WHO OWNS THE ROSETTA STONE?

I had to attend a meeting the other day in the City of London and after it was over decided bravely to exercise my limbs by walking at least half the way back to Paddington. Burdened by a laptop and file laden shoulder bag I soon began to wonder whether this was actually an entirely sensible decision, but I was making for the British museum and I determined resolutely to get there come what may.

An hour later I stumbled across Russell Square (navigating without a map I had come a little too far north) and crept wearily in at the Museum’s back entrance, where several gigantic Chinese bells stand guard over the staircase.

Apart from offering the welcome pause, I had wanted to reach the Museum to look at the Rosetta Stone which occupies an important place in some research I’m doing at the moment. There it was, ferociously surrounded by an army of the international young flashing their cameras at this irregular and broken lump of dark granitoid rock with its elegantly traced inscriptions in three scripts and languages

People know it is famous and I suppose if you pressed them they might mutter something about giving us the key to deciphering hieroglyphs, but I’m not sure if the rock were to be placed in a corner with no more than a simple label whether anyone would give it a second glance. In itself it is not very interesting, though its delicate inscriptions are: the rock however is merely their carrier. Besides, the inscription was addressed to the generality of Egypt’s temples in around 200 BC, so there must be a large number of equivalent rocks broken and buried somewhere in those dusky sands.

This Stone came all the way up to Rosetta (modern day Rashid) at the mouth of one of the Nile’s multiple branches, far from where it was quarried near Aswan. For half a millennium it did duty proclaiming its Temple free from taxes. But when the Temple fell to ruin and was broken up the Stone was broken up with it and became no more than a piece of hardcore incorporated by the local Sultan, in the wall of his coastal fort, four miles north from Rosetta.

And there it stayed, for another half millennium until one day in July 1799 some French soldiers, repairing and strengthening the Fort happened to come across it with their picks.

We know the name of the man credited with the Stone’s ‘discovery.’ He is a French captain called Pierre-Francois Bouchard, but whether he really would have been toiling in the heat of the Egyptian midsummer sun with pick and shovel seems unlikely. More likely others pulled it out of the wall and he had the nous to see that it might be interesting, Napoleon (at the time making his way back from the besieging Acre) being particularly keen on collecting the artifacts of ancient Egypt.

Anyway the Stone was carefully put aside and carted off to Cairo where it was covered in printers ink and served, quite literally, as a ‘litho-plate’ from which a number of lithographs of the inscriptions were made; though as these would have added to the deciphering complexity by being a mirror image of what was on the stone, the French also made a number of wax rubbings as well to send back to France.

The Stone itself was given pride of place in a new Institute in Cairo, created to accommodate all the treasures unearthed by Napoleon’s corps of wise men, 167 of whom, in various grades and categories, had been brought over specially for the purpose of describing Egypt’s antiquities.

And there in the Institute in Cairo the Rosetta Stone might comfortable have reposed. It might still be there even to this day had not Napoleon’s designated successor as master of Egypt, Jean-Baptiste Kléber, not been assassinated the following summer by a knife wielding fanatic.

What happened then can just be made out in two hundred year old and now barely perceptible paint marks on the side of the Rosetta Stone itself where the inscription reads: ‘Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801.’ It was then sent to Britain, nominally in the name of the ageing George III. It entered the British Museum in London in 1802 and there, more or less, it has been ever since.

Whether Kléber would have succeeded in defeating the combined British and Turkish forces with a weakened French army already weary from disease and two years of service which had included three major battles against adversaries far superior in numbers, is one of history’s unknowns.

Before he was assassinated Kléber defeated a Turkish army estimated to have been six times the size of his own, but his successor, Jacques-François de Menou, was not so skilled at defensive warfare and so the Rosetta Stone - along with a host of other artifacts deemed ‘spoils of war’ - was removed from the Cairo Institute to be shipped to London.

For a long time now, to bring the story up to date, Egypt has been demanding the return of the Rosetta Stone. Not unreasonably the country claims ownership, though it has indicated it may drop this claim if satisfactory loan arrangements were to be negotiated.

This brings us to an interesting question. Should such artifacts be returned and if so what would that mean for the great museums of the world? British consciences in 1801 were salved by deeming the Stone (and the other antiquities) French treasures, rather than Egyptian, and arguing that they didn’t exist (other than as building material) before the French invasion. And it is true that the Egyptians of the time cared as little for their ancient heritage as fifty years ago we in Britain cared about Georgian terraces. But is that the point?

For it seems clear that the French had intended a major part of the antiquities to remain in Egypt - why else build the Institute? - and therefore the plan was to preserve them in their country of origin.

These days when copies can be made so easily and indistinguishable from the real thing does it matter where the originals are kept? This is a question that is relevant to museums across the world. The British Museum fights fiercely to keep its treasures. But is it right to?

Whatever the answer may be, the question is uncomfortable.

