The Rosetta Stone: a war transfer still disputed

In 1801, in Alexandria, a British colonel named Tomkyns Hilgrove Turner went to the house of General Abdallah Jacques de Menou. Menou had commanded the French army in Egypt. It had surrendered to British and Ottoman forces, and the surrender ended on 2 September. Turner came with an artillery detachment. He had come for a slab of dark stone. By his own account, which napoleon.org publishes, he took it from the general’s house.

The slab is the Rosetta Stone. It was carved in 196 BC. It carries a decree of priests for the boy king Ptolemy V, written in hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek. The British Museum says French soldiers found it in July 1799, while they dug foundations at a fort near Rashid, which Europeans called Rosetta. An officer, Pierre-François Bouchard, saw that it mattered. The museum gives 15 July as the usual day but calls the early accounts vague. Egypt’s ministry marks the find on 19 July.

The terms of the surrender covered the French collections. Article 16 of the Capitulation of Alexandria, as later quoted, made the antiquities public property, to be disposed of by the allied generals. Menou said the stone was his private property. The British commander, General John Hely-Hutchinson, insisted. Turner writes that Menou gave way and said he was forced. Turner sailed with the stone on a captured French frigate, and it reached Portsmouth in February 1802. According to the scholar Bénédicte Savoy, Hutchinson wrote that this was a fair return for French removals of art from Rome. The stone entered the British Museum in 1802.

The two sides read these events differently. The British Museum says the stone became British property under the Treaty of Alexandria. In 2022 it told the Associated Press that an Ottoman admiral signed for Egypt, because the Ottoman sultan nominally ruled it. Two petitions that year, one from the archaeologist Monica Hanna and one from Zahi Hawass, a former Egyptian antiquities minister, said Egypt had no say in the agreement. They call the transfer plunder. A US art-law specialist, Nicholas Donnell, told the Associated Press that a legal case would be hard to win. No case has been brought. Two painted inscriptions on the stone’s sides read “Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801” and “Presented by King George III”.

Egypt has asked in different ways. In December 2009 Hawass offered to drop a demand for permanent return in exchange for a three-month loan. The museum said it had no official request for permanent return. The Grand Egyptian Museum near Giza opened on 1 November 2025. Hawass told the BBC he wanted three objects back, among them the Rosetta Stone.

On 4 December 2025 Mohamed Ismail Khaled, secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, said Egypt would love to have it back. He said it left Egypt unlawfully in wartime. The Standard reports that the British Museum replied that Egypt had submitted no request, and that it would consider loan requests for any part of its collection.

The latest report is dated 16 July 2026. The National says the stone is still in the British Museum. It says the 2022 petition has about 350,000 signatures, a figure it attributes to the Egyptian newspaper Al Shorouk. Hawass plans an international campaign if the petition reaches one million. No one is accused of an offence.