David Abulafia David Abulafia

Why the Rosetta Stone shouldn’t be returned to Egypt

(Credit: Getty images)

The Rosetta Stone is said to be the most visited object in the British Museum. By and large the most popular, most beautiful or most impressive objects are found at the top of the shopping list of those who want to send objects back to their place of origin. 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. This, after all is (or rather will be, after endless delays in its opening) the final resting place of Tutankhamun, 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. Treasures galore, then, a collection of ancient Egyptian art works only rivalled by the British Museum, the Louvre and the Egyptian Museum in Turin.

Despite these riches, more than 104,000 people have signed petitions calling for the return of the famous Rosetta stone. Yet the history of this object 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 Qaitbay, one of the Mamluk sultans of late medieval Egypt. These Mamluks were former Circassian slaves who had been exported from the Black Sea, mainly by Genoese merchants. Male Circassians with big muscles entered the palace guard and sometimes gained supreme power, Qaitbay being an excellent example.

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