This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

On a hot summer day in 1799, French army engineers in occupied northern Egypt were sifting

through the rubble of a centuries-old abandoned fortress. These soldiers had been tasked by their

general, Napoleon Bonaparte, heard him, to repair the fort for proper use.

And as they were laying the foundation for the walls and barracks, someone made a startling discovery.

That's producer Vivian Lay.

They stumbled upon the Rosetta Stone, possibly the most famous chunk of rock in human history.

The reason it's famous and the reason you can see it when you go to the British Museum

is that there was text in three languages.

That's Joel Slemrod, professor of economics at the University of Michigan.

The texts on the Rosetta Stone had been inscribed with the same message in three different scripts, Greek, Egyptian demotic script, and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Which at the time, no one could decipher.

Based on the first two scripts, researchers were eventually able to crack the code for how to finally read hieroglyphics,

a writing system that hadn't been used for about 1,400 years.

Question, what was so important to write about?

And the answer is, well, among other things, the Rosetta Stone describes a tax break

given to the temple priests of ancient Egypt.

So the Rosetta Stone helped us unlock the secret of hieroglyphics by talking about something in Texas.

Taxes are essentially as old as human civilization, and they've been shaping it ever since.

Historically, they've influenced

everything from what our buildings look like, to what kind of cars we drive, to who we elect

as our president, to whether we revolt. History is shown that tax codes can reveal so much

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