Sacred Texts  Egypt 

The Rosetta Stone by E.A. Wallis Budge [1893, 1905]

This is a collection of two articles by E.A. Wallis Budge on the famous Rosetta Stone, which was the key to the modern decipherment of the Ancient Egyptian writing system. The first article is an essay from Budge's 1893 anthology The Mummy, which discusses the stone, ancient and medieval writings about hieroglyphics, and the competition between Young and Champollion, the two 19th century scholars who eventually cracked the code. He explains how the stone was used to piece together the Egyptian alphabetic signs, the key to the rest of the hieroglyphics. The second article is his 1905 translation of the text of the stone, which turns out to be a fairly unremarkable Ptolemaic era decree.

This makes extensive use of polytonic Greek Unicode, so if you have trouble viewing it, you should refer to the sacred-texts Unicode page. Longer passages in Greek were made into thumbnailed image files.