It was inevitable that the Grand Egyptian Museum outside Cairo would accompany its much-delayed opening with demands for the restitution of several of the most famous objects that have survived from the days of the Pharaohs. It was inevitable too that this effort would be fronted by the irrepressible Zahi Hawass, formerly the government minister in charge of antiquities, and now one of the most voluble ambassadors for ancient Egyptian civilization.
The history of the Rosetta Stone is not simply an Egyptian history
Fortunately he is not asking for the return of everything. If he was, the largest museum of Egyptian antiquities outside of Egypt, in Turin, would be left completely empty. The Museo Egizio owes its collection to the Savoy dynasty, who cleverly decided to concentrate on collecting Egyptian artefacts when they realised the race to acquire antiquities in the nineteenth century was focusing mainly on the classical world. As a result, you will find in Turin a famous statue of Rameses II on which Mr Hawass has set his eye.
Hawass has a shopping list. On it is a beautiful head of Nefertiti which can be seen on the famous Museum Island in the heart of Berlin. The head has not been there terribly long, as it used to be kept in West Berlin, divorced from the main Egyptian collections in East Berlin. The East Germans were sore about not being able to include it in the Berliner Ägyptischer Museum, and it was only reunited with the larger collections after the fall of the DDR.
Berlin, Turin, Paris, London and New York: these are the places with world-class museums where you will find magnificent Egyption sculptures alongside intimate items such as the marvellous models of Nile boats created more than 3,000 years ago.
As for London, what Mr Hawass would like to obtain from there is the Rosetta Stone, the key to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Rosetta Stone is said to be the most visited object in the British Museum. Yet here is a piece of debris that, if installed in the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, would look as out of place as a dirty pair of trainers in the Athenaeum. The Giza museum has become the final resting place of Tutankhamun. It is a museum rich in gold and lapis lazuli, lying in the shadow of the Great Sphinx and the three massive pyramids built by a much earlier dynasty of Pharaohs.
The history of the Rosetta Stone is not simply an Egyptian history. The inscription in three scripts, hieroglyphic, the less formal hieratic script, and classical Greek, is humdrum. It dates from 196 BC and honours a child king, Ptolemy V, recording in formulaic language royal gifts to several temples. The damaged black stone had been carted from its unknown place of origin to the foundations of a fortress at Rosetta or Rashida in the Nile Delta during the reign of Sultan Qaitbay in the late fifteenth century. He was a Mamluk, that is, a freed Circassian slave from the Black Sea who had risen, not uniquely, to command over Egypt and Syria. He was also a great builder, which explains why the Rosetta Stone was found where it was.
The Rosetta Stone was discovered by Napoleon’s engineers in 1799, during the emperor’s brief occupation of Egypt, and confiscated by the British after Napoleon was chased off. This is when the history of the Rosetta Stone really begins. It was quickly recognised as the key to the decipherment of ancient Egyptian writing. The French may not have won the stone, but they did win the race against Britain to decipher Egyptian scripts. Champollion’s demystification of hieroglyphics put to an end bizarre theories that the letters were the key to magical knowledge known to the pyramid builders which might, at a mundane level, solve the alchemist’s problem of how to manufacture gold from base metals. The Rosetta Stone is therefore a very important document in the history of European scholarship, coming at the tail end of the Age of the Enlightenment.
Nor does inscription on the Rosetta Stone illuminate the age of the Egyptian Pharaohs. It was carved when Egypt lay under the rule of the Ptolemies, a Greek dynasty that ended suddenly with the suicide of Queen Cleopatra. The Ptolemies cleverly combined ancient Egyptian culture with their own Hellenistic culture that dominated the eastern Mediterranean. They even fused Egyptian and Greek gods, creating the great god Serapis who was designed to appeal to the mixed population of their lands. The Library of Alexandria contained the largest collection of Greek literature anywhere in the ancient Mediterranean. Greek became the everyday language of large stretches of the Mediterranean and, not surprisingly, the third text on the Stone, the one that made decipherment possible, is in Greek.
This object is not a disarticulated fragment of a larger piece that might be reunited; it is certainly not an item of beauty. It has spent much of its life as a discarded piece of ancient rubbish. But its importance is global, because of the light it sheds not just on ancient Egyptian writing but because of the light it sheds on the history of European scholarship. The right place for it is in a Great Universal Museum, accessible free of charge to everyone, and situated in one of the great travel hubs of the world. Really there is only one such place: the British Museum.
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