The debate over who owns ancient artifacts has been an increasing challenge to museums across Europe and America, and the spotlight has fallen on the most visited piece in the British Museum: The Rosetta stone.
The inscriptions on the dark grey granite
slab became the seminal breakthrough in deciphering ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphics after it was taken from Egypt by forces of the British empire in
1801.
Now, as Britain’s largest museum marks the
200-year anniversary of the decipherment of hieroglyphics, thousands of
Egyptians are demanding the stone’s return.
’’The British Museum’s holding of the stone
is a symbol of Western cultural violence against Egypt,” said Monica Hanna,
dean at the Arab Academy for Science, Technology & Maritime Transport, and
organizer of one of two petitions calling for the stone’s return.
The acquisition of the Rosetta Stone was
tied up in the imperial battles between Britain and France. After Napoleon
Bonaparte’s military occupation of Egypt, French scientists uncovered the stone
in 1799 in the northern town of Rashid, known by the French as Rosetta. When
British forces defeated the French in Egypt, the stone and over a dozen other
antiquities were handed over to the British under the terms of an 1801
surrender deal between the generals of the two sides.
It has remained in the British Museum
since.
Hanna’s petition, with 4,200 signatures,
says the stone was seized illegally and constitutes a “spoil of war.” The claim
is echoed in a near identical petition by Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s former minister
for antiquities affairs, which has more than 100,000 signatures. Hawass argues
that Egypt had no say in the 1801 agreement.
The British Museum refutes this. In a
statement, the Museum said 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 said Egypt’s government has
not submitted a request for its return. It added that there are 28 known copies
of the same engraved decree and 21 of them remain in Egypt.
The contention over the original stone copy
stems from its unrivaled significance to Egyptology. Carved in the 2nd century
B.C., the slab contains three translations of a decree relating to a settlement
between the then-ruling Ptolemies and a sect of Egyptian priests. The first
inscription is in classic hieroglyphics, the next is in a simplified
hieroglyphic script known as Demotic, and the third is in Ancient Greek.
Through knowledge of the latter, academics
were able to decipher the hieroglyphic symbols, with French Egyptologist
Jean-Francois Champollion eventually cracking the language in 1822.
“Scholars from the previous 18th century
had been longing to find a bilingual text written in a known language,” said
Ilona Regulski, the head of Egyptian Written Culture at the British Museum.
Regulski is the lead curator of the museum’s winter exhibition, “Hieroglyphs
Unlocking Ancient Egypt,” celebrating the 200th anniversary of Champollion’s
breakthrough.
The stone is one of more than 100,000
Egyptian and Sudanese relics housed in the British Museum. A large percentage
were obtained during Britain’s colonial rule over the region from 1883 to 1953.
It has grown increasingly common for
museums and collectors to return artifacts to their country of origin, with new
instances reported nearly monthly. Often, it’s the result of a court ruling,
while some cases are voluntary, symbolizing an act of atonement for historical
wrongs.
New York’s Metropolitan Museum returned 16
antiquities to Egypt in September after a U.S. investigation concluded they had
been illegally trafficked. On Monday, London’s Horniman Museum signed over 72
objects, including 12 Benin Bronzes, to Nigeria following a request from its
government.
Nicholas Donnell, a Boston-based attorney
specializing in cases concerning art and artifacts, said no common
international legal framework exists for such disputes. Unless there is clear
evidence an artifact was acquired illegally, repatriation is largely at the
discretion of the museum.
“Given the treaty and the timeframe, the
Rosetta stone is a hard legal battle to win,” said Donnell.
The British Museum has acknowledged that
several repatriation requests have been made to it from various countries for
artifacts, but it did not provide The Associated Press with any details on
their status or number. It also did not confirm whether it has ever repatriated
an artifact from its collection.
For Nigel Hetherington, an archaeologist
and CEO of the online academic forum Past Preserves, the museum’s lack of
transparency suggests other motives.
“It’s about money, maintaining relevance
and a fear that in returning certain items people will stop coming,” he said.
Western museums have long pointed to
superior facilities and larger crowd draws to justify their holding of world
treasures. Amid turmoil following the 2011 uprising that toppled autocrat Hosni
Mubarak, Egypt saw an uptick in artifact smuggling, which cost the country an
estimated $3 billion between 2011 and 2013, according to the U.S.-based
Antiquities Coalition. In 2015, it was discovered that cleaners at Cairo’s
Egyptian Museum had damaged the burial mask of Pharaoh Tutankhamun by
attempting to re-attach the beard with super glue.
But President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi’s
government has since invested heavily in its antiquities. Egypt has
successfully reclaimed thousands of internationally smuggled artifacts and
plans to open a newly built, state-of-the-art museum where tens of thousands of
objects can be housed. The Grand Egyptian Museum has been under construction for
well over a decade and there have been repeated delays to its opening.
Egypt’s plethora of ancient monuments, from
the pyramids of Giza to the towering statues of Abu Simbel at the Sudanese
border, are the magnet for a tourism industry that drew in $13 billion in 2021.
For Hanna, Egyptians’ right to access their
own history should remain the priority. “How many Egyptians can travel to
London or New York?” she said.
Egyptian authorities did not respond to a
request for comment regarding Egypt’s policy toward the Rosetta stone or other
Egyptian artifacts displayed abroad. Hawass and Hanna said they are not pinning
hopes on the government to secure its return.
“The Rosetta stone is the icon of Egyptian
identity,” said Hawass. ‘‘I will use the media and the intellectuals to tell
the (British) museum they have no right.’’ -AP