Tea at Trianon: Famine Stela

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, April 27, 2022

Famine Stela

From Historical Eve:

In 1889 the journalist and Egyptologist Charles Edwin Wilbour, who for about ten years had spent every winter in Egypt aboard a dahabiya (a typical Nile passenger boat with two sails) that he had converted into his home and library, visited Aswan and its surroundings.

But in that same expedition Wilbour also approached another island, that of Sehel, located in the Nile about 3 kilometers southwest of Aswan, before the first cataract of the river. In it there are numerous archaeological sites and a temple, that of Anuket, the Egyptian goddess of water and the Nile falls. But the place was mainly a granite quarry used since ancient times and at different times. For this reason, there are numerous inscriptions on the stones and boulders, left mainly by workers, but also by travelers who began or ended their journey to Nubia there. Some narrate historical events. And precisely Wilbour was going to discover one of the most curious of all. (Read more.)