Cairo Covets the Rosetta Stone, With Little Hope

In London, they are mounting a show to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, the star exhibit in the British Museum. In Egypt, they are mourning the loss of the stone that revolutionized archeology.

“It’s part of your national heritage. It’s something that was left to you by your great-great-grandfathers,” said Gaballah Ali Gaballah, head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.

Gaballah says Egypt dearly wants the Rosetta back. But, under international law, it does not have a case.

A U.N. agreement of 1971 provides for the return of objects that were stolen and exported after that date. The Rosetta Stone clearly predates the accord, which Britain has never signed, and Gaballah declines to accuse the British of theft.

The Rosetta was discovered in August 1799 in a town of the same name located 35 miles northeast of Alexandria. French troops stumbled on it as they recycled for their own fortifications the blocks at the site of an old Egyptian fort.

Their officer recognized that its trilingual inscription could be important and sent it to Cairo, where Napoleon had it deposited at the French Institute.

When the French surrendered to the British in Egypt two years later, they handed over the Rosetta Stone. It was shipped to the British Museum.

Gaballah says that, although Egypt lacks a legal case, its moral case is unassailable.

Everything about the slab of black basalt is Egyptian. It was inscribed by the priests of Memphis, a town south of Cairo, as homage to King Ptolemy Epiphanes to mark his accession to the Egyptian throne. The text is written in hieroglyphics, a second ancient Egyptian language called demotic, and Greek--which was the official language of Egypt in 196 BC.

Working from the Greek inscription, the decipherers cracked the code of Pharaonic hieroglyphics.

“The beginning of Egyptology is due to the Rosetta Stone,” said Abdul-Halim Noureddin, head of Cairo University’s Egyptology department.

To soothe Egyptian feelings, Noureddin suggests that Britain lend it back for a monthlong exhibition.

In the meantime, Cairo makes do with a copy in the Egyptian Museum.