Following the Louvre’s decision to return some fragments of frescos to Egypt, one wonders whether the relatively long standing requests to the British Museum for the return of the Rosetta Stone will be properly considered at last.

From:
Modern Ghana

HAWASS REQUESTS ROSETTA STONE: WILL BRITISH MUSEUM MAKE A BOLD CONCILIATORY GESTURE?
By Kwame Opoku, Dr.
Feature Article | Fri, 16 Oct 2009

In an article entitled Egypt asks British Museum for the Rosetta Stone after Louvre victory, the British Daily Telegraph reports that soon after the Louvre has agreed to return the stolen frescoes, Zahi Hawass, the dynamic Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities has asked the British Museum for a loan of the Rosetta Stone. The Telegraph also reports that: “Mr. Hawass acknowledged that seeking the return of the Rosetta Stone was a different proposition from the painted fragments in the Louvre.” The paper adds that: “A spokesman said the British Museum “enjoys good relations” with Egypt and promised to consider Mr Hawass’s request.”(1)

A reader who has not followed discussions on restitution and the efforts by Hawass to secure the return of looted Egyptian artefacts might be forgiven for thinking that emboldened by his recent success with the Louvre, Hawass is now turning attention to the British Museum and making demands. The truth however, is that the request for the return of the Rosetta Stone has been made long ago by the Egyptians. There are at least reports on this demand as far back as 2003.
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Christopher Hitchens has written a 4 page piece in Vanity Fair about the Parthenon Marbles & the reasons why he believes that they belong in Greece. Unlike many recent pieces though, although it is prompted by the opening of the New Acropolis Museum, it goes far deeper into the argument, looking at many aspects of it rather than purely focussing on this most recent development.

From:
Vanity Fair

Acropolis Now
The Lovely Stones
Among the first to visit Greece’s new Acropolis Museum, devoted to the Parthenon and other temples, the author reviews the origins of a gloriously “right” structure (part of a fifth-century-b.c. stimulus plan) and the continuing outrage that half its façade is still in London.
By Christopher Hitchens July 2009

The great classicist A. W. Lawrence (illegitimate younger brother of the even more famously illegitimate T.E. “of Arabia”) once remarked of the Parthenon that it is “the one building in the world which may be assessed as absolutely right.” I was considering this thought the other day as I stood on top of the temple with Maria Ioannidou, the dedicated director of the Acropolis Restoration Service, and watched the workshop that lay below and around me. Everywhere there were craftsmen and -women, toiling to get the Parthenon and its sister temples ready for viewing by the public this summer. There was the occasional whine of a drill and groan of a crane, but otherwise this was the quietest construction site I have ever seen—or, rather, heard. Putting the rightest, or most right, building to rights means that the workers must use marble from a quarry in the same mountain as the original one, that they must employ old-fashioned chisels to carve, along with traditional brushes and twigs, and that they must study and replicate the ancient Lego-like marble joints with which the master builders of antiquity made it all fit miraculously together.
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