A remarkable intellectual adventure reaching from the filthy back streets of Georgian London to the hushed lecture rooms of the Institut de France, from the forgotten byways of provincial France to the splendor of the Valley of the Kings, this book reveals the decipherment in its full historical complexity"--.

"Until the Rosetta Stone was finally translated and the decoding of hieroglyphic writing made possible, much of Egyptian history was lost. The author has done a masterful job of distilling information, citing the highlights, and fitting it all together in an interesting and enlightening look at a puzzling subject." —H. "The social and intellectual history here are fascinating. A handsome, inspiring book." —K. Notable Children's Books of 1991 (ALA) Notable 1990 Children's Trade Books in Social Studies (NCSS/CBC) Children's Books of 1990 (Library of Congress) 100 Books for Reading and Sharing (NY Public Library) Parenting Honorable Mention, Reading Magic Award

Mr. Morris¿s narratives, originally published in 1901, make you feel as if you are listening to a kindly grandfather recounting tales from the past. This delightful book will introduce to your child famous people and events that occurred in the nations around the world. Plus we¿ve added a few chapters of our own, so Volume 1 presents stories from Queen Elizabeth through Garibaldi (1550¿1850).

The surprising and compelling story of two rival geniuses in an all-out race to decode one of the world's most famous documents--the Rosetta Stone--and their twenty-year-long battle to solve the mystery of ancient Egypt's hieroglyphs. The Rosetta Stone is one of the most famous objects in the world, attracting millions of visitors to the British museum ever year, and yet most people don't really know what it is. Discovered in a pile of rubble in 1799, this slab of stone proved to be the key to unlocking a lost language that baffled scholars for centuries. Carved in ancient Egypt, the Rosetta Stone carried the same message in different languages--in Greek using Greek letters, and in Egyptian using picture-writing called hieroglyphs. Until its discovery, no one in the world knew how to read the hieroglyphs that covered every temple and text and statue in Egypt. Dominating the world for thirty centuries, ancient Egypt was the mightiest empire the world had ever known, yet everything about it--the pyramids, mummies, the Sphinx--was shrouded in mystery. Whoever was able to decipher the Rosetta Stone, and learn how to read hieroglyphs, would solve that mystery and fling open a door that had been locked for two thousand years. Two brilliant rivals set out to win that prize. One was English, the other French, at a time when England and France were enemies and the world's two great superpowers. The Writing of the Gods chronicles this high-stakes intellectual race in which the winner would win glory for both himself and his nation. A riveting portrait of empires both ancient and modern, this is an unparalleled look at the culture and history of ancient Egypt and a fascinating, fast-paced story of human folly and discovery unlike any other.

Read the Bldg Blog interview with Mary Beard about the Wonders of the World series(Part I and Part II) The Rosetta Stone is one of the world's great wonders, attracting awed pilgrims by the tens of thousands each year. This book tells the Stone's story, from its discovery by Napoleon's expedition to Egypt to its current--and controversial-- status as the single most visited object on display in the British Museum. A pharaoh's forgotten decree, cut in granite in three scripts--Egyptian hieroglyphs, Egyptian demotic, and ancient Greek--the Rosetta Stone promised to unlock the door to the language of ancient Egypt and its 3,000 years of civilization, if only it could be deciphered. Capturing the drama of the race to decode this key to the ancient past, John Ray traces the paths pursued by the British polymath Thomas Young and Jean-Francois Champollion, the "father of Egyptology" ultimately credited with deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. He shows how Champollion "broke the code" and explains more generally how such deciphering is done, as well as its critical role in the history of Egyptology. Concluding with a chapter on the political and cultural controversy surrounding the Stone, the book also includes an appendix with a full translation of the Stone's text. Rich in anecdote and curious lore, The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt is a brilliant and frequently amusing guide to one of history's great mysteries and marvels.

The discovery and deciphering of Europe’s earliest known written language is recounted with “almost nail-biting suspense” in this prize-winning account (Booklist, starred review). In 1900, famed archaeologist Arthur Evans uncovered the ruins of Knossos, a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization that flowered on Crete 1,000 years before Greece’s Classical Age. The massive discovery included a cache of ancient tablets, Europe’s earliest written records. For half a century, the meaning of the inscriptions, and even the language in which they were written, would remain an enigma. Award–winning New York Times journalist Margalit Fox follows this intellectual mystery from the Bronze Age Aegean to a legendary archeological dig at the turn of the twentieth century, and on to the brilliant decipherers who finally cracked the code in the 1950s. These include Michael Ventris, the amateur linguist who deciphered the script but met with a sudden, mysterious death that may have been a direct consequence of his findings; and Alice Kober, the unsung heroine of the story whose painstaking work allowed Ventris to crack the code. Winner of the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing

Profiles girls and women who participated in the American Revolution by refusing to buy British merchandise, collecting money, and even going to war as wives, nurses, spies, or soldiers.

This book examines a type of object that was widespread and very popular in classical antiquity - votive offerings in the shape of parts of the human body. It collects examples from four principal areas and time periods: Classical Greece, pre-Roman Italy, Roman Gaul and Roman Asia Minor. It uses a compare-and-contrast methodology to highlight differences between these sets of votives, exploring the implications for our understandings of how beliefs about the body changed across classical antiquity. The book also looks at how far these ancient beliefs overlap with, or differ from, modern ideas about the body and its physical and conceptual boundaries. Central themes of the book include illness and healing, bodily fragmentation, human-animal hybridity, transmission and reception of traditions, and the mechanics of personal transformation in religious rituals.

For 1,600 years Dioscorides (ca. AD 40–80) was regarded as the foremost authority on drugs. He knew mild laxatives and strong purgatives, analgesics for headaches, antiseptics for wounds, emetics to rid one of ingested poisons, chemotherapy agents for cancer treatments, and even oral contraceptives. Why, then, have his works remained obscure in recent centuries? Because of one small oversight (Dioscorides himself thought it was self-evident): he failed to describe his method for organizing drugs by their affinities. This omission led medical authorities to use his materials as a guide to pharmacy while overlooking Dioscorides' most valuable contribution—his empirically derived method for observing and classifying drugs by clinical testing. Dioscorides' De materia medica, a five-volume work, was written in the first century. Here revealed for the first time is the thesis that Dioscorides wrote more than a lengthy guide book. He wrote a great work of science. He had said that he discovered the natural order and would demonstrate it by his arrangement of drugs from plants, minerals, and animals. Until John M. Riddle's pathfinding study, no one saw the genius of his system. Botanists from the eighteenth century often attempted to find his unexplained method by identifying the sequences of his plants according to the Linnean system but, while there are certain patterns, there remained inexplicable incoherencies. However, Dioscorides' natural order as set down in De materia medica was determined by drug affinities as detected by his acute, clinical ability to observe drug reactions in and on the body. So remarkable was his ability to see relationships that, in some cases, he saw what we know to be common chemicals shared by plants of the same and related species and other natural product drugs from animal and mineral sources. Western European and Islamic medicine considered Dioscorides the foremost authority on drugs, just as Hippocrates is regarded as the Father of Medicine. They saw him point the way but only described the end of his finger, despite the fact that in the sixteenth century alone there were over one hundred books published on him. If he had explained what he thought to be self-evident, then science, especially chemistry and medicine, would almost certainly have developed differently. In this culmination of over twenty years of research, Riddle employs modern science and anthropological studies innovatively and cautiously to demonstrate the substance to Dioscorides' authority in medicine.

Fascinating account of great linguistic detective story — discovery of Stone, history of the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics; work of Young, Champollion, other scholars; much more. 23 photographs. Bibliography.