Rosetta Stone-Egypt's Property?

French linguist Jean-Francois Champollion deciphered the Rosetta Stone and cracked the hieroglyphic code.

Egypt calls on UK to return Rosetta Stone

Egypt renewed its request for the British Museum to return the prized Rosetta stone to its country of origin.

In an interview with the Evening Standard, director of the new Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) Tarek Tawfik said he was engaged in a “vivid discussion” regarding the return of the stone, which had allowed 19th-century scholars to understand and translate Egyptian hieroglyphs for the first time in modern history.¹

The artefact became a point of contention between Egypt and its host country ever since.

French soldiers discover the Rosetta Stone in Egypt.

French soldiers discover the Rosetta Stone in Egypt.²

In 1798, when Napoleon Bonaparte set out to seize Egypt—as a way to cut off Britain’s access to India he brought along 167 scientists and scholars. On July 19, 1799, an officer named Pierre-François Bouchard made a strange discovery while reinforcing a fort near the town of Rashid (Rosetta): a black basalt slab about four feet long and two-and-a-half feet wide, covered with ancient writing. The stone had been used to fortify an old wall, but Bouchard recognized its importance and reported the find at once.

Scholars soon realized that there were three languages inscribed onto the stone: Ancient Greek, Demotic, and Egyptian hieroglyphics. The Greek passage revealed that the stone had been inscribed by second-century priests proclaiming their fealty to 13-year-old Ptolemy V, and (more importantly) that the three passages all said the same thing. This made the stone the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics, whose meaning had, until that point, eluded archaeologists.

The stone was taken to Cairo for further study, and in 1800, reproductions were made and shared with other scholars in Europe, though the hieroglyphic script wouldn’t be fully deciphered for more than 20 years. When the British defeated French forces in Egypt in 1801, they seized the Rosetta stone and brought it back to London, where it was presented to the Society of Antiquaries before being transferred to the British Museum, where it has been on display—aside from a short break during the First World War—ever since.³ 

Jean-Francois Champollion deciphered the Rosetta Stone and cracked the hieroglyphic code.

In 1820, Champollion embarked in earnest on the project of decipherment of hieroglyphic script, soon overshadowing the achievements of British polymath Thomas Young⁴ who had made the first advances in decipherment before 1819. In 1822, Champollion published his first breakthrough in the decipherment of the Rosetta hieroglyphs, showing that the Egyptian writing system was a combination of phonetic and ideographic signs – the first such script discovered.⁵

1. Egyptian museum calls for Rosetta Stone to be returned from UK after 200 years.The Telegraph. November 6, 2018.

2. Giblin, James Cross. The Riddle of the Rosetta Stone : Key to Ancient Egypt. 1st ed. New York: Crowell, 1990.

Ray, J. D. The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007.

3. Budge, E. A. Wallis (Ernest Alfred Wallis). The Rosetta Stone in the British Museum : the Greek, Demotic, and Hieroglyphic Texts of the Decree Inscribed on the Rosetta Stone Conferring Additional Honours on Ptolemy V Epiphanes (203-181 B.C.) with English Translations and a Short History of the Decipherment of the Egyptian Hieroglyphs, and an Appendix Containing Translations of the Stelae of Ṣân (Tanis) and Tall Al-Maskhûṭah. New York: AMS Press, 1976. Print.

4. Buchwald, Jed Z., and Diane Greco Josefowicz. The Riddle of the Rosetta : an English Polymath, a French Polyglot, and the Meaning of Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2020.

5. Meyerson, Daniel. The Linguist and the Emperor : Napoleon and Champollion’s Quest to Decipher the Rosetta Stone. 1st edition. New York: Ballantine Books, 2004