How can you find out about local history?
History is still happening all around you, and local history is an important field of study. It shows how ordinary people lived and worked. It is not difficult to find out what happened in your own area in the recent past. Most towns and cities, for example, have local museums that preserve items of interest. Libraries may hold stocks of old newspapers.
You could construct a family tree to trace the history of your own family. Usually parents and relatives can provide information about recent family members, but after a few generations you will need to check local records. In many countries, churches kept records of births, christenings, marriages and burials, and these records can be studied.
What is the Rosetta stone?
The discovery of the Rosetta stone in 1799 near Alexandria, in Egypt, was the key to unraveling the language of the ancient Egyptians. Hieroglyphics, a form of picture writing used by ordinary people in ancient Egypt, had puzzled archaeologists and historians for hundreds of years. The discovery of the Rosetta stone, which contained the same inscription in hieroglyphics and in Greek, allowed the meaning of the complicated hieroglyphic pictures to be understood. In turn, this allowed thousands of surviving ancient Egyptian inscriptions to be translated.
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