April 15 is here. Although tax day may not change your personal history — except for making you and other Americans a little poorer — there have been many times when taxes and tax policies have changed history. Here are five of them.

Tax freedom and hieroglyphs. In 1799, when Napoleon Bonepart was in the middle of his Egyptian campaign, one of his soldiers found a large black stone in the Nile Delta near the town of Rashid (Rosetta). You know it today as the Rosetta Stone. The stone recorded the same message in three different scripts: ancient Greek, Demotic (which is ancient Egyptian written in a common script) and hieroglyphs.

The text was eventually translated, allowing scholars to read hieroglyphs for the first time in centuries. The stone explained that the Egyptian ruler Ptolemy V in 196 BC had granted a tax exemption for the resident priests at the temple in Memphis, one of the historic capitals of Egypt. The priests placed the stone in front of the temple to, in essence, tell any tax collectors to keep moving, thus promoting the principle that religious establishments would not be taxed.

Julius Ceasar, democratic socialist. Most people know that Julius Caesar (100-44 BC) became involved with the Egyptian ruler Cleopatra and that he was assassinated in the Roman Senate. But did you know he........

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