In July 1799, during Napoleon’s brief occupation of Egypt, Captain Pierre-François Bouchard, an army engineer supervising the reconstruction of the Ottoman fort near the port of Rosetta, extracted a lump of dark granite from under the crumbling walls, covered in ancient writing.
The first sight of the Rosetta Stone was so remarkable that the Napoleonic Army, it was said, immediately snapped to attention: “It halted itself and, by one spontaneous impulse, grounded its arms.”
An edict in honour of Ptolemy V, the Macedonian-Greek Pharaoh, written in three scripts, deciphered by a British and a French scholar, the stone not only unlocked the written secrets of Ancient Egypt, but stands as a vivid symbol of how intellectual changes move with physical artefacts, by conquest, colonisation and trade, but also through the free, borderless exchange of ideas.
This object — partly Hellenic in origin, Ancient Egyptian in provenance, the subject of Anglo-French scholarship and an object of universal reverence and importance — is now the focus of a furious repatriation debate.
Zahi Hawass, the formidable secretary-general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, has demanded that the stone, which he calls an “icon of Egyptian identity”, be returned from the British Museum to Egypt. “We own that stone,” he told al-Jazeera television recently. “The motherland should own this.”
For Dr Hawass, and many others in so-called “source” countries, this is a simple issue of restoring looted cultural property: “For all of our history, our heritage was stolen from us. They [the British Museum] kept it in a dark, badly lit room until I came and requested it.”
There are several objections to this, beginning with what he means by “we” and “the motherland”. Modern Egypt did not exist in 1799, let alone in 196BC, when the stone was carved. Unlike some controversial items in Western museums, the stone was not smuggled away, but handed over to the British as part of a legal treaty, signed not only by the French and British, but by the Ottoman Government in Egypt.
As for the absurd notion that it was undervalued and poorly exhibited: the Rosetta Stone has been on almost continuous, prominent display since 1802, the single most visited object in the entire museum.
But more than that, the Rosetta Stone is an emblem of universality, and a product of the multiple cultures that existed in the 2nd century BC, in what we now call Egypt. Dr Hawass, a brilliant and inspiring defender of the past, has selected the wrong object over which to fight a narrow, nationalistic political campaign for “repatriation”.
If ever there was a genuinely global object, deserving of a place in a world museum, it is this: the text itself is insignificant, and very boring. Its importance lies in how it was moved outside Egypt, and deciphered: a chunk of builders’ rubble that changed the way we think.
The Rosetta Stone describes a tax amnesty for temple priests, essentially a tax break for fat cats 2,200 years ago. It is toadying in the extreme: “Ptolemy, the ever living, beloved by Ptah, the God manifest and gracious . . .” Blah, blah, ptah. But, crucially, it is sycophantic in three distinct languages: Ancient Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphs and the everyday language of the people.
The inscription was a reflection of cultural diversity and colonial politics, aimed at three separate constituencies: the Greek government, Egyptian locals and the Ancient Egyptian gods. Deciphering these parallel texts restored a lost chapter of history, enabling linguists to begin deciphering hieroglyphics and decoding 4,000 years of Egypt’s past.
It was extracted from the tangle of history through international rivalry, but it came to be understood through international co-operation. Thomas Young, British scientist and polymath, deciphered parts of the demotic text (mostly during weekends in Worthing) and offered up his findings in the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1819. Jean-François Champollion, the French Egyptologist, corresponded with Young, and produced his own breakthrough in 1822.
Instead of complaining about being pipped to the script, Young was delighted: “Were I ever so much the victim of the bad passions, I should feel nothing but exaltation at Mr Champollion’s success.” Young was a true son of the Enlightenment, fascinated by discovery for its own sake: in addition to the Rosetta code, he left us the word “energy”, as applied to science, “Young’s modulus” of elasticity and “Young’s principles” in life insurance.
But it is Young’s principles of openness to the intellectual riches of ancient objects that should inform the argument over cultural property. Instead of debating ownership and trying to impose modern notions of political sovereignty on ancient cultural patrimony, the argument should be about how to bring the world’s cultural riches to the widest possible audience, regardless of where they physically reside.
Arguments about “stolen” artefacts and national identity seem oddly old-fashioned in a world where the internet enables every object in a public collection to be seen and appreciated anywhere on the planet.
Some curators, fearful of the insistence that all cultural artefacts must stay in the country of discovery, argue for a return of the system of “partage”, whereby discoveries were shared between the source country and the finders. In a globalised world, this system should be universal, allowing the widest possible exchange of artefacts and the ideas that go with them, irrespective of national boundaries and political pride.
The Rosetta Stone is not a national icon, as Dr Hawass maintains, but an international symbol, as demonstrated by its idiomatic usage: the word “Rosetta” has come to mean not just unlocking ideas, but spreading them. Some ideas, and some objects, are so universally important that they demand that we stand spontaneously to attention.
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Ben Macintyre is Writer at Large for The Times and contributes a regular column. His earlier roles at The Times include being editor of the Weekend Review, parliamentary sketchwriter and bureau chief in Washington and Paris. He has also published a number of historical non-fiction books
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