Thaindian News

London, Dec 10 (IANS) After securing the return of some 5,000 treasures from around the world, the ‘Indiana Jones of Egypt’ wants Britain to hand back the jewel in the crown - the famed Rosetta Stone.
Without the 2,200-year-old stone tablet returning to its homeland, Egyptian history remains “incomplete”, the crusading Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass said Wednesday on a visit to London.

Dating back to 196 BC, the stunning tablet was discovered by Napoleon’s French forces near the port of Rosetta in 1799 and seized from them by the British two years later. It has been part of the British Museum collection since 1802.

An edict in honour of the Pharaoh Ptolemy V, its inscriptions in three different languages - Latin, hieroglyphic and the ancient Egyptian script Demotic - helped scholars unlock the written secrets of ancient Egypt.

“We own that stone. The motherland should own this,” Hawass, who heads Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, told Al Jazeera television.

Calling it an “icon of Egyptian identity”, he said the object must be returned to Egypt on a permanent basis for its upcoming multi-million dollar national museum — planned to be the world’s biggest.

“For all of our history, our heritage was stolen from us. They [the British Museum] kept it in a dark, badly lit room until I came and requested it. Suddenly it became important to them.”

The Museum said it was considering a request for a short-term loan to Egypt, while Roy Clare, head of Britain’s Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, said the stone must stay in London.

The awe-inspiring first sight of the dark granite tablet, it is said, brought the French Army instinctively to a state of attention: “It halted itself and, by one spontaneous impulse, grounded its arms.”