Until almost the end of the 19th cent., the most important records of antiquity, apart from the authors, that had been preserved for literary reasons, were the inscriptions on stone and metal. Published in great collections, and utilized by scholars of all civilized countries, they have given new life to all branches of the study of antiquity, to history in the widest sense of the word, and in particular to the history of States, law, economics, language, and religion. The age of modern epigraphy has been extraordinarily productive of knowledge that never could have been discovered from the authors alone. And the end has not yet come. The researches and excavations of European and American arch