Thursday, February 15

Rock

I meet my tax consultants on Bedford Square in Bloomsbury next to the British Museum. A luxury of London is the content - and today I explore Europe from the Romans to the Rococo. In the East Wing I learn that Constantinople I changed the Mediterranean by moving his seat of power from Rome to Constantinople (Istanbul) with easy access to the Danube. He also sponsored the Christian church, allowing it to thrive during his reign. I also pay my respects to the Rosetta Stone (postcard pictured) which was discovered in Rosetta, Egypt in 1799 by the French during Napoleon then stripped by the British military and transferred to the British Museum in 1801. The stone is inscribed with the same passage of writing in two Egyptian language scripts (hieroglyphic and domitic) and in classical Greek, which allowed Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion to translate the thing by 1822. Hieroglyphics fell from use in the 4th century after 3,500 years so the translation returned to us a forgotten culture. Famously upon arriving in the UK I did not know the significance of the rock and made the mistake of telling Silver so.

After telling Madeleine the bedtime story "Ali Baba and the Forty Theives" she asks me if I can tell her "Ali Baba and the Forty Dwarves."

Sonnet is in Paris this weekend with Halley.