I NEED MORE TIME TO READ

Tidying the bedroom this morning and mournfully discarding to the waste bin those beguiling but unaffordable catalogues from the likes of the White Company, I hesitated at a growing pile of unread magazines by my bedside and, next to it, another pile of books, most similarly unread or only dipped into. “I must devote more time to reading,” I concluded. But how?

I have a friend, more erudite than I, who kindly passes me copies of the London Review of Books, a most marvellous publication with all sorts and manners of articles and the best line in ‘personal’ ads of the ‘man seeking bisexual woman for interactive seminars in the library’ type. Several copies of the LRB nestle in my unread pile.

Extracting one at random my eye falls on Hilary Mantel (whose ‘Experiment with Love’ is one of the books in the bedside pile that I have actually finished. A dark-ish sort of a novel, for those interested, about growing up and rites of passage and two girls from very different backgrounds who end up in the same hall of residence in a London college. There’s ample comedy, too, among the sombre tones while little hammers of Mantel's prose trigger intriguing resonances from the bells of one’s own forgotten adolescence).

In the LRB Hilary Mantel is expounding not about growing-up but about hypochondria. This in the course of reviewing a book compellingly entitled ‘Nine Hypochondriac Lives,’ including, apparently, not only the ancient Boswell and Darwin but also modern figures like Warhol. Which is as interesting a piece of trivia, I warrant, as any you will find today.

When we lived in Essex and I worked in London I could count on the best part of two hours a day sitting on a train or a bus and looking to be occupied. It was prime reading time and I used to read a lot then. In fact I rather took this reading window for granted so that when these commuting journeys ended my reading shut down too, something that I never took much into account at the time, busy as I was with the preoccupation of a new domestic establishment about as far from Essex, spiritually and geographically as you can get. My reading has never really caught up since.

And yet each day I hear of a book I'd like to read I thought as I dutifully cleared away the debris of a week's untidiness and returned one or two books to the shelves and added more magazines to the pile. ‘Archeology Today’ - whatever persuaded me to subscribe to that, I wondered? - and the Spectator which for some reason I love despite its tacky political articles - to which I never find quite adequate time to do justice.

So how to find a new hour a day for reading? Or, to put it another way: what can I spend an hour less on when everything I do demands more time rather than less?

*************

The fabulous Rain Or Shine Theatre company who concluded their winter tour at our little theatre with a spectacular production of ‘A Christmas Carol’ will be performing ‘The Importance of Being Earnest,’ outdoors, in the summer.

Now we have here in the town a walled garden that would make a fine venue for one of the dates they have free and so Rain or Shine wrote to the Council - without reply apparently. So they asked me for help. I telephoned the Vale of Glamorgan County Council who manage the gardens only to be told by someone who sounded about 16 and on work experience to speak to our own local Community Council. Which I duly did and in an exchange of answerphone messages it emerged that the gardens were, after all the Vale’s responsibility. So I go back to the Vale.

There followed a Kafka-esque exchange: I ask to speak to the person who is in charge of the gardens but am told (again by the work-experience 16 year old) that she isn’t allowed to put me through but that she will take details of my ‘concern’ and relay them to the man in question.

I ask for an email address but she tells me that if I tell her what it is that I want she will herself send an email to this person and he will then reply to me within 5 days!

So I explain - who I am and ask whether the gardens will be free and whether the Vale would permit a performance by a visiting theatre company - but it is clear that what I am trying to get across is too long and complicated. She doesn't really understand, but I have no alternative but to leave my little request with her. Needless to say I haven’t heard anything either.

John Townsend who in the seventies wrote an excellent book on management advice called ‘Up the Organisation’ suggested that managers of organisations should telephone themselves pseudonymously from time to time to get an idea of how the organisation responds to members of the public. You can see why.

What really irks me though is the missed opportunity to stage an event that will bring a hundred or more visitors to the town. It feels like the dead and unfeeling hand of public bureaucracy. It's perhaps why I read the Spectator (when I have time!).

A MEMORY: THE COMB AND THE CRAB

ExmoorJane tagged me the other day to produce a 'memory.' I remonstrated, protesting that I had far too many memories; how could I pick just one? Then I remembered that I did have one that was already written up. It is in the form of a story but the events in it, the found crab and the lost comb, are completely true. Make of it what you will.

******

"I could tell you a story." I smiled, sweetly. Better than facing hordes of kids in the café.

"Not if it's a love story, Fennie, like most of your stories are." Helen yawned, a bored sort of yawn.

"No," I said. "This one isn't. And then, perhaps it is, in a kind of a way. It’s a true story, too. Anyway it's about a crab……and Karma."

"A what and what?"

"A crab….and Karma - that's how what happens to you in this life depends on how you’ve treated the world. Life gives you back what you give it."

She pulled her sunglasses down from the thick black hair on top of her head. "I'm sitting comfortably," she whispered, doubtfully.

