Musée d’Archéologie Méditerranéenne

This guide to the Musée d'Archéologie Méditerranéenne follows two grey limestone slabs a stonemason pulled from a demolished house near Marseille's old cathedral in 1845, sold to a museum director for ten francs. It traces how scholars deciphered the Punic script carved into them and the surprisingly mundane document it turned out to be, a temple's price list for animal sacrifice, down to the exact cost of an ox or a goat. Chemists later tested the stone itself, raising a question about where it had really come from.