The debate over who owns the most important works of art and antiquities in human history has been a growing challenge for museums in Europe and America, and now attention has turned to the most visited piece in the British Museum: the rosetta stone. The inscriptions on the dark gray granite slab became the seminal breakthrough in deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics after it was removed from Egypt by British Empire forces in 1801. Now Britain's largest museum is celebrating the 200th anniversary of the decipherment of the hieroglyphs and thousands of Egyptians demand the return of the stone.
"The possession of the stone by the British Museum is a symbol of Western cultural violence against Egypt," said Monica Hanna, dean of the Arab Academy of Science, Technology and Shipping, and organizer of one of the two petitions calling for the return of the stone, according to the AP agency. The acquisition of the Rosetta stone was linked to the imperial battles between Great Britain and France. After the military occupation of Egypt by Napoleon Bonaparte, French scientists discovered the stone in 1799 in the northern city of Rashid, known to the French as Rosetta.
When British forces defeated the French in Egypt, the stone and more than a dozen other antiquities were turned over to the British under the terms of an 1801 surrender agreement between the generals of the two sides. It has remained in the British Museum ever since. Hanna's petition, with 4,200 signatures, says the stone was seized illegally and constitutes "spoils of war." The claim is almost identical to the one led by Zahi Hawass, Egypt's former minister of antiquities affairs, which has more than 100,000 signatures. Hawass argues that Egypt had no say in the 1801 agreement.
The British Museum refutes all these requests and in a statement points out that the 1801 treaty includes the signature of a representative of Egypt. It refers to an Ottoman admiral who fought alongside the British against the French. The Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul was nominally the ruler of Egypt at the time of Napoleon's invasion.
The Museum also notes that the Egyptian government has not filed a request for its return, adding that there are 28 known copies of the same recorded decree and 21 of them remain in Egypt.
The dispute over the original stone copy stems from its incomparable importance to Egyptology. Carved in the 2nd century BC. C., the slab contains three translations of a decree related to an agreement between the then ruling Ptolemies and a sect of Egyptian priests. The first inscription is in classical hieroglyphics, the next is in a simplified hieroglyphic script known as demotic, and the third is in ancient Greek. Through knowledge of the latter, scholars were able to decipher the hieroglyphic symbols, and French Egyptologist Jean-Francois Champollion finally cracked the language in 1822. "Scholars of the earlier eighteenth century longed to find a bilingual text written in a known language," comments Ilona Regulski, Director of Egyptian Written Culture at the British Museum.
