The British Museum welcomes an enormous number of visitors who mostly come to view the Rosetta Stone every day. The controversial artifact, which was seized from Egypt over 200 years ago, was never returned. Visitors have always taken pictures of the etched black slab of the Rosetta Stone at the London Museum but that will change in the next month. The Rosetta Stone is returning home — or so to speak.
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 at a QR code, and watch the stone pop out of their screens in an augmented-reality installation.
Looty is a collective of London-based designers digitally reclaiming artifacts in Western museums that were plundered during colonial times and has done the same for the Rosetta Stone. Founded in 2021, Looty aims to give people from former colonies who are unable to travel to the West three-dimensional replicas and knowledge of their stolen treasures. Their mission is to end Western museums’ monopoly over the narrative and give the public a more complete picture.
The 2,200-year-old Rosetta Stone is part of the many antiquities whose display is under an incomplete description in the London Museum. These artifacts are not represented as they were meant to be shown; they are often royal, religious, or ritual objects, which were never intended for show in glass display cases. This misrepresentation is part of what happens when people are stripped of the right to tell their own stories.
Egyptians and any other Africans who travel to Egypt have access to it where it is believed to have been extracted as a form of taking some power back. The AR 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.
