Rosetta Stone - From French To British Possession

From French To British Possession

After the surrender, a dispute arose over the fate of French archaeological and scientific discoveries in Egypt, including a group of artefacts, biological specimens, notes, plans and drawings collected by the members of the commission. Menou refused to hand them over, claiming that they belonged to the Institute. British General John Hely-Hutchinson refused to relieve the city until Menou gave in. Scholars Edward Daniel Clarke and William Richard Hamilton, newly arrived from England, agreed to examine the collections in Alexandria and claimed to have found many artefacts that the French had not revealed. In a letter home, Clarke said that "we found much more in their possession than was represented or imagined".

When Hutchinson claimed all materials were property of the British Crown, a French scholar, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, said to Clarke and Hamilton that they would rather burn all their discoveries—referring ominously to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria—than turn them over. Clarke and Hamilton pleaded the French scholars' case and Hutchinson finally agreed that items such as natural history specimens would be the scholars' private property. Menou quickly claimed the stone, too, as his private property; had this been accepted, he would have been able to take it to France. Equally aware of the stone's unique value, General Hutchinson rejected Menou's claim. Eventually an agreement was reached, and the transfer of the objects was incorporated into the Capitulation of Alexandria signed by representatives of the British, French and Ottoman forces.

How exactly the stone was transferred into British hands is not clear, as contemporary accounts differ. Colonel Tomkyns Hilgrove Turner, who was to escort it to England, claimed later that he had personally seized it from Menou and carried it away on a gun-carriage. In a much more detailed account, Edward Daniel Clarke stated that a French "officer and member of the Institute" had taken him, his student John Cripps, and Hamilton secretly into the back streets behind Menou's residence and revealed the stone hidden under protective carpets among Menou's baggage. According to Clarke, their informant feared that the stone might be stolen if French soldiers saw it. Hutchinson was informed at once and the stone was taken away—possibly by Turner and his gun-carriage.

Turner brought the stone to England aboard the captured French frigate HMS Egyptienne, landing in Portsmouth in February 1802. His orders were to present it and the other antiquities to King George III. The King, represented by the War Secretary Lord Hobart, directed that it should be placed in the British Museum. According to Turner's narrative, he urged—and Hobart agreed—that before its final deposit in the museum, the stone should be presented to scholars at the Society of Antiquaries of London, of which Turner was a member. It was first seen and discussed there at a meeting on March 11, 1802.

During the course of 1802, the Society created four plaster casts of the inscriptions, which were given to the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh and to Trinity College Dublin. Soon afterwards, prints of the inscriptions were made and circulated to European scholars. Before the end of 1802, the stone was transferred to the British Museum, where it is located today. New inscriptions painted in white on the left and right edges of the slab stated that it was "Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801" and "Presented by King George III".

The stone has been exhibited almost continuously in the British Museum since June 1802. During the middle of the 19th century, it was given the inventory number "EA 24", "EA" standing for "Egyptian Antiquities". It was part of a collection of ancient Egyptian monuments captured from the French expedition, including a sarcophagus of Nectanebo II (EA 10), the statue of a high priest of Amun (EA 81) and a large granite fist (EA 9). The objects were soon discovered to be too heavy for the floors of Montagu House (the original building of The British Museum), and they were transferred to a new extension that was built onto the mansion. The Rosetta Stone was transferred to the sculpture gallery in 1834 shortly after Montagu House was demolished and replaced by the building that now houses the British Museum. According to the museum's records, the Rosetta Stone is its most-visited single object and a simple image of it has been the museum's best selling postcard for several decades.

The Rosetta Stone was originally displayed at a slight angle from the horizontal, and rested within a metal cradle that was made for it, which involved shaving off very small portions of its sides to ensure that the cradle fitted securely. It originally had no protective covering, and despite the efforts of attendants to ensure that it was not touched by visitors, by 1847 it was found necessary to place it in a protective frame. Since 2004, the conserved stone has been on display in a specially built case in the centre of the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery. A replica of the Rosetta Stone as it would have appeared to early 19th-century visitors—without a case and free to touch—is now available in the King's Library of the British Museum.

Toward the end of the First World War, in 1917, the museum was concerned about heavy bombing in London and moved the Rosetta Stone to safety along with other portable objects of value. The stone spent the next two years 15.24 metres (50 ft) below ground level in a station of the Postal Tube Railway at Mount Pleasant near Holborn. Other than during wartime, the Rosetta Stone has left the British Museum only once: for one month in October 1972, to be displayed alongside Champollion's Lettre at the Louvre in Paris on the 150th anniversary of its publication. Even when the Rosetta Stone was undergoing conservation measures in 1999, the work was done in the gallery so that it could remain visible to the public.