The complete online text of Hieroglyphic Tales by Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford.

Horace Walpole was a significant figure in literary history, but his reputation would stand even higher if he had excelled in what today are regarded as the "major" genres. He wrote a pioneering book which initiated the Gothic novel; he produced a high-f...

Horace Walpole is known to literary scholars as the founder of a significant literary genre, the gothic novel, which he initiated with the publication of The Castle of Otranto, A Story. Translated by William Marshal, Gent. From the Original Italian of On...

Horace Walpole's literary productions reflect an extraordinary range of talents and interests: author of the first and most influential Gothic novel in English and of the first example of Gothic drama, he was also a poet, an indefatigable letter writer,...

We like to think of the Ancient Egyptians as a literate, cultured race. We also like to think of them as a people involved in a mist of esoterica - issuing curses, offering up invocations, resuscitating mummies with the juice of sacred Tana leaves,...

IN 1799, French soldiers preparing the foundations for an extension to Fort Julien, at Rosetta, Egypt, discovered the single most famous stone in the history of archaeology, the Rosetta Stone. This slab contained an inscription in Egyptian hieroglyphs accompanied by the same text in...