This Day In History

[The Poet]

In 1799 a soldier with Napoleon's Egyptian campaign found a black basalt stone near Rosetta which was inscribed with a text in ancient hieroglyphics, demotic, and ancient Greek. Though it ultimately led to the ability to translate the lost pictographic language dead for the previous 2000 years, it is still Greek to me. And in 1898, following his conviction for libel against the French army, novelist Emile Zola fled France. His crime was the publication of a letter, entitled J'Accuse, which exposed a cover-up by the military in the alleged espionage case against Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew. The nation became polarized on the affair, usually on racial grounds. Thankfully, a century of progress has moved us past such prejudice.