor Tewodros. They carried more than 1,200 sacred objects off with them, including gold crowns, chalices, manuscripts and at least a dozen tabots. Some 200 mules and 15 elephants were used to cart the plunder away.
Since then only a handful of artefacts have been returned to Ethiopia, the majority remaining in the British Library, British Museum, and in the Queen's collection at Windsor Castle.
In an echo of the Elgin Marbles controversy between Britain and Greece, campaigners say the precious objects should be returned immediately.
"These items have been stolen, it's as simple as that," said Prof Richard Pankhurst of the University of Addis Ababa. "If they were taken in Iraq recently there would be outrage, and rightly so."
Italy has increased the pressure by agreeing to return at least a 1,000-year-old obelisk taken by Mussolini in 1937 and re-erected in Rome in front of his Africa headquarters. The 200-tonne monument is being dismantled for transportation to Axum.
Dr MacLennan, a consultant at London's Whittington Hospital on sexually transmitted diseases, found the tabot in a personal collection on sale at Maggs's bookshop in central London.
He spurns comparisons with Indiana Jones but admits to being "a bit eccentric".