The inauguration of the brand new Grand Egyptian Museum is the fulfillment of a silent personal desire that I have kept for thirty-five years. What is now the largest archaeological museum in the world dedicated to a single civilization almost completely fills my imagination. It still lacks the big key: the Rosetta Stone.
Summer 1990. In sweltering heat, I enter the Museum of Egyptian Antiquity, in Tahrir Square, in the center of Cairo. The quantity of artefacts, documents and archaeological pieces alluding to Egyptian civilization impressed me. I immediately thought that so much and so valuable heritage, almost piled up there, would be enough for a few museums – by European standards. The week before, I had wandered around that great country, going up to the great Aswan dam and passing through Luxor and Asyut, which allowed me to better understand this multi-millennial civilization, especially the pharaonic period, far beyond what I was taught in school books.
It was around that time that the Minister of Culture, Farouk Hosni, had the idea of bringing together in a large, modern museum the bulk of the assets that document Egyptian civilization, including the iconic tomb of Tutankhamun. In 1992, then president Hosni Mubarak announced the plan to build the large project. However, work on the ground only began in 2005.
Until the inauguration that takes place this week, the path was anything but easy. First of all, the financing: the museum will have cost a billion dollars, an astronomical sum that, even if justified by the historical value it will house, will certainly have to be amortized by the revenues from the expected five million annual visitors. But the greatest difficulties came from disruptive periods, such as the Arab Spring, which deposed Mubarak in 2011; the Covid-19 pandemic, which in 2020 and 2021 eclipsed tourism in the country; and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, right on its borders. The opening was postponed repeatedly, but now the time has come to open its twelve galleries to the world.
However, the most precious of the pieces is missing – a stone a little over one meter high and around seventy centimeters wide. In it, in about a hundred lines, is written a decree issued by the supreme council of priests and promulgated by Pharaoh Ptolemy V about 2200 years ago. The particularity is that the decree is translated into three blocks: hieroglyphic writing, demotic writing and ancient Greek. It turns out that, when it was found, the meaning of the hieroglyphs was not known, which is why, after being deciphered, it allowed – in comparison with ancient Greek – to discover this strange writing made up of symbols and, thus, opening the door to an extensive understanding of the history of Egypt.
The problem is that the Rosetta Stone was first discovered – and then stolen – by Napoleonic armies at the end of the 18th century. The English, who were also in Egypt, defeated the French in the Battle of the Nile and, in the division of the loot, kept the stone, which arrived in London in 1802 and has been in the British Museum ever since.
The Rosetta Stone is the missing key to the Grand Egyptian Museum. Its return would be a gesture that would greatly dignify the United Kingdom.