July 12, 1999

Egypt in No Mood to Celebrate Bicentenary of Rosetta Stone's Discovery

By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

AIRO -- Egypt has no plans to celebrate Thursday's bicentenary of the discovery of the Rosetta stone as long as the key that opened the door to the language of the Pharaohs remains in British hands, officials said here Sunday.

"Our treasure was stolen. What are we going to celebrate? Its absence?" asked Mohammad al-Soghayar, head of the Egyptian antiquities office.

"If we recover it, we will celebrate its return," he told AFP.

The stone was discovered in the northern village of Rosetta (known as Rashid in Arabic) on July 15, 1799 by French Captain Pierre Bouchard during his country's expedition to Egypt.

The basalt rock, now on display in the British Museum in London, allowed Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion to decipher hieroglyphics, the symbols used by the ancient Egyptians, because it contained a 190 B.C. decree from Ptolemy V written in both hieroglyphics and ancient Greek.

Egyptian antiquities officials are pessimistic they will ever secure the stone's return from the British authorities.

Egyptian officials said in 1996 they would ask Western countries to hand back Pharaonic period masterpieces, including the Rosetta stone, so that they could exhibit them in a new museum to be built by the Pyramids.

But Soghayar said it would be difficult to recover them using the courts since "UNESCO agreements on recovering antiquities grant the right to recover only items stolen after 1971."

Recovery of the Rosetta stone would depend on a "gentleman's agreement" between Britain and Egypt, he said.

But government daily Al-Ahram noted that Egyptian antiquities were good business for Britain -- most of the six million people who visit the British Museum each year do so to see its Egyptian treasures, its director Robert Anderson told the paper.