Key objects missing from the Grand Egyptian Museum's collection

FRANCE 24 English

Visit our website: http://www.france24.com  Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FRANCE24.English  Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/France24_en

Transcript

00:00Gathering all of this together, and there are still some questions from other museums,

00:05as always happens when you want to be the museum for Egyptology, some missing artefacts,

00:10some artefacts the museum still wants.

00:12There are, there are several, but there are three key objects I would say that are missing

00:17from this new museum, the Rosetta Stone, that is in the British Museum, the Zodiac, which

00:23is in the Louvre, and the bust of Nefertiti, which is in Berlin now.

00:27Activists have actually set up online petitions, calling for these pieces to be returned to

00:33Egypt, with hundreds of thousands of signatures, and let me explain a bit why these three are

00:38so significant.

00:39The Rosetta Stone, that was found in 1799, and it provided the key to deciphering hydroglyphics,

00:45so it kind of unlocked this entire language of ancient Egypt.

00:49It was discovered by the French army, then it was seized by the British as war booty, and

00:54Britain have had it ever since.

00:56And there's also the Dendara Zodiac, that is an ancient Egyptian celestial map that the

01:02French, a French team literally cut from the temple of Hathor in Upper Egypt in 1821, then

01:09they removed it from its original location, took it back to France, where it remains in

01:14the Louvre.

01:14And then the bust of Nefertiti, that is this stunningly colourful painted sculpture of the

01:21wife of pharaoh Akhenaton, that's in Berlin.

01:24Egypt accuses German archaeologists of smuggling it out of the country more than a century ago.

01:31So the argument is, for centuries, and Western institutions have argued that Egypt didn't

01:36have the know-how, really, and the proper facilities to care for these treasures.

01:40That's not really an argument today with the state-of-the-art museum that has been built.

01:46The question now is, where is this justification to keep these artefacts that potentially really

01:53rightfully belong back in Egypt in this museum?

Category

Transcript

Be the first to comment

Recommended