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 is now used in other contexts as the name for the essential clue to a new field of knowledge. The Rosetta Stone is listed as "a stone of black granodiorite, bearing three inscriptions ... found at Rosetta" in a contemporary catalogue of the artefacts discovered by the French expedition and surrendered to British troops in 1801. At some period after its arrival in London, the inscriptions on the stone were coloured in white chalk to make them more legible, and the remaining surface was covered with a layer of carnauba wax designed to protect the Rosetta Stone from visitors' fingers.