24.5.2009

How the Stone Spoke

    How the Stone Spoke

http://www.netsaga.is/media/files/01%20Track%2001.mp3


    A coincidence which has its origins in antiquity surfaced during the search to interpret the inscription of the famous Rosetta Stone in 1820. The translator, Dr Thomas Young, had received a parcel of manuscripts from a man named Casati in Paris, incl one which bore in its preamble something resembling the text of the Rosetta Stone. Dr Young had made a certain amount of progress in attempting to decipher this material when he received some research material on ancient Egyptian art from Sir George Grey, who had just returned from Egypt, incl several fine specimens of writing and drawing on papyrus which he had bought at Thebes. They were, said Dr Young, chiefly in hieroglyphics and of a mythological nature, but two contained some Greek characters written in an apparently pretty legible hand.

    Dr Y said C's material was the first in which any intelligible characters had been discovered among the many manuscripts and inscriptions which he had examined.

    Studying Sir George's manuscripts, he established that they were in fact-and astonishingly-of Casati's manuscripts.

    Young wrote: I could not therefore but conclude that a most extraordinary chance had brought into my possession a document which was not very likely in the first place ever to have existed, still less to have been preserved uninjured for my information through a period of near 2 thousand years, but that this very extraordinary translation should have been brought safely to Europe, to England and to me, at the very moment when it was most desirable to me to possess it, as the illustration of an original which I was then studying, but without any other reasonable hope of comprehending it; this combintion would in other times have been considered as affording ample evidence of my having become an Egyptian sorcerer.

 

    Slaughter on the Mind

    On Sunday, 1 Sept 1991, Audrey Best borrowed from her local library a copy of a book called Diary of a Country Parson. She goes on: -I did start reading the book until the evening of 9 Sept, when I learned it was the edited diary of a Rev Francis Witts, born in 1783, Rector of Upper Slaughter, a village in the Cotswolds, from 1808 until 1854.

    - Although I knew of the Cotswolds, I had heard of the village of Upper Slaughter. When I collected the office mail The Veterinary Surgery, Lower Slaughter, The Cotswolds.

 

    Good for the Teeth

    A dentist is named Dr SO Chu