return our works; Egypt’s heritage is imprisoned in Britain

According to ISNA; The Rosetta Stone, which was taken out of Egypt by the British forces in 1801, has once again been at the center of discussions about the return of antiquities. The opening of the “Great Egyptian Museum” (GEM) in Giza has led to renewed calls for the return of this historical artifact from the British Museum. This stone played a key role in deciphering the hieroglyphic line.

“Zahi Hawass”, the former minister of tourism and antiquities of Egypt, said in an interview with the “BBC” channel:

Now is the time for Western European museums to be responsible for the preservation of Egyptian antiquities. I have two requests; First, that the museums stop buying stolen works, and secondly, that three important objects, the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum, the Zodiac from the Louvre Museum, and the bust of Nefertiti from Berlin, are returned to Egypt.

Other prominent Egyptologists, including Monica Hanna, have also confirmed Hawass’s words and mentioned that these works were transferred abroad during the colonial period. Hanna, who was one of the founders of the campaign to return the Rosetta Stone in 2022, said:

The opening of the Great Egyptian Museum has a clear message. Egypt has done its duty and now it is time to officially request the return of these works.

In response, the British Museum announced that it had not received any official request for the return of the Rosetta Stone from the Egyptian government, and Sharif Fathi, the current Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, has not yet publicly called for its return. The spokesperson of this museum said in an email:

We have not received any official request from the Egyptian government to return the Rosetta Stone. The British Museum collaborates with partners around the world, including our colleagues in Egypt, on projects, exhibitions and research, and has a long-standing relationship with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

The “British Museum” continued its defense, pointed out that the “Rosetta Stone” is one of the 29 officially recognized decrees from the “Ptolemaic period” (from 332 BC to 30 BC), which was written in three languages, Egyptian hieroglyphs, demotic Egyptian, and ancient Greek, and helped decipher the hieroglyphic script.

The museum also emphasized that according to the “British Museum Act” which was approved in 1963, it is not able to permanently return works from its collection except in exceptional cases. This law imposes strict restrictions on the return of objects and has been repeatedly invoked in discussions regarding the “Parthenon” statues, which were transferred from the Acropolis of Athens to Britain in the early 19th century, and which Greece wants to return.

“Rosetta Stone” was discovered in 1799, during the Napoleonic wars, when a wall was destroyed in the city of Rashid (Rosetta). After the surrender of the French forces to the British in 1801, according to the Treaty of Alexandria, this stone was handed over to Britain and has been kept in the collection of the British Museum ever since.

Thomas Young, a British physicist who was also interested in Egyptology, began studying the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone in 1814. He received oval symbols attached to the names of royal people.

But it was “Jean-Francois Champollion”, a French lexicographer, who in 1822, after carefully examining the “Rosetta Stone” and other texts, finally managed to provide a complete list of “hieroglyphic” signs and their Greek equivalents.

Champollion was the first Egyptologist to understand that some of these hieroglyphic symbols are alphabetic, some are syllabic, and some are related to pronouns.

In fact, the Rosetta Stone is a copy of a text dating back to the 3rd century BC.

The writings on the “Rosetta Stone” is a decree that was issued in 196 BC by the priests of “Memphis” and by the order of “Ptolemy V”, one of the kings of the Greek-speaking dynasty of ancient Egypt. This decree includes several positive actions of the pharaoh and during which it is specified that this text should be placed in the temples all over Egypt.

The opening of the “Great Egyptian Museum” was the end point of a 20-year project that had repeatedly faced problems such as internal political unrest, the Corona epidemic, and regional conflicts. The cost of building this museum is estimated to be more than one billion dollars and it is located on a land almost the same size as the Vatican. This museum is the main focus of Egypt’s efforts to revive international tourism and narrates the history of this country by displaying more than 50,000 historical artifacts, including the complete collection of Tutankhamun’s tomb and a reconstructed version of the Rosetta Stone.