27. März

Memphis decree on the Rosetta StoneRosetta Stone

Egypt’s priests met at Memphis and honoured the boy-king Ptolemy V; the decree was set up in temples in three scripts — hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek. One copy, reused as building stone, became the Rosetta Stone. The date is the Julian equivalent of the decree’s own Macedonian and Egyptian dates.

The Rosetta Stone decreeRosetta Stone

Priests meeting at Memphis honoured the thirteen-year-old Ptolemy V and ordered their decree set up in every temple in hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek. A copy reused in a fort at Rashid (Rosetta) was found by French soldiers in July 1799; Champollion used it to crack hieroglyphs in 1822.

Bombay came to Charles II in 1661 with Catherine of Braganza’s dowry. It cost more to keep than it earned, so he leased it to the Company for £10 a year, paid in gold. Its deep harbour made it the Company’s western capital instead of Surat.

A student talk on sea creatures from the Firth of Forth: the “ova” of the bryozoan Flustra could swim, so they were larvae, and small black globes found in oyster shells were the eggs of a skate leech.

About 350 porters carried the loads east in two parties, over the ridges and rivers of eastern Nepal to the monastery of Thyangboche. Twenty Sherpas were led by their sirdar, Tenzing, back on Everest for the seventh time. In Kathmandu the Sherpas, lodged in the embassy garage, had protested.

Stolen from a stamp exhibition at Westminster’s Central Hall a week earlier, the Jules Rimet trophy turned up wrapped in newspaper under a hedge in south London, sniffed out by a collie called Pickles on a walk with his owner, David Corbett.

Diverted to the small airport of Los Rodeos by a bomb at Gran Canaria, a KLM 747 began its take-off in fog without clearance and struck a Pan Am 747 still taxiing on the runway. 583 people died: all 248 on the KLM aircraft and 335 on the Pan Am. It remains the deadliest accident in aviation history.

American researchers from FirstSounds found Scott’s phonautograms in Paris archives. Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scanned them and turned the traces into sound with software built to play fragile records without touching them. Scott’s voice was heard 148 years after he…

Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun shared computing’s highest honour for the work that made deep neural networks practical — work much of which they had kept at through the second winter, when neural networks were out of fashion.

Salvors from the Dutch firm Smit worked with the canal’s dredgers and tugs, waiting for the spring tide of the full moon. Dredgers moved about 27,000 cubic metres of sand and mud from around the bow.