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Excerpt from The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the East In the present century two events, which at the time seemed unimportant, have vastly increased our knowledge regarding several very early kingdoms and empires which, to the ancient and mediæval historians, were known only by name. In 1802, the Rosetta Stone was brought to England, and presented by George III. to the British Museum. Only a rude block of black basalt, though called "a priceless jewel" by the archæologists, it bears an inscription in three languages; and as soon as one of these, written in "hieroglyphs," was, by means of the other two, interpreted by Young and Champollion, a key was put in our hands to open the sealed book of Egypt's mighty past by reading the records on her numberless monuments. Thus the "wisdom of Egypt," so long inscrutable, became known, and a new science arose called Egyptology. The second event was in 1842, when M. Botta was sent as French envoy to the banks of the Tigris, and began to dig for Assyrian antiquities. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.