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The History Column, California City, CA (2026)

06/13/2026

Before they reached Jerusalem they massacred the Jewish communities of Germany. When they took Jerusalem they killed every Muslim, Jew, and Eastern Christian inside. They wrote home calling it a miracle. The survivors called it genocide. The wounds created in 1099 are still felt today.The First Crusade of 1095-1099 is one of the most consequential military campaigns in the history of religion — and one of the most contested in its moral meaning.Pope Urban II delivered his call to crusade at Clermont on November 27 1095 in a speech whose exact words were not recorded but whose effects are among the best-documented in medieval history.The Seljuk Turks had expanded westward across the Byzantine Empire's territories in Anatolia, threatening Constantinople and cutting off Christian pilgrimage routes to Jerusalem.The Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos had appealed to Rome for military assistance.Urban seized the opportunity.He framed the response not as military aid to Byzantium but as something far more emotionally powerful — a holy war to reclaim the city of Christ's death and resurrection from Muslim rule.He promised plenary indulgence — the complete forgiveness of all sins — to those who took the cross.He told his audience that God willed it."Deus vult!" — "God wills it!" — became the battle cry of the Crusade.The response exceeded anything Urban had anticipated.Thousands of knights — trained warriors who saw in the Crusade both spiritual redemption and the opportunity for land and wealth in the East — took the cross.But also tens of thousands of ordinary people — peasants, minor clergy, women, the poor — who understood the call in their own terms and set out for Jerusalem with religious fervour and almost no practical preparation.The most disturbing manifestation of this popular religious excitement came before the main armies had even assembled.The Rhineland Massacres of 1096 — sometimes called the German Crusade or the People's Crusade — occurred when crusading forces moving through the Rhine Valley of Germany turned on the Jewish communities living in cities including Worms, Mainz, and Cologne.The theological logic — such as it was — was articulated by the crusaders themselves:"Why should we march to the ends of the earth to fight the enemies of Christ when the enemies of Christ live among us?"The Jewish communities of the Rhine Valley had lived in Germany for generations — many were merchants and financiers whose commercial relationships with Christian neighbours were long-established.They were not enemies of the Crusade.They were not involved in the control of Jerusalem.They were simply available.The massacres that followed were carried out by both the crusading forces and, in some cases, by local populations who used the religious fervour as cover for robbery and score-settling.Thousands of Jews were killed.Some communities, given the choice between baptism and death, chose collective su***de — killing their children and themselves rather than converting.The local bishops attempted to protect Jewish communities in several cities — sheltering them within their own palaces — with limited success.The formal crusading armies then moved south and east — through Hungary, through the Byzantine Empire's territories, into Syria and Palestine.The military campaign was a story of extraordinary suffering and extraordinary brutality on both