The celebrated Rosetta Stone which supplied Champollion with the key for the decipherment of the ancient monuments of Egypt was found near Fort St Julien, 4 m.
Layard at Nineveh opened up a new world, coinciding as they did with the successful decipherment of the cuneiform system of writing.
Colebrooke, began to make known the treasures of Sanskrit literature, which the great scholars of Germany and France proceeded to develop. In Egypt the discovery of the Rosetta stone placed the key to the hieroglyphics within Western reach; and the decipherment of the cuneiform character enabled the patient scholars of Europe to recover the clues to the contents of the ancient libraries of Babylonia and Assyria.
Galton was the author of memoirs on various anthropometric subjects; he originated the process of composite portraiture, and paid much attention to finger-prints and their employment for the identification of criminals, his publications on this subject including Finger Prints (1892), Decipherment of Blurred Finger Prints (1893) and Finger Print Directories (1895).
The decipherment and interpretation by the learned Jesuits, Fathers Epping and Strassmeier, of a number of clay tablets preserved in the British Museum, have supplied detailed knowledge of the methods practised in Mesopotamia in the 2nd century B.C. 5 They show no trace of Greek influence, and were doubtless the improved outcome of an unbroken tradition.