The city of London sweltered in the heat of summer, 1858. But it was not merely the sun that scorched the metropolis. An even more unpleasant force infested its very heart: the River Thames. Years of industrial effluents had transformed London's lifeblood into a nauseating odor. The stench was all-consuming, a miasma that clung to every cobblestone

The Rosetta Stone, a monumental artifact unveiled in 1799, has served as a key to understanding the cryptic hieroglyphs of ancient Egyptian civilization. This remarkable slab, inscribed with the same decree in three different scripts—hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Greek—provided the crucial link necessary for deciphering the long-lost language of t