The British Museum is finally coming under more and more pressure to repatriate the antiquities held in its collections. The latest request came from Egypt, in particular from the Egyptian archaeologist and former Minister of Antiquities of his country, Zahi Hawass, who told the National Gazette of the United Arab Emirates that a new campaign would be launched, including with the goal of returning the famous Rosetta Column (196 BC). BC), which has been in the British fund since 1802.

The request, which came weeks after Oxford and Cambridge Universities announced that they would return to Nigeria 213 items from the Benin Bronzes collection (as Germany also pledged to do with 1,100 artifacts from the same collection held by its institutions), he is expected to be supported by several more Egyptian intellectuals whom Hawass is approaching to sign a memorandum that will be sent to various museums in Europe in October and will cover other Egyptian antiquities. In particular, in addition to the Rosetta Column, Hawass will demand the return of the bust of Nefertiti (circa 1340 BC), stored in the Neues Museum in Berlin, as well as the ceiling of the Dendera Zodiac (50 BC). ) located in the Louvre.

The international media is already comparing Hawass’s request with other similar requests, such as Greece’s request to the British Museum for the repatriation of the Parthenon sculptures. Hawass himself has also campaigned on the issue for many years, and while some of his methods have been deemed controversial by his peers, he has managed to repatriate several Egyptian artifacts in the past, most notably during his tenure as antiquities minister in 2011.

The famous Rosetta Column was opened in 1799 and has been in the British Foundation since 1802.

A few years earlier, in 2007, Hawass requested a loan of the same three antiquities he claims today to be displayed in the long-delayed Grand Egyptian Museum, which is expected to open its doors in 2022. were sent from Hawass in 2019, but even then all institutions responded negatively.

“I believe that these three objects are unique and their homeland should be Egypt. We have collected all the evidence that these three items were stolen from Egypt,” Hawass said in an interview with National, also stressing that the European world is now aware of the problem of repatriation of antiquities.

Commenting in the same publication on recent climate change in similar cases, Alexander Herman, director of the UK Foundation for Art and Law, said that “there is a change in the atmosphere on these issues, with old arguments that have dominated for a long time. time is time to loosen.”

It is noted that the Rosetta Column (the study of which contributed to the deciphering of hieroglyphs) was found in the city of the same name in 1799 by a French officer, and a few years later was captured by British troops and sent to Great Britain. . The bust of Nefertiti was discovered by the German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt in 1912 in Amarna and, according to the laws of that time, was included in the indexes of the financier of the excavations. Finally, a sandstone ceiling depicting the Zodiac, found at Dendera by the Frenchman Vivant Denon in 1799, was brought to Paris in 1822.