7. XXXIV--THE ROMAN RULE: Egypt a Province of the Roman Empire; 31 <small>B.C.</small> to 395 <small>A.D.</small> At the latter date it became a part of the Eastern Roman Empire. In 389 the emperor, Theodosius, issued an edict proclaiming that Christianity was to be recognised as the religion of Egypt. In consequence of this change all knowledge of the old form of writing gradually disappeared and the antiquities of Egypt remained a sealed book for some fourteen centuries. * * * * * The commencement of the modern interest in Egypt, as a mine of historical, archæological, and artistic lore, dates from Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion, for he took with him a body of savants to explore the topography and nature of the country and its antiquities. The results of their labours were published in 1809-13 in twenty-five volumes, illustrated with 900 engravings. Meanwhile, in 1799, Captain Boussard, an engineer under Bonaparte, had discovered in the trenches a tablet of black basalt, inscribed with three kinds of writing, one of which was Greek. From the name of the village near which it was found it is called the _Rosetta Stone_ and is now in the British Museum. Various attempts were made to decipher through the Greek the other two scripts, which were, respectively, hieroglyphic and the demotic or popular writing-form of ancient Egypt. Finally, the clue was discovered by the French scholar, Champollion. He found there had been three kinds of characters which represented successive developments of one system of writing: that in the hieroglyphic each letter was represented by a picture-form; that in the hieratic or priestly writing, these forms were represented in a freer and more fluent way, which was further simplified in the demotic characters, used generally by the scribes. Two of these had been repeated as nearly as possible in the Greek text. It is out of this discovery that Egyptology, or the science which concerns itself with the writing, language, literature, monuments, and history of ancient Egypt, is being gradually developed. Yet the subject is still involved in great uncertainty, owing to the difficulty in discovering principles of grammar, so that the translations of one scholar vary from those of others and all reach only the general sense, without assurance of accuracy. * * * * *