Rosetta Stone a permanent return. In December 2009, he proposed to drop his claim for the permanent return of the Rosetta Stone if the British Museum lent the stone to Egypt for three months for the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza in 2013. These requests were refused. As John Ray has observed, "the day may come when the stone has spent longer in the British Museum than it ever did in Rosetta." There is strong opposition among national museums to the repatriation of objects of international cultural significance such as the Rosetta Stone. In response to repeated Greek requests
Rosetta Stone both languages. From this, Champollion identified the phonetic characters "k l e o p a t r a" (in today's transliteration "q l i҆ w p ꜣ d r ꜣ.t"). On the basis of this and the foreign names on the Rosetta Stone, he quickly constructed an alphabet of phonetic hieroglyphic characters, which appears in his famous 1822 ""Lettre à M. Dacier"" sent to Bon-Joseph Dacier, secretary of the Paris Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and immediately published by the Académie. In the postscript Champollion notes that similar phonetic characters seemed to occur in both Greek and Egyptian names, a