It’s one of the most familiar sights to the seasoned British Museum visitors: a throng of tourists at the opening of the Great Court into the Egyptian Galleries, crowded around one of the Museum’s most prized exhibits, the Rosetta Stone. This slab of inscribed granodiorite is one of the most recognisable of all artefacts from ancient Egypt, and it serves, both as an image and a figure of speech, as a universal symbol of translation. As is well-known, inscribed on the stela is a text in both ancient Greek and ancient Egyptian (in both the demotic and the sexier hieroglyphic script); this ready-made translation allowed the Stone to play a key role in the decipherment of ancient Egyptian language and scripts, unlocking three millennia of civilisation for serious study. If visitors read the information accompanying the Stone, they will learn that the text concerns the anniversary of the coronation of Ptolemy V. For the vast majority of visitors, this will be new information. One wonders how long it takes the average visitor to forget which Ptolemy.

The visitors crane to see the ancient inscriptions on the Stone — a king they never knew honoured in languages they don’t understand through scripts they can’t read. Meanwhile, two other pieces of text that most visitors can read, and which point more directly the real locus of the artefact’s significance, lie on its rather neglected sides. Painted in the familiar Latin alphabet are “Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801” and “Presented by King George III.” If not ignored, this ‘overlay’ is viewed with either contempt or a knowing smile and a remark about how “there wouldn’t be anything here if the British hadn’t pillaged the world.”

This familiar scene is, temporarily, displaced. The Rosetta Stone is currently being shown in a new special exhibition, Hieroglyphics, which tells the story of the decipherment of the Egyptian scripts and emergence of Egyptology as a serious discipline, as well as giving some insight into the historical role of texts in ancient Egypt. The Rosetta Stone stands near the beginning of the exhibition; at the very end is laid out another mighty incised slab, the Shabaka Stone. Like the Rosetta Stone, the Shabaka Stone has seen conspicuous modifications made to it after the initial inscription. In this case, the surface is defaced due to its later use as a millstone, rather recalling the Rosetta Stone’s tenure as part of the wall of a fort. What is different is that the damage to the Shabaka Stone is more obvious than the 1801 additions to the Rosetta Stone, and, more importantly, that the text originally inscribed is highly significant in itself. It gives both an account of the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt and the “Memphite Theology”, one of three central creation stories from official Egyptian ideology we have, in which the god Ptah plays the central role. While there is a poignancy in the Shabaka Stone’s fall from grace – for me it is a symbol of the indifference that material conditions so often show towards ‘high’ intellectual history — its later career is incidental to its significance. This is its fundamental difference from the Rosetta Stone. 

The Rosetta Stone is not a very important piece of ancient Egyptian history

The Rosetta Stone is not a very important piece of ancient Egyptian history. It is an artefact of Egyptology, the field, rather than ancient Egypt, the subject. As such, it demands reflexive reading. Its meaning today does not reside in the intention with, or context in, which it was initially carved, but depends more on its modern identification, move to Europe and role in the decipherment of Champollion and others. It is because of the last 200-odd years that it is so significant, instantly recognisable, and has its own disputes over “repatriation”. Far from being unimportant, embarrassing, or damning intrusions, the 1801 texts are as integral to the Stone as the ancient scripts inscribed on its face in antiquity. Il n’y a pas de hors-texte. It is therefore a great shame that at an exhibition concerned not only with ancient Egypt but with Egyptology and the deciphering of hieroglyphics in particular, lighting has been chosen that almost completely hides these words that are simultaneously late and essential.

Ptolemy V, the subject of the Stone’s text and the ultimate reason for its carving, was a Macedonian ruler of the 3rd and 2nd century BC. The presence of Greek on the Stone – without which it could never have become so important — points to the chronological lateness compared to more or less everything else commonly associated with ancient Egypt. Ptolemaic rule followed in the wake of Alexander’s conquest, which is typically regarded as ending the nearly 3000-year Pharaonic Period; even the Late Period, the final era of Pharaonic Egypt, is little-known and rarely celebrated in the popular imagination of either the West or Egypt. The Stone was carved more than a millennium after Tutankhamun, whom, together with the famous Berlin bust of his probable step-mother Nefertiti, is at the nexus of imagery associated with ancient Egypt. The other instantly-recognisable image of ancient Egypt, the pyramids and Sphinx at Giza, are further in time from the Stone than it is from us. Egyptologists, rightly, lament how ancient Egypt is static and timeless, even ossified, in the popular imagination — bundling the pyramids, Tutankhamun, and the Rosetta Stone under a unified banner epitomises and perpetuates this misconception. Instead, the particularities of each deserve to be emphasised.

What Egyptologists are less eager to criticise is how a very 19th-century kind of romantic nationalism makes the same “mistake” as this ossification. “Mistake” is not quite the right word —  we are here talking about a choice about symbols with which to do politics, not historical scholarship. I do not begrudge Egyptians with a political agenda making this “mistake.” Similarly, I don’t begrudge them calling for the Rosetta Stone to be moved to Egypt; it is according to their principles. I certainly do, however, begrudge Western academics processing their White guilt (or engaging in status-seeking) by demanding that everyone uncritically buy in to the principles of subaltern nationalism by shipping off prize artefacts to distant places. 