sides.By June 1099 the main crusading force had reached Jerusalem — which was then under the control of the Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt.The siege lasted five weeks.On July 15 1099 the crusaders breached the walls.What followed has been described in accounts written by the crusaders themselves — accounts whose pride in the violence is one of the most historically confronting aspects of the entire episode.The entire population of Jerusalem was killed.Muslims — who had been the city's majority population — were killed throughout the city.Jews — who had retreated to their main synagogue — were killed when it was set on fire around them.Eastern Christians — who were theologically distinct from the Latin Christians doing the killing — were killed alongside their Muslim and Jewish neighbours.Raymond of Aguilers, a crusading chronicler who was present at the massacre, wrote with satisfaction:"Wonderful things were to be seen. Numbers of the Saracens had their heads cut off... Others were shot with arrows, or forced to jump from the towers; others were tortured for several days, then burned with flames. In the streets were seen piles of heads and hands and feet. One rode about everywhere amid the corpses of men and horses."He then described the crusaders entering the Temple of Solomon to give thanks, wading through blood up to their ankles.He called it a miracle.He called it God's judgment.The massacre of Jerusalem in 1099 reverberated through the Islamic world.The Arabic chroniclers who recorded it described it with grief and outrage that would fuel Muslim responses — military and cultural — for centuries.When Saladin recaptured Jerusalem in 1187 his treatment of the city's Christian inhabitants was — by deliberate, conspicuous contrast — merciful.He allowed them to ransom their freedom and leave.The contrast between Saladin's mercy in 1187 and the crusaders' massacre in 1099 became one of the foundational narratives of the relationship between the Christian and Islamic worlds — a narrative that has never been fully resolved.The Crusades continued in various forms for the next two centuries — eight major Crusades and numerous minor ones, each with its own mixture of religious sincerity, political calculation, commercial interest, and violence.The Fourth Crusade of 1202-1204 — notoriously — never reached the Holy Land at all.It was diverted to Constantinople — a Christian city — which the crusaders sacked with a thoroughness that permanently damaged the Byzantine Empire and embittered Eastern Christianity toward the Catholic West in ways that have never been fully healed.The Children's Crusade of 1212 — one of the most tragic episodes in crusading history — involved thousands of children from France and Germany marching toward the Mediterranean in the belief that their innocence would succeed where adult armies had failed.Most died of starvation and disease.Some were sold into slavery.None reached Jerusalem.The Crusades ended not in triumph or in defeat but in exhaustion — the crusader states in the Holy Land gradually losing ground to resurgent Muslim power until the last significant crusader presence, the city of Acre, fell in 1291.Two centuries of holy war.Millions of deaths.Jerusalem changed hands multiple times.And the wounds created by the violence of 1099 — and by the entire crusading enterprise — remain embedded in the relationship between the Christian West and the Islamic world in ways that no amount of subsequent history has entirely healed.

