Dear Commons Community,
The Rosetta Stone is to the British Museum what the Mona Lisa is to the Louvre. Every day, throngs of visitors to the London museum take smartphone snaps of the etched black slab that was seized from Egypt over 200 years ago and never went back. Except that, in the next month, the Rosetta Stone is returning home — in a manner of speaking.
At Fort Qaitbay in Rashid, along Egypt’s northern coast, visitors will soon be able to stand where the Rosetta Stone is thought to have been found, point their smartphones (see photo below) at a QR barcode and watch the stone pop out of their screens in an augmented-reality installation. The stone is being “digitally repatriated” by Looty, a collective of London-based designers who, as they put it, virtually reclaim artifacts in Western museums that were plundered during colonial times. As reported by The New York Times.
Looty’s installation returns the Rosetta Stone to Rashid, Egypt, as an augmented reality. Credit…NZZ Format
Chidirim Nwaubani and Ahmed Abokor founded Looty in 2021, naming it after Queen Victoria’s Pekingese dog, which was picked up in a ransacked Chinese palace. The collective seeks to give people from former colonies who are unable to travel to the West three-dimensional replicas and knowledge of their stolen treasures. Their aim is to end Western museums’ monopoly over the narrative and give the public a more complete picture.
On a recent afternoon, Nwaubani, just back from the fort in Rashid, stood before the 2,200-year-old Rosetta Stone in London.
“I don’t like being here,” he said, motioning at the slab and surrounding statues and sarcophagi in the British Museum’s Egyptian sculpture gallery. “These are reminders of the spoils of war, reminders of defeat, reminders of colonialism.”
He said the museum gave an incomplete description of the antiquities exhibited in its galleries, not representing them as they were meant to be shown; these were often royal, religious or ritual objects, which were never intended for display in a vitrine. For young people of African descent such as himself, he said, “not having the power to tell your own story is wrong.”
“What I’ve been able to do is actually take some of that power,” he added.
The augmented reality installation in Rashid will offer visitors a high-definition image of the stone, with detailed descriptions in Arabic and English, a translation of the stone’s inscriptions and an account of how the artifact left Egypt.
By making virtual replicas of looted treasures, he was shifting some of the attention to the digital space — a “new landscape,” he said, where “laws have not caught up. No one is colonizing
“The restitution conversation is all about what happens next,” said Dan Hicks, a professor of contemporary archaeology at Oxford University, “and there is a new generation, it seems, who are not willing simply to wait for the cogs to turn at the glacial pace at which museums often operate.”
Restitution is “fundamentally about agency,” Hicks said, and so is Looty. The collective has challenged Western museums’ control over treasures and the narrative about them, and is using digital media to show that artifacts are “not dead,” Hicks added. “They are continuing to be a living part of culture.”
Tony
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