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The Rosetta Stone at the British Museum in London.
Photo:
/Associated Press
The British Museum in London is among the world’s greatest, alongside the Louvre in Paris and the Met in New York City. Like its peers, it’s sometimes embroiled in scandals over the provenance of its artifacts. This week’s scandal concerns the jewel in the British Museum’s curatorial crown, the Rosetta Stone.
This 2,100-year-old block of granodiorite is among the most important objects in Mediterranean history. It contains a decree written in Greek, ancient Egyptian demotic script, and hieroglyphs. This allowed
Jean-François Champollion
to decipher the latter in 1822, after decades of cooperative (and competitive) effort by scholars across Europe—an achievement the museum is now marking with a bicentennial exhibition.
So naturally a petition has started to return the stela to Egypt, where it was discovered by the French during Napoleon’s invasion in 1799 before being traded to the British and shipped to England. Defenders of Egypt’s cultural patrimony have a point that the artifact was looted without permission of the duly constituted government of the day.
This case is different from the British Museum’s other long-running provenance controversy, concerning marbles from the Parthenon in Athens that Greece claims. The museum says those were removed in the early 19th century by
Lord Elgin
with permission of the Ottoman authorities who ruled that part of Greece at the time. It’s also different from recent attempts to return art stolen from European Jews by the Nazis.
Would Egypt, or the world, have been better off if the Rosetta Stone had remained in Egypt then, or if it were returned now? The decipherment was made possible by bringing the artifact to a place where it could be inspected by experts and where detailed copies could be made and distributed across Europe. The work of these researchers, many of them stereotypical gentlemen enthusiasts, unlocked Egypt’s ancient history for Egyptians as much as anyone else.
As a linchpin of the Mediterranean, Egypt’s history is also part of Europe’s cultural heritage. The decree recorded on the Rosetta Stone was written in Greek in addition to Egyptian scripts because it was issued in the reign of Ptolemy V, from the family of Greek descendants of a general of Alexander the Great who ruled Egypt until Cleopatra.
Leaving the Rosetta Stone in London will keep the timeless artifact accessible to the millions of visitors who will come to the British Museum each year as post-pandemic travel resumes. The thought should thrill curators and historians around the world who otherwise might descend into futile culture-warring over colonialism or transient fads.
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Appeared in the December 1, 2022, print edition as ‘The Rosetta Stone’s Best Home.’
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