If it weren’t for humanity’s passion for cryptography, one of the world’s most famous artefacts would just be a broken slab of stone
This week’s 200th anniversary of the decoding of the Rosetta Stone is generating a rare level of patriotic excitement. A celebration is under way in Egypt, which has been petitioning for the return of the stone. A summer of love for its decoder, Jean-François Champollion, culminates in France this week with the opening of an exhibition at the Louvre’s satellite museum in Lens. Meanwhile, the British Museum – where it has lain in state since docking on British shores – is gearing up for its own blockbuster exhibition.
Yet the arrival of the “very curious stone” in the UK in 1802 warranted only the briefest of mentions in the London press, which reported that it was among a shipload of Egyptian antiquities collected by the French army that had become “the property of the conquerors”. These were spoils of a war, not against the Egyptians but against Napoleonic forces, signed over under the Treaty of Alexandria.
