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The French took the stone as a cultural trophy of war, but it never made it back to Paris.
法国人将石碑视作自己的战利品，却从未能将其成功地运回巴黎。
Pursued by Nelson, Napoleon was defeated, and in 1801 the terms of the Treaty of Alexandria, signed by the French, British and Egyptian generals, included the handing over of antiquities-and the Rosetta Stone was one of them.
在尼罗河河口海战中，纳尔逊勋爵打败了法国舰队，拿破仑拋下军队独自回到法国。1801年，法国向英国与埃及的将领投降。之后签署的亚历山大协议要求法国人交出一切文物，其中便包括罗塞塔石碑。
Most books will tell you that there are three languages on the Rosetta Stone, but if you look on the broken side, you can see that in fact there are four.
许多书籍都会告诉你—就像我刚才说的一样—罗塞塔石碑上共有三种文字。但如果查看石碑断面，你便会发现第四种。
Because there, stencilled on in English, you can read: "CAPTURED BY THE BRITISH ARMY IN 1801; PRESENTED BY KING GEORGE III".
上面用英文写着“1801，英国军队获于埃及”以及（在另一处）“英王乔治三世赠”。
Nothing could make it clearer that if the text on the front of the stone is about the first European empire in Africa, Alexander the Great's, the finding of the stone stands at the beginning of another European adventure-the bitter rivalry between Britain and France for dominance in the Middle East and in Africa, which had continued from Napoleon until the Second World War.
石碑表面的文字记载了非洲土地上第一个欧洲帝国—亚历山大 帝国—的故事，而石碑的重新发现又恰逢新的欧洲列强争夺战的开端:英法争夺中东与非洲统治权的斗争，从拿破仑时期一直延续到二战。
We asked the Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif for her view of this history:
我曾询问埃及作家阿达法苏维夫对这段历史的看法。
"This stone so makes me think of how often Egypt has been the theatre of other peoples' battles.
罗塞塔石碑让我想起埃及如何频繁地成为别国战争的舞台。
It's one of the earliest objects through which you can trace Western colonial interest in Egypt, because of course it was found by the French in the context of Napoleon's invasion of the country, and then appropriated by the British when they defeated him, and the French and the British argued over it.No-one seems to have considered that it belonged to neither of them.
这是最古老的能表现欧洲在埃及攫取殖民利益的物品之一。在英法两国为它的归属权争论不休时，似乎没有人想过石碑其实不属于他们中的任何一位。
