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LONDON: Campaigners in Egypt have demanded the return of artefacts held in Europe after the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

It comes as Dick Schoof, the outgoing prime minister of the Netherlands, announced that a 3,500-year-old stone head from the dynasty of Thutmose III would be returned to Egypt during a summit with President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi in Cairo on Sunday.

The handover, to take place later this year under the 1970 UNESCO Convention, comes after the item was seized in Maastricht at an art fair in 2022.

Items including the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum in London are among the most important in both Egyptian and world ancient history, and Zahi Hawass, Egyptologist and former minister of antiquities, launched a movement to pressure international governments into returning them in 2010.

As well as the Rosetta Stone, Hawass’ campaign also seeks the repatriation of a bust of Nefertiti from the Neues Museum in Berlin, and the Dendera Zodiac in the Louvre.

It was derailed by political upheaval caused by the Arab Spring in 2011, but Hawass now believed the tide is turning.

“In the past, they said your museums weren’t qualified,” Hawass told The Times. “Now we’ve built more than 22 museums to the highest standards — some more modern than those in America or Europe.”

Egypt banned the export of all historic items in 1983, but illegal digging and black market sales remain widespread and lucrative.

“They dig destructively, interested only in what they can carry,” said Monica Hanna, dean of Egypt’s Arab Academy for Science and Technology. 

Hanna, who founded the Repatriate Rashid campaign to return the 18 artefacts taken in the Rosetta Stone export in 1801, said the decision of the Dutch government may “encourage those who want to do the right thing to do it.”

She added that Western museums could no longer guarantee the security of items, saying: “What about the recent theft from the Louvre, the 2,000 items stolen from the British Museum last year, or environmental activists pouring oil on Egyptian artefacts in Germany?”

Hanna added: “We don’t want every Egyptian artefact abroad. We want those essential to Egypt’s narrative.”

Hawass now plans to submit an official document petitioning for the return of artefacts after receiving 1 million signatures, with campaigners across Egypt’s major museums to ask visitors to sign up.

“This concerns the international community — the Egyptian people I represent, supported by the government and the president himself,” Hawass said.

Egypt has gone to great lengths to track down stolen items in the past few years, securing the return of over 5,000 since 2020, including 114 from the US and 91 from France. In 2019, a gilded coffin of Nedjemankh was returned after an investigation found export licenses were forged during its sale to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for $4 million in 2011. 

The Rosetta Stone, taken by British forces to London in 1802 after its discovery by French soldiers in 1799, dates from 196 B.C. and features ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, as well as Demotic and Greek script. It was key to deciphering the ancient Egyptian language after it was translated by Jean-Francois Champollion in 1822.