As the good doctor made clear yesterday, he regards Egypt as its rightful home and has no intention of abandoning his goal of permanent repatriation. In the British Museum, it is seen for free by more of the institution’s 5.5 million annual visitors than any other object, but if the authorities there want to hang on to it, they have something of a, well, let’s call it a stonewalling job to do.

That is exactly what the Rosetta Stone was when a sharp-eyed French soldier spotted it in 1799 in the coastal town of al Rashid (Rosetta, in English), where it had been used as a recycled building block in a 15th-century fortress. It came to Britain as a spoil of war two years later.

To Enlightenment scholars searching for the key to the magic door into Ancient Egyptian culture, it had a double significance. It records a decree issued by the priests in Memphis in 196BC ordering the teenage Ptolemy V to be worshipped in recognition of his “establishing Egypt and making it perfect”. The outcome of a power struggle in the dying years of his dynasty (originally Greek), it was to be displayed in temples. So it was an early form of mass communication, asserting the ruler’s authority.

To emphasise this, the decree is written in three languages, including ancient hieroglyphs, written only by the priestly class, and Greek, the language of administrators. It was this that enabled European scholars -- primarily the Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion and Englishman Thomas Young -- to crack the secret of hieroglyphics that had been lost for 2000 years and spark a love

of and fascination with Egyptology that continues to this day, and which accounts for millions visiting the ancient sites every year.

The 4ft-high stone, with its jagged top, is not spectacular but when my family first saw it a few years ago, we all felt the power of its history. It was the sense that such artefacts have important stories to tell.

The claims of Dr Hawass rest on the assumption that artefacts should remain in whatever country they

were found. (Other culturally protectionist nations include Turkey, Greece and, in the case of the Lewis Chessmen, Scotland.)

There are several stock reasons why this may not be true. First, they may not be safe because museums there cannot offer appropriate physical conditions or security. The celebrated Lydian Hoard was repatriated from the US to Turkey only for several of the most valuable bits to disappear. And they may be exploited by political leaders to legitimise their governments. The most disgusting recent example was Saddam Hussein using Iraqi archaeological museums to pass himself off as a latter-day Nebuchadnezzar.

Neither of these situations applies in Egypt, where President Hosni Mubarak has no pretensions to reinvent himself as Tutankhamun, and millions flock annually to Cairo’s Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, though last year my partner only avoided queuing for three hours to get in by bribing a taxi driver.

However, there is a much bigger point that needs to be made.

Dr Hawass justifies both his extensive shopping list and the ever-stricter controls and restrictions placed on foreign archaeologists in Egypt like this: “We are the descendants of the pharaohs. If you look at the faces of the people of Upper Egypt, the relationship between modern and ancient Egypt is very clear.” Frankly, this is nonsense. The stone derives from the Hellenistic era. At the time it was found, Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire and Egyptian historians were more interested in Islamic history. That’s why the Rosetta Stone was being used as building material.

Egyptology (and Egyptophilia) were western European inventions. The fame of the Rosetta Stone owes far more to the Enlightenment than 19th-century Egypt. Without it, the stone would be no more than a curiosity.

As Dr James Cuno puts it in his book Who Owns Antiquity?, without western discovery and study of artefacts such as the Rosetta Stone, “Egyptology would not exist and Egyptians would not know to claim it as theirs”. So, if anyone is guilty of cultural imperialism in this argument, it is Dr Hawass.

As in so many of these cases -- the Elgin Marbles is another example -- the current rulers of these countries have little in common with the creators of the objects they claim to own. Besides, it assumes a very fixed, false notion of culture, a 1066 and All That version of history in which one thing comes after another.

The reality is a continual process of migration, amalgamation and disintegration. It’s understandable that Greece, Italy and Egypt don’t want all and sundry despoiling their archaeological sites, which is why the 1970 UN agreement making newly unearthed artefacts the property of their country of origin was necessary.

Where objects such as the Sioux ghost shirt, once displayed in Kelvingrove, have a huge emotional significance, repatriation is simply the decent thing to do.

But it’s quite wrong to translate that as meaning that a country has sole rights to investigate its past and hoard its treasures. The notion that Egyptians understand their own past in a way others cannot is completely spurious. In fact, if there was ever an instance of an object that belongs to the world, rather than a country, the Rosetta Stone is it.

As Richard Parkinson, assistant keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum, puts it: “It has turned from the booty of conflict into a symbol of cross-cultural understanding.” As Alan Price and Georgie Fame might have sung: “Rosetta, you are better where you are.”