Hi, thanks for tuning in to ancient Greece, Declassified.

Episode 1, Tomb Raiders, codebreakers, and the discovery of antiquity.

Anyone today with an internet connection has at their fingertips an incredible amount of information and detail about what was happening in Greece and Egypt and the Middle East four thousand years ago.

You can even read the personal correspondence between the pharaohs of Egypt and other Bronze Age rulers, and tons of other stuff written in long dead languages and

scripts, like Acadian, Sumerian, Hittite, Ugaritic, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Mycenaean Linear B.

But how is it that we can read all these funny scripts

and dead languages, some of which we didn't know existed a century ago? Two hundred years ago,

no one had ever heard of the Sumerians or the Minoans or the Hittites. They probably wouldn't

have believed you if you told them that such civilizations had existed so long ago.

So how did we get from there to today when every time archaeologists unearth a new tablet with

writing on it, there seems to be an expert at hand, ready to translate it in time for the National Geographic headline?

Well, the 19th and early 20th centuries saw a succession of

amazing discoveries about the ancient world. If there was ever a time when archaeologists

resembled Indiana Jones, that was it. They may not have carried whips, but these adventurers

often broke their bones while digging for ancient stones.

The knowledge they uncovered filled many tomes.

Antiquities were taken from their ancient homes and used to adorn western domes.

Anyway, this episode is going to cover four of these incredible stories.

So stick around, and you'll hear about the Rosetta Stone and why it's been called the most famous rock in the world.

You'll also hear about the businessman who went digging for a mythical city, and the architect who cracked the code of the linear B tablets.

We'll get a glimpse of the laborious and often dangerous work that went into a lot of the discoveries which formed the basis of our knowledge of the ancient world.

Our story today is going to start just over 200 years ago when something big was happening in Europe.

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