Did you know Crusaders massacred the Jewish communities of Germany before they even reached Jerusalem — then killed every Muslim, Jew, and Eastern Christian in Jerusalem when they took it — and wrote home calling it a miracle of God? Drop a ⚔️ in the comments.

06/13/2026

He killed 40 million people. He also created the first international postal system, established religious freedom when Europe was burning heretics, promoted slaves to generals, and left no portraits because he considered vanity a weakness. We do not know what the most powerful man who ever lived looked like — he made sure of it.Temüjin — the man who would become Genghis Khan — was born around 1162 on the Mongolian steppe into a world of tribal violence, shifting allegiances, and the constant proximity of death.His father was poisoned by enemies.His family was abandoned by their tribe to die on the frozen steppe.He was enslaved as a teenager by a rival clan.He escaped.By 1206 — through a combination of military genius, political intelligence, and the deliberate construction of a new kind of loyalty that transcended tribal kinship — he had unified virtually all the Mongol tribes and been proclaimed Genghis Khan — Universal Ruler.The campaigns that followed between 1206 and his death in 1227 — and the conquests of his sons and grandsons that extended them for another fifty years — produced the largest contiguous land empire in history.The destruction that accompanied those conquests was real and staggering.The massacre of Nishapur in 1221 — in which Mongol forces reportedly killed every living thing in the city, including dogs and cats, in revenge for the killing of Genghis Khan's son-in-law — was typical of the treatment meted out to cities that resisted.Contemporary sources — mostly hostile, and prone to exaggeration — describe mountains of skulls arranged as warnings.The House of Wisdom in Baghdad — the greatest library in the medieval world — was destroyed when the Mongols sacked the city in 1258.An estimated 40 million people died as a direct result of Mongol conquest — though the figure is disputed and difficult to verify.But here is what the histories of violence tend to obscure.Genghis Khan was not only a destroyer.He was a builder — and what he built alongside the destruction was, in several respects, more sophisticated than anything his contemporary rulers in Europe or the Islamic world were managing.Religious freedom:At a time when the Catholic Church was burning heretics across Europe, when the Inquisition was beginning its long history of coerced religious conformity, and when religious identity was a primary criterion for political inclusion and exclusion — Genghis Khan declared religious freedom across his empire.His Yasa — the code of law he promulgated — specifically protected religious minorities from persecution.Buddhist monks, Muslim imams, Christian priests, Taoist scholars, and shamans all operated freely within the Mongol Empire.Genghis Khan consulted spiritual teachers of multiple traditions.He exempted religious leaders from taxation.Not because he was personally devout — he appears to have been pragmatically interested in every religion without committing to any of them — but because he understood that religious freedom was politically stabilising.Meritocracy:The Mongol military system was explicitly organised around capability rather than birth.Former enemies who showed ability were promoted to command positions.Subutai — arguably the greatest general in Mongol history, the architect of campaigns that destroyed the armies of Hungary and Poland in 1241 — was born a blacksmith's son.Jebe — one of Genghis Khan's finest commanders — had once shot Genghis Khan's horse in battle while fighting on the other side.Genghis Khan, recognising the quality of the shooting, incorporated him into his army rather than executing him.Men who had been slaves rose to command tens of thousands of soldiers.The only criterion that mattered was what you could do.Rule of law:The Yasa established a legal code that applied — in principle — to everyone within the empire, including the Khan's own family.Theft was severely punished.Disputes between merchants were adjudicated according to consistent rules.The Yam — the postal relay system — not only transmitted messages but established protected trade routes whose legal security was enforced by Mongol power.A merchant could travel from China to the Black Sea knowing that interference with trade was a capital offence.The postal system:The Yam — the Mongol horse relay network — was the first international postal system in history.Relay stations were established at approximately one day's ride across the entire empire.Each station maintained fresh horses and riders.A message could travel from Beijing to Persia in a matter of weeks — faster than any communication system that had previously existed across that distance.No portraits:Perhaps the most striking thing about Genghis Khan is the absence of contemporary portraits.Unlike virtually every other major ruler of his era — whose faces were recorded in paintings, mosaics, coins, and sculpture — Genghis Khan appears to have actively discouraged the creation of his own image.The portraits that exist were made after his death, by people who had never seen him.None is considered reliable.We do not know if he was tall or short, what colour his eyes were, whether his hair was dark or light.He was the most powerful man who had ever lived on Earth to that point.And he made certain that we would never know what he looked like.The reason, according to the accounts of those who knew him, was his view that vanity was a weakness — that a leader who was concerned with how history would remember his face was not sufficiently focused on what actually mattered.He was concerned with what he did.He was indifferent to how he appeared.The most powerful man in the history of the world left no face.Only consequences.

Did you know Genghis Khan established religious freedom when Europe was burning heretics, promoted slaves to generals, created the first international postal system, and left no portraits because he considered vanity a weakness — we will never know what the most powerful man who ever lived looked like? Drop a 🏹 in the comments.

