Many letters passed at length, on consideration that the care in preserving the insects and animals had made the property in some degree private, it was relinquished by Lord Hutchinson but the artificial, which consisted of antiquities and Arabian manuscripts, among the former of which was the Rosetta Stone, was insisted upon by the noble General with his usual zeal for science. This was refused on the part of the French General to be fulfilled by saying they were all private property. “By the sixteenth article of the capitulation of Alexandria, the siege of which city terminated the labours of the British army in Egypt, all the curiosities, natural and artificial, collected by the French Institute and others, were to be delivered up to the captors.
“The Rosetta Stone having excited much attention in the learned world, and in this Society in particular, I request to offer them, through you, some account of the manner it came into the possession of the British army, and by what means it was brought to this country, presuming it may not be unacceptable to them. In a letter to the Society of Antiquaries in London, Colonel Tomkyns Hilgrove Turner relates the story of how he escorted the stone back to Britain, where it was placed, and remains to this day, in the British Museum. Menou tried claiming that the stone was his private property, but he was forced to give it up to the British.
However, as a result of French scholar Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s pleas, Hutchinson did concede to let the French keep some artefacts. After the surrender, the British General Hutchinson claimed that the archaeological and scientific discoveries of the French, including the Rosetta stone, were property of the British Crown. They defeated General Menou, who was forced to surrender on 2 September. In March 1801, allied forces landed in Alexandria. Following Kléber’s assassination on 14 June 1800, General Menou, who was now in possession of the stone, took command. Napoleon set sail from Egypt on 23 August, 1799, leaving the French troops under the command of General Kléber. It is now in Boulag.”Įxtract from Courier de l’Egypte, n° 37, p. “Citizen Bouchard, officer of the corps du Génie who, under the orders of Citizen D’Hautpoul, led the works at the Rashid Fort, was willing to undertake the task of transporting this stone to Cairo. This stone is of great interest for the study of hieroglyphic characters maybe it will even prove to be the key to understanding them. This part essentially relates how Ptolemy Philopater had all the canals in Egypt reopened, and that the prince, in order to carry out these colossal works, employed a considerable number of labourers, a great deal of money and eight years of his reign. “General Menou had part of the Greek inscription translated. The third and last section is written in Greek it has fifty-four lines of very fine, very well sculpted characters which, as is the case for the characters in the two superior sections, are very well preserved. The second and middle strip is written using characters which are believed to be Syriac it includes thirty-two lines. The first and uppermost is written in hieroglyphic characters: there are fourteen lines of characters, but part has been lost as a result of damage to the stone. Only one side is polished, and on it are thee distinct inscriptions, separated into three parallel strips. The stone is 36 inches high, 28 inches wide and 9-10 inches in depth. “Among the fortification works that the citizen D’Hautpoul, chef de bataillon of the Génie, has carried out on the old Rashid fort (now called Fort Julien) on the left bank of the Nile, a beautiful black granite stone, of fine grain and hard as a hammer, was excavated. The find was published in the Courier de l’Egypte, a periodical in Cairo at the time. It was rediscovered by Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard on 19 July, 1799, during Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt. The Rosetta stone is an Egyptian engraved stone bearing a tri-lingual decree dated 197 BC inscribed in Hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek text.