As in Greece as it sought independence from the Ottoman Empire, the formation of modern Egyptian national consciousness was an artificial affair that downplayed more recent, and more real, monotheistic history for what Western Enlightenment values saw as a more venerable pagan antiquity. I don’t mean to be harsh; all tradition is, to greater or lesser degree, invention, and hence artificial. Brazen ahistorical appropriation of symbols from the deep past as symbols of nation-building is very attractive. If only the late neolithic spread of ideas from Orkney through to southern Britain were recruited in support of unionism! I would welcome this not because there is any objective justification for it, but because I like it aesthetically and it lends itself to my politics — I would not for a moment expect an outsider to Britain to buy into it.

Similarly, there is no reason for me, or the British Museum, to buy into the historiography of Egyptian nationalism. Claims of very much meaningful cultural commonality between ancient Egypt and the modern state, particularly insofar as “the Egyptian people” goes, a volkish phrase used to elide change, are dubious. There has been substantial gene flow into Egypt since Ptolemaic times; modern and ancient inhabitants of Egypt do not belong together in any straightforward population. That may or not be important, but it does make volkish rhetoric suspect, implying the extension of the ossification of Egyptian history through to the present. The culture of the Nile valley has changed immensely since Ptolemy V’s day, most notably through the introduction of Islam, which has been a dominant theme since the 7th century, also a vector of major demographic change. The Rosetta Stone itself is an explicitly multicultural and bilingual artefact, commissioned by an “indigenous” priesthood of venerable tradition in honour of a “foreign” Greek-speaking ruler, a symbol of the hybrid nature of the Ptolemaic regime. Between its carving and modern times, Egypt has belonged to empires centred on Rome, Constantinople, Mesopotamia, Arabia, Damascus, Baghdad and more. It had been part of the Ottoman Empire for close to 300 years before the brief period of French occupation in which the Stone was identified. History is flux. Over such timescales, what is “Egypt”? What is “the Egyptian people”?

There is, in fact, no temporal wormhole providing the forces of historical influence a short-cut from antiquity to the 19th century, avoiding all of this messy, real history. Neither would anyone attempt to talk of a conceptually-coherent British identity or people over such timescales — or anyone who did would be pilloried by academics. When we as Britons look at our own history, it is easy to discern the way in which culture and identity accrete over time, mutate in unexpected directions, and suffer breaks. We are left satisfied that a Boudicca is more or less as foreign to us as a Ptolemy V — maybe much more. But if we are ill-acquainted with the history of Muslim Egypt, the corresponding exercise for that country is not possible, and we indulge out of naivety the historiographical leapfrogging that Egyptian politicians might promote out of ideology.

The mediation of Egyptology, an academic discourse, was necessary to make symbols of the deep and essentially forgotten past available to modern Egyptian politics. For all the debt Egyptology owes to “native” scholars, Coptic priests, Egyptian labourers and local knowledge, this mediation, and the associated overvaluing of Pharaonic Egypt at the expense of Muslim Egypt, is irrevocably indebted to European scholarship. Again, Egyptians are perfectly entitled to employ largely European approaches to the history of the land in which they live, but I am simultaneously entitled to raise an eyebrow when it is claimed that artefacts which matter due to the intervention of Western scholarship belong by default to the modern Egyptian state or “people”.

Academic proponents of giving the Rosetta Stone to modern Egypt claim that its continued presence in London perpetuates the original violence involved in prising it out of Egyptian hands. I argue that, in treating the relation between coloniser and colonised as consisting in nothing but predation and looting, this perspective is conceptually thoroughly colonial, just motivated by pity and guilt rather than greed or chauvinism. What I am suggesting is a genuinely postcolonial perspective which sees European powers as neither enlightened civilisers or barbaric parasites but takes seriously the entanglement between the coloniser and colonised as they separate — it is just that, despite this more symmetrical relationship, the key move in the case of the Rosetta Stone lies on the European side. This is a postmodern perspective: the scribal author is dead; coloniser and colonised are mutually dependent, and national identity is not some fixed monadic essence to be revealed, but something distributed and in a state of becoming. The conclusion of all of this is to acknowledge the debt Egyptian national identity owes to Europe — as well as the debt Egyptology owes to modern Egypt, much more fashionable to invoke — and undermine nationalist rhetoric about the Rosetta Stone.

The Rosetta Stone, then, should not be ‘returned’ to Egypt. I defend this not with claims about differences in conservation capacities or political stability between London and Cairo. Nor because of a liberal-humanist conviction that it belongs to all mankind, and therefore cannot be “returned” anywhere in particular, but ought to be wherever most people will have the chance to see it. And nor even because the Capitulation of Alexandria, signed by British, French, and Ottoman representatives, handed antiquities in French possession over to Britain. ‘Return’ itself is inappropriate, as it only became what it is in predominantly European hands: the Rosetta Stone should not be given to Egypt because Britain is entitled to claim that its importance and its presence in London are intimately wedded, and because we are not obliged to elevate the logically-posterior claims of Egyptian nationalism above our own claims. The Rosetta Stone could hardly be more at home than in a display case in London.