ghackler @ghackler

Dinner time! …. vai:@baldwin_the_basset #bassethound #basset #bassetlove #viral #hound #dogs #bassethoundpuppy #bassethoundmoments #puppy #rescuedog #bassets #bassethounds #hounddog #bassetlife #adoptdontshop #instabasset #bassetsofig #pets #pet

@MaxandCarrie How is Ruby doing? (Sat.)

@SDetectorist Beautiful!

Last nights beautiful 8.5% Waxing Crescent Moon setting above Stonehenge 😍🌙 photo credit Nick Bull 🙏 #moon #moonmagic #crescentmoon #lunar #astro #astrophotography

@katephillips29 I will!

@GretelleMaitre Yes. I was there and did much the sss as me thing. Ancient, holy, and precious. Still speaks powerfully.

Long before Michelangelo, long before Rembrandt, long before Picasso.....women were quietly and collaboratively creating their own masterpieces in Western art history.... #BayeuxTapestry

@OrkneyUncovered We were there!

@RichardIIIGhost We were there!

July 1799. A French officer named Pierre Bouchard is supervising repairs on a crumbling fort near the town of Rashid, in the Nile Delta. Napoleon had invaded Egypt the year before and dragged along 150 scholars, because of course he did. The soldiers are tearing into an old wall. Someone pulls out a slab of dark granite, broken at the top, chipped down the side. It had been sitting in that wall as construction filler for centuries. Recycled rock. Nobody's treasure. Bouchard looks at it and notices something. There is writing on it. Three different kinds of writing. Here is why that mattered. Egyptian hieroglyphs had gone completely dark. The last person who could read them died sometime around the 5th century. Fourteen hundred years of silence. Europe had spent centuries staring at temple walls covered in birds and eyes and squiggles, inventing nonsense about mystical symbols, because the actual sound values were gone. An entire civilization left thousands of pages of writing and nobody on earth could read a word of it. Now look at the slab. Hieroglyphs on top. Demotic in the middle. And at the bottom, Greek. Greek. A language scholars read perfectly well. Same text. Three scripts. A key. The British beat the French in Egypt two years later and took the stone as a spoil of war. The French general tried to claim it was his personal property. It did not work. To this day you can read the words painted on its side in the British Museum: captured in Egypt by the British Army, 1801. But the text had already escaped. Ink impressions had been pressed and mailed to scholars all over Europe, including the French ones. The British got the object. Everyone got the puzzle. It still took twenty years. Thomas Young cracked part of it. Jean-Francois Champollion finished it in 1822, realizing hieroglyphs were not pure symbols and not pure alphabet but both at once, sound and meaning braided together. When it clicked, he ran to his brother's office, said "I've got it," and passed out cold on the floor. And the message that reopened three thousand years of human history? A tax deal. It is a decree from 196 BC, signed off by a council of priests for a 13 year old king named Ptolemy V. Temple funding. Debt forgiveness. Amnesty for prisoners. Grain allowances. Politics. The best part is the ending. The decree instructs that it be carved in all three scripts and placed in every major temple in the land. The stone contains the order to create the stone. A bureaucratic memo about priestly tax breaks, written in triplicate so everyone could read it, then thrown in a wall and forgotten. And that is the thing that gave us back Tutankhamun, the pyramids, the Book of the Dead, and every name in every tomb. Civilizations do not die when the last person dies. They die when the last person who can read them dies.

Oh wait, we're talking about the peasant's revolt. I can't resist using this as an excuse to share one of my favourite memes ever:

@GretelleMaitre @holland_tom Castle interiors, please.

@MaxandCarrie Can she recognize your voice on the speaker phone?

This is the oldest surviving book ever made in England. Created in north-east England around AD 700, the St Cuthbert Gospel is a tiny pocket-sized copy of the Gospel of John. Its survival is remarkable. When St Cuthbert was reburied in AD 698, the book was placed inside his coffin. It remained there for more than 400 years, protected from the outside world until the tomb was opened in 1104. Remarkably, its original red leather binding has survived almost perfectly, making it not only England's oldest surviving intact book, but also the oldest intact European book. The manuscript later became known as the Stonyhurst Gospel and was eventually acquired by the British Library in 2012. More than 1,300 years after its creation, it remains a direct link to the craftsmanship, faith and learning of Anglo-Saxon England. Follow @oaksandlions for your daily dose of England's hidden gems.

@GretelleMaitre No tidal causeway, then!

@katephillips29 Very pleasing to look at.

@saniyafatma1278 Pearl

Happy 1100th Birthday England! From Athelstan's resting place at Malmesbury Abbey

I'll never get tired of these 😆