smiyah, in southern Babylonia, which have brought to
light many objects of interest, if not of great historical importance.
The Turkish government, under whose rule the territory of Babylonia and
Assyria now is, stimulated by the example of other nations, is taking
an active interest in these excavations, granting the privilege of
excavating to an ever-increasing number of scholars, and giving them
protection while engaged in their work. The Sultan has erected in
Constantinople a magnificent museum, where the valuable antiquities are
accessible to the scholarship of the world.

The credit of having first turned the attention of the West toward the
monuments of Egypt, and of having brought them within the reach of
science, belongs to the military expedition of Napoleon Bonaparte,
undertaken in the summer of 1798.[3] In August, 1799, a French
artillery officer, Boussard, unearthed at the Fort Saint Julien, near
{117} Rosetta, in the Nile Delta, a stone of black granite, three feet
five inches in height, two feet four and one half inches in width, and
eleven inches in thickness. It is thought to have been at least twelve
inches higher and to have had a rounded top. On the upper portion of
this block could be seen parts of fourteen lines of characters,
resembling those seen everywhere on the obelisks and ruined temples of
the land; adjoining these below are thirty-two lines of another species
of script, while at the bottom are fifty-four lines, twenty-eight of
them complete, in Greek uncial letters. The Greek was easily read, and
told the story of the stone: It was set up in B.C. 195, by the priests
of Egypt, in honor of Ptolemy Epiphanes, because he had canceled
arrearages of certain taxes due from the sacerdotal body. The grateful
priests ordered the memorial decree to be inscribed in the sacred
characters of Egypt, in the vernacular, and in Greek. The Greek
portion having been read, it was conjectured that the two inscriptions
above the Greek told the same story. Such being the case, the value of
the document for the decipherment of the Egyptian inscriptions was at
once perceived, and scholars immediately set to work on the task of
deciphering the unknown script. The honor of having solved the mystery
belongs to Francois Champollion, who by 1822 had succeeded in fixing
the value of a considerable {118} portion of the ancient Egyptian
signs, and at the time of his death, ten years later, left behind in
manuscript