A petition for the British Museum to return the Rosetta Stone to Egypt is being circulated by a group of Egyptian academics.
More than 2,500 people have signed on to the petition being led by two department heads at Egypt’s Arab Academy for Science, Technology & Maritime Transport that says the stone was taken as a “spoil of war.”
It calls on Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly to sort out the historic stone’s return, along with 16 other Egyptian artifacts.
“The confiscation of the Rosetta stone, among other artefacts, is an act of encroachment on Egyptian cultural property and identity, and is a direct result of cultural colonial violence against Egyptian cultural heritage,” the petition reads.
The discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 helped unlock the mysteries of Ancient Egypt.
According to the British Museum, the stone contains the same passage written in three languages — hieroglyphs, which was the written language of Egyptian priests; Demotic, the written language of common people; and ancient Greek, the language of the Greco-Macedonian rulers of Egypt who came about after Alexander the Great’s conquest.
Scholars eventually deciphered the stone and came to understand ancient Egyptian culture in greater depth.
French soldiers discovered the stone by accident during Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt from 1798 to 1801. The British Museum said the stone had been built into a very old wall.
When Napoleon was defeated in 1801, the stone was handed over to the British in the Treaty of Alexandria.
The petition says that this is a chance for Egypt to lead the rest of the Arab and African world in recovering the heritage that was looted during the colonial period. It will also be a boon for tourism to the ancient city of Rashid, where the stone was first discovered, and would be a moral good for its British stewards.
“This is a powerful opportunity for Britain to demonstrate moral leadership, and to choose to follow moral principle over profit and support the healing of the wounds inflicted by colonial powers,” the petitioners write. “An act of Parliament will allow Rosetta Stone to be restored to its rightful home in Egypt.”
Zahi Hawass, an Egyptian archaeologist and former antiquities minister, has been campaigning to have the stone returned to its original home for over the past decade.
NPR reported that he made the plea for the stone’s return in 2010 after New York’s Metropolitan Museum in New York said it would return a number of items from King Tut’s tomb.
In August of this year, Mr. Hawass renewed his effort to secure the Rosetta Stone’s return when speaking with Middle Eastern newspaper The National.
He told the newspaper he will begin sending a petition to European museums that house Egyptian artifacts this fall.
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