Tea at Trianon: The Mystery of the World’s Oldest Writing System

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

Saturday, March 22, 2025

The Mystery of the World’s Oldest Writing System

From Smithsonian:

On a late-summer day in 1856, a letter carrier stepped from a mail coach in front of a three-story townhouse in Mayfair, in central London. Crossing the threshold, the courier handed a wax-sealed envelope to a clerk. The missive was addressed to Edwin Norris, the secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, one of Europe’s leading research institutions.

The postman had no way of knowing that the envelope would help rewrite the story of civilization’s origins and ignite a contest for international renown. At stake: the immortality conferred on those who make a once-in-a-century intellectual breakthrough. Three men—driven by bound-less curiosity, a love of risk, and the distinctive demons of aspiration and ambition—were most responsible for making the contest possible.
One, Austen Henry Layard, was the son of an English colonial civil servant. At age 22, he had fled the drudgery of clerkship in his uncle’s law office for a life of adventure on the backroads of the Ottoman Empire. Bandits robbed him three times and once left him to wander half-naked and barefoot through the desert. He joined a rebellious mountain tribe in Persia and spied in the Balkans for the British ambassador in Constantinople. At last he reached the mounds of Mesopotamia, where he transformed himself into one of the most celebrated archaeologists of the age. (Read more.)