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The debate over who owns ancient artefacts has been a growing challenge for European and American museums, with the spotlight falling on the most visited piece in the British Museum: the Rosetta Stone.
After the inscriptions on this dark gray granite slab were taken from Egypt in 1801 by troops of the British Empire, it became a groundbreaking breakthrough in deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Now, as Britain’s largest museum marks the 200th anniversary of the deciphering of hieroglyphs, thousands of Egyptians are demanding the stone’s return.
“The British Museum’s possession of the stone is a symbol of Western culture’s violence against Egypt,” said Monica Hanna, president of the Arab Academy of Science, Technology and Maritime Transport, who is part of two petitions calling for the stone’s return Organizer of one of the books.
The acquisition of the Rosetta Stone is associated with the imperial war between England and France. French scientists discovered the stone in 1799 in the northern town of Rashid (known to the French as Rosetta) after Napoleon Bonaparte’s military occupation of Egypt. When British troops defeated the French in Egypt, the stone and a dozen other antiquities were handed over to the British under a surrender agreement between the two generals in 1801.
It has been kept in the British Museum ever since.
Hannah’s petition, which has 4,200 signatures, says the stone was taken illegally and constitutes a “trophy of war”. Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s former antiquities minister, echoed the claim in a nearly identical petition that has more than 100,000 signatures. Hawass argued that Egypt had no say in the 1801 agreement.
The British Museum refuted this claim. The 1801 treaty included the signature of the Egyptian representative, the museum said in a statement. It refers to an Ottoman admiral who fought alongside the British against the French. The Ottoman Sultan of Istanbul was nominally the ruler of Egypt when Napoleon invaded.
The museum also said the Egyptian government had not submitted a request for its return. It added that there are 28 known copies of the same engraved decree, 21 of which remain in Egypt.
The debate over the original stone stems from its incomparable significance to Egyptology. Carved in the 2nd century BC, this tablet contains three translations of a decree pertaining to a reconciliation between the ruling Ptolemies and an Egyptian priesthood. The first inscription is in classical hieroglyphs, the next is in simplified hieroglyphs called Demotic, and the third is in ancient Greek.
Knowledge of the latter allowed scholars to decipher the hieroglyphic symbols, and French Egyptologist Jean-Francois Champollion finally deciphered the language in 1822.
“Scholars before the 18th century have longed to find a bilingual text written in a known language,” said Ilona Regulski, head of Egyptian written culture at the British Museum. Regulski is lead curator of the museum’s winter exhibition “Hieroglyphs Unlock Ancient Egypt,” celebrating the 200th anniversary of Champollion’s breakthrough.
The stone is one of more than 100,000 Egyptian and Sudanese artifacts in the British Museum’s collection. A large portion was acquired during the British colonial rule of the area from 1883 to 1953.
It is increasingly common for museums and collectors to repatriate artifacts to their country of origin, with new cases being reported almost every month. Often, this is the result of a court decision, while some cases are voluntary, representing an act of atonement for historical wrongs.
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New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art returned 16 artifacts to Egypt in September after a US investigation concluded they had been illegally trafficked. On Monday, the Horniman Museum in London signed 72 objects to Nigeria, including 12 Benin bronzes, at the request of the Nigerian government.
Nicholas Donnell, a Boston-based attorney who specializes in arts and crafts cases, said there is no common international legal framework for such disputes. Unless there is clear evidence that the artifact was obtained illegally, restitution is largely at the discretion of the museum.
“Given the treaty and time frame, Rosetta Stone is an uphill legal battle,” Donnell said.
The British Museum acknowledged that it has received several requests from various countries to return the artifacts, but it did not provide The Associated Press with any details about their status or quantities. It also did not confirm whether it had ever returned an artifact from its collection.
For Nigel Hetherington, an archaeologist and chief executive of Past Preserves, an online academic forum, the museum’s lack of transparency suggests other motives.
“It’s about money, staying relevant and worrying about returning something and people will stop coming,” he said.
Western museums have long justified their collections of the world’s treasures with superior facilities and larger crowd draws. Antiquities smuggling in Egypt increased amid the turmoil that followed the uprising that toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011, and between 2011 and 2013, according to the U.S.-based Antiquities Alliance About $3 billion was lost as a result. In 2015, cleaners at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo were discovered trying to superglue Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s beard again, damaging his tomb mask.
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But the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has since invested heavily in its relics. Egypt has successfully recovered thousands of internationally smuggled artefacts and plans to open a new, state-of-the-art museum with room for tens of thousands of items. The Grand Egyptian Museum has been under construction for more than a decade, and its opening has been delayed repeatedly.
Egypt’s plethora of ancient sites, from the pyramids of Giza to the towering statues of Abu Simbel on the Sudanese border, are attracting tourism, which will bring in $13 billion in 2021.
For Hannah, the right of Egyptians to know their own history should still come first. “How many Egyptians can travel to London or New York?” she said.
Egyptian authorities did not respond to a request for comment on Egypt’s policy on the Rosetta Stone or other Egyptian artifacts displayed abroad. Hawass and Hannah say they are not banking on the government to ensure its return.
“The Rosetta Stone is a symbol of Egyptian identity,” Hawass said. “I will use the media and intellectuals to tell (British) museums they have no right.”
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