And so I began.

"As you know we were staying with Charlotte in Brittany last summer. Her house is only about five minutes walk from this lovely little fishing port. There's a superb beach as well. Must be a mile long - beautiful yellow sand, shelving gently.

“Charlotte’s son-in-law Karim was there as well. He’s the one who spends all his time
fishing for shrimps."

"Shouldn't one shrimp for shrimps?" asked Helen, who can be irritatingly facetious at times.

"At low tide a veritable army of men - I guess women are far too sensible to enjoy this sort of thing - appears on the beach, wading out knee deep on the sands with a long pole thing from which hangs a kind of net. This disturbs the little grey shrimps that feed in the shallow water and they fly up into the net."

"But I thought this was a story about a crab?"

"It is! You see it's not only shrimps that fill the net. Sometimes you find an occasional crab."

"At last, we're getting somewhere," murmured Helen. "Now all we need is the Karma."

"One evening it was my turn to prepare supper. Karim had been out as usual and had helpfully deposited his shrimp catch in the kitchen sink. Now once out of the sea these little beasties die rapidly and unless they are cooked directly they go off and make a terrible smell. At the very least therefore I would have to serve the shrimps as a starter.

"But the problem with eating shrimps everyday is that you quickly run out of ideas of how to serve them. What could I do? But then I remembered we had not yet had shrimps with mayonnaise and that seemed a serviceable idea.

"I opened the fridge. There was no mayonnaise of course - but there were eggs, and we had oil and …..

“And.....a crab?”

“No - not quite! Well, the eggs turned out to be hard-boiled - don’t ask - and so I had to rush down to the supermarket to buy some. And when I came back there he was - in the sink - he had emerged from the shrimps.”

Helen rolled her eyes.

"The crab I mean! There he was - a little green fellow with eyes on stalks sidling across the forest of shrimps in the sink. They – that is the shrimps - had long since expired in their tap water bath, but he – if it was indeed a he, for I presume crabs come in more than one gender - was very much alive-o. I picked him out of the water and set him on the edge of the sink. His eyes swivelled maliciously as he scuttled about his little corner.

"He was tiny - about the size of a 10 penny piece – all legs and jaws and claws and feelers - a miniature masterpiece of arthropodic engineering. 'Help,' he seemed to say, and he fell backwards into the shrimps again.

"But what can you do with a baby crab with swivelling eyes? To consign him live to the boiling water I had prepared for the dead shrimps was something I could not do. Equally, I could not simply throw him out of the window or into the bin. Life, where possible, must be preserved after all – even that of inedible baby crabs.

"So there was no alternative, good follower of the Buddhist principle that I am, but to wrap him in some kitchen towel, get into the car again and drive him down to the sea.
I sneaked out of the house, not daring to admit that supper would be even later than it already was owing to my one woman mission to rescue a crab.

"I parked the car at the port - by now it was quite dark - and there, standing on the arm of the port jetty, with the wind whistling about my ears and the sea all turbulent below, I unwrapped the little fellow. He climbed over my hand and gripped my finger with his tiny claws.

"Maybe, I reflected, he had become enamoured of his recent life among the shrimps, or maybe he had just been fascinated to watch me at work in the kitchen. Maybe, he had enjoyed being chauffeured through the evening streets. Whatever it was, he was refusing to let go of my finger. I had pictured an appropriately sentimental parting, but in the end I just had to shake him off. He sailed away on the wind, back to his dark sea home far below.

"Will he, I thought as I drove home, now be telling lesser crabs about his life among the humans? Will he, as an old crab, ‘strip his sleeve and show his scars…remembering with advantages' - as Shakespeare puts it - the deeds he did that day? Will he be caught again and from another kitchen, some years in the future, confidently expect another safe return to the sea? Or will his life end in cruel and banal fashion as dinner for a seagull or codfish?"

I paused.

"You turn sentimentality into an art form, Fennie," said Helen cynically. I suppose now you will be telling me that saving this crab boosted your Karma credits and that now one day you will win the Lottery, or some such."

"But that's the funny thing. We joke about such coincidences but one really happened, Helen. The day before I had been swimming and I'd taken along a little blue plastic hair comb in my beach bag. It's not special or valuable but it is a very odd design. I've never seen another one remotely like it. And I've had it quite a long time. So when it went missing I was vexed. I wasn't exactly sure where I'd lost it. Maybe on the beach, maybe in the house, maybe in-between. But I thought it would turn up.

"But the day after the crab incident, I was walking along the beach, right at the water's edge. The waves were washing my feet. I told you it's a long beach - about a mile long and I was a long way past the spot where we usually swim. But just then, suddenly for some reason, something made me look down. And there in the surf at my feet was my little blue comb, just washing in on the tide.

"I picked it up, hardly believing my eyes. Incredible, I thought, is that coincidence or Karma or what?"

For a moment Helen was silent.