As repatriation gains rapid momentum in the world of artifacts, Egypt is now gearing up to bring back all the glories scattered across museums and private collections across the world.
Aiming to open “the largest archaeological museum in the world” at the foot of the pyramids of Giza in November, Egypt’s former Antiquities Minister Zahi Hawass said he will soon demand the return of three of its greatest lost treasures.
Rosetta Stone
The basalt slab dating from 196 B.C. was the key that helped French linguist Jean-Francois Champollion crack the code of Egypt’s ancient hieroglyphs.
The stone was discovered by Napoleon Bonaparte’s invading French army in 1799 while troops were repairing a fort near the Nile Delta port of Rashid (or Rosetta), close to the Mediterranean.
It bore extracts of a decree written in Ancient Greek, an ancient Egyptian vernacular script called Demotic and hieroglyphics. Comparing the three scripts finally helped resolve a mystery that had bedeviled historians for centuries.
Champollion announced his discovery on Sept. 27, 1822.
The stele has been housed in the British Museum since 1802, inscribed with the legend “Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801” on one side and “presented by King George III” to the museum on the other. Egypt has been demanding its return for decades, with Egyptologist Heba Abdel Gawad saying the inscriptions alone were “an act of violence that no one talks about, and which the British Museum denies is the destruction of an artifact.”
The museum said the stone was “handed over to the British as a diplomatic gift.”
