Today, as Britain’s largest museum celebrates the 200th anniversary of the deciphering of hieroglyphics, thousands of Egyptians find it not easy to return to the stone.
CELTIC GOLD COINS STOLEN FROM GERMAN MUSEUM DURING INCREDIBLE MAKE-UP
“The British Museum’s possession of the stone is a form of Western cultural violence against Egypt,” said Monica Hanna, dean of the Arab Academy of Science, Technology and Shipping and organizer of one of the two petitions calling for the stone’s return.
The acquisition of the Rosetta Stone was related to the imperial battles between Britain and France. After the profession of the Egyptian army through Napoleon Bonaparte, French scientists discovered the stone in 1799 in the north of the city of Rashid, known to the French as Rosetta. When British forces defeated the French in Egypt, the stone and more than a dozen other antiquities passed to the British under an 1801 agreement between generals on both sides.
It has remained in the British Museum ever since.
Hanna’s petition, with 4,200 signatures, claims the stone was illegally seized and constitutes “spoils of war. “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 of Istanbul, theoretically, the ruler of Egypt at the time of Napoleon’s invasion.
The museum also said the Egyptian government had filed a request for restitution. He added that there are 28 known copies of the same decree engraved and 21 of them remain in Egypt.
The controversy over the original stone copy stems from its unprecedented importance for Egyptology. Carved in the BC century, slab 3 translations of a decree relating to an agreement between the Ptolemies then in force and a sect of Egyptian priests. The first inscription is in classical hieroglyphics, the next in a simplified hieroglyphic script known as demotic and the third in ancient Greek.
Thanks to the wisdom of the latter, scholars were able to decipher the hieroglyphic symbols, having nevertheless deciphered the French Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion in 1822.
“Academics of the last eighteenth century aspired to a bilingual text written in a known language,” said Ilona Regulski, head of Egyptian written culture at the British Museum. celebrating the 200th anniversary of Champollion’s breakthrough.
The stone is one of more than 100,000 Egyptian and Sudanese relics in the British Museum. A giant percentage received British colonial rule over the dominion from 1883 to 1953.
It is increasingly common for museums and creditors to return artifacts to their countries of origin, with new cases reported almost every month. Often, this is the result of a court decision, while some cases are voluntary, symbolizing an act of atonement for ancient evils.
MUSEUM FACES ‘CULTURAL VANDALISM’ ACCUSATIONS TO SHUT DOWN ‘RACIST, SEXIST AND CAPABLE’ MEDICAL EXHIBITION
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 donated more than 72 objects, 12 Beninese bronzes, to Nigeria following a request from its government. .
Nicholas Donnell, a Boston-based attorney who specializes in instances involving art and artifacts, said there is no unusual foreign legal framework for such disputes. Unless there is transparent evidence that an artifact was acquired illegally, repatriation is largely at the discretion of the museum.
“Given the treaty and the timing, the Rosetta Stone is a legal war to win,” Donnell said.
The British Museum stated that several requests had been made for the repatriation of artifacts from countries, but did not provide The Associated Press with any main points of prestige or number. Nor did he verify whether he had ever repatriated an artifact from his collection. .
For Nigel Hetherington, archaeologist and executive director of the online educational forum Past Preserves, the museum’s lack of transparency suggests motives.
“It’s a matter of money, maintaining relevance and concern that by changing certain items, other people will avoid coming,” he said.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
Western museums have long promoted high-quality services and a larger number of visitors to justify owning global treasures. between 2011 and 2013, according to the U. S. -based Antiquities Coalition. U. S. In 2015, he discovered that cleaners at Cairo’s Egyptian Museum had broken Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s burial mask while seeking to replace the beard with superglue.
But since then, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s government has invested heavily in its antiquities. Egypt has effectively recovered thousands of smuggled foreign artifacts and plans to open a new museum where tens of thousands of items can be kept. The Grand Egyptian Museum has been in structure for more than a decade and its opening has been delayed several times.
Egypt’s plethora of ancient monuments, from the pyramids of Giza to the towering statues of Abu Simbel on the border with Sudan, is the magnet for tourism that has attracted $13 billion in 2021.
For Hanna, Egyptians’ right to access their own history must remain the priority. “How many Egyptians can pass to London or New York?”She.
The Egyptian government did not respond to a request for comment related to Egypt’s policy toward the Rosetta Stone or other Egyptian artifacts on display abroad. Hawass and Hanna said they had no hope the government would secure their return.
“The Rosetta Stone is the icon of Egyptian identity,” Hawass said. “I will use the media and materials for the (British) museum that have no rights. “