The magic spades of archaeology have given us the whole lost world of Egypt. We know more about the vanished Egyptians than we know about any other ancient people, more than we know about the early Greeks and Romans, whose civilization died just yesterday. We know nearly everything there is to know. One of the reasons is that in Egypt almost nothing rots, nothing spoils, nothing crumbles away. Dig up the most delicate carving, the finest substance, and you will find it just as fresh and perfect after thousands of years of lying in the sand as if it had recently come from the artist's hand. When they didn't bury the actual objects, the Egyptians buried little models of them, exact reproductions of the real things. Is it any wonder that we have a complete record of their civilization?

Q. Underline the sentence which suggests that Egyptian civilization is older than the Greek and Roman civilizations.