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.