Rosetta Stone of Champollion was smaller than one of Young on an adjacent information panel; English visitors complained that the opposite was true. The portraits were in fact the same size. Egypt first requested the return of the Rosetta Stone in July 2003, on the British Museum's 250th anniversary. Zahi Hawass, the chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, asked that the stele be repatriated to Egypt, commenting that it was the "icon of our Egyptian identity". He repeated the proposal two years later in Paris, listing the stone as one of several key items belonging to Egypt's cultural heritage, a list
Rosetta Stone text. Lancret's report, dated 1799, was read to a meeting of the Institute soon after . Bouchard, meanwhile, transported the stone to Cairo for examination by scholars. Napoleon himself inspected what had already begun to be called "la Pierre de Rosette", the Rosetta Stone, shortly before his return to France in August 1799. The discovery was reported in September in "Courrier de l'Égypte", the official newspaper of the French expedition. The anonymous reporter expressed a hope that the stone might one day be the key to deciphering hieroglyphs. In 1800, three of the Commission's technical experts devised ways to make