Hawass made the appeal for the repatriation of the Egyptian artefacts at the British Museum, chief among them the iconic Rosetta Stone, in the wake of a recent revelation that around 2,000 artefacts had been stolen from the museum.

Recovery efforts for the stolen artefacts, which include gold jewellery and gems, are ongoing, said George Osborne, the museum’s Chair of Trustees, on earlier this week.

Hawass, a former minister of antiquities in Egypt, described the thefts as nothing short of a global catastrophe and a grievous crime against world heritage.

He asked the international community to rally behind his cause, asserting that the British Museum did not merit the honour of safeguarding these priceless antiquities.

He urged both UNESCO and the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities to organize an international conference to discuss both the risks of keeping valuable artefacts in the British Museum and steps to repatriate them to their rightful homelands.

Hawass has been campaigning for decades for the return of Egyptian artefacts from museums in former colonial countries.

In 2022, Hawass started a petition calling for the return of the two iconic ancient Egyptian artefacts, including the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum and the Dendera Zodiac at the Louvre Museum in Paris, to Egypt.

In 2005, during his tenure as secretary-general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, Hawass lobbied for the return of five key Egyptian artefacts with the Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin.

More than a stone!
 

The Rosetta Stone was stumbled upon by officers in the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt 1799-1801 in the Nile Delta town of Rosetta.

A major discovery of historic proportions, the stone is inscribed with a 196 BC decree scripted in hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts and ancient Greek. allowed the world to decipher ancient Egyptian language.

In 1801, a defeated French army surrendered the one-of-its-kind find to a victorious British army, who sent it to the British Museum in London.

The Rosetta Stone remains the most-visited exhibit at the museum.