06/13/2026

It killed 60% of Europe in three years. Bodies piled in the streets because there was nobody left to bury them. But the survivors were now so scarce they could demand higher wages. Feudalism collapsed. The Church lost its authority. The Renaissance emerged from the ashes. Modern Europe was built on the bones of the Black Death.The story of the Black Death is not simply a story of death.It is the story of how death on an incomprehensible scale remade the world that survived it.Yersinia pestis — the bacterium responsible for bubonic plague — had been circulating in rodent populations in Central Asia for centuries before it made its catastrophic leap into the human world in the 1340s.The mechanism of its westward spread followed the Mongol trade routes — the network of roads and sea lanes that the Pax Mongolica had made safe and efficient, connecting China to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean in a web of commerce that had never existed before.The same roads that carried silk and spices carried rats.The rats carried fleas.The fleas carried Yersinia pestis.In 1346 the plague reached the Crimean Peninsula — where the Mongols besieging the Genoese trading post of Caffa reportedly catapulted infected corpses over the walls, creating one of the first documented instances of biological warfare.The Genoese fled by ship.The disease arrived in Messina, Sicily in October 1347 on board those ships — the sailors already dying, their bodies covered in the characteristic black swellings that gave the plague its name.The port authorities of Messina ordered the ships out of the harbour immediately.It was too late.The plague spread from Sicily to Sardinia, Corsica, and the Italian mainland.By early 1348 it was in Genoa, Venice, Pisa, and Florence — the great commercial cities of northern Italy, whose trading networks now became highways of infection.By mid-1348 it had crossed the Alps into France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire.By 1349 it was in England, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe.By 1351 it had reached Russia.The speed was devastating.The scale was incomprehensible.In the most affected cities the mortality was staggering.Florence — one of the most sophisticated cities in Europe — lost an estimated 50 to 60% of its population.The writer Giovanni Boccaccio, who lived through the Florentine plague and wrote about it in the Decameron, described:Bodies left in the streets.Houses standing open and empty, their occupants dead.Dogs and pigs eating corpses in the road.The social fabric of the city dissolving as people fled from each other in terror — abandoning the sick, including family members, because proximity to the dying seemed to mean certain death.The plague did not discriminate.It killed the poor in their crowded tenements.It killed the rich in their palaces.It killed priests and monks — who, being bound by their vocation to attend the sick and dying, died in disproportionate numbers.It killed children — who had no accumulated immunity to anything.It killed one third of the clergy in England.It killed, across Europe as a whole, an estimated 30 to 60% of the population — with some regions losing up to 80% and others, through isolation or fortune, escaping relatively lightly.In total the Black Death killed an estimated 75 to 200 million people globally — including massive mortality in the Middle East and North Africa through which the disease also passed.The range of the estimate reflects the genuine difficulty of counting the dead in a society that was simultaneously dying and ceasing to keep records.The medical understanding of the 14th century had no framework for what was happening.The dominant theory was miasma — bad air, rising from corrupted matter — which led to the burning of aromatic woods and herbs to purify the atmosphere.Some theorists blamed planetary alignments.The Church — which was supposed to provide not just spiritual comfort but rational explanation of the universe — could offer neither effective treatment nor satisfying explanation.Priests died at the same rate as their congregations.Prayer did not stop the dying.The moral authority of an institution whose entire claim to legitimacy rested on its relationship with a God who apparently could not or would not stop the worst catastrophe in human history was permanently damaged.The long-term consequences of the Black Death were not only death.They were transformation.Feudalism — the economic and social system in which peasants were bound to the land of lords who owed military service to kings — had operated on the assumption of a large, surplus population of agricultural workers who could be compelled to work for subsistence wages because they had no alternative.The Black Death destroyed that assumption.The survivors were suddenly scarce.Scarce labour is valuable labour.Peasants who had previously been legally bound to their lord's land could now — if they were willing to move — find lords willing to pay wages that would have been unimaginable before the plague.Agricultural wages in England rose approximately 40% in the decades after the Black Death.Lords who tried to maintain pre-plague wage levels found their workers simply leaving.The Statute of Laborers — passed in England in 1351 to cap wages at pre-plague levels — was widely evaded and ultimately unenforceable.The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 — an uprising against attempts to reassert pre-plague social controls — was one of many signs across Europe that the old order could not be restored by command.Feudalism did not die overnight.But the Black Death had fatally undermined the demographic foundations on which it rested.The Church's loss of moral authority — combined with its loss of roughly a third of its clergy, which led to the rapid ordination of under-trained replacements — created space for the theological questioning that would eventually produce the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century.The concentration of inherited wealth in fewer hands — as family lines were extinguished and property accumulated among survivors — created the capital base that funded the artistic patronage of the Italian Renaissance.The Renaissance — the great flowering of art, literature, science, and humanism that transformed European culture in the 14th to 17th centuries — began in the cities most devastated by the plague.Florence.Siena.Venice.The connection between the catastrophe and the flowering has been argued by historians for generations.The most compelling argument is simply this:A culture that has watched 50% of everything it knew die in three years is a culture that has been violently forced to ask what matters.What is worth preserving.What is worth creating.What is worth being.The Black Death asked humanity those questions.The Renaissance was the answer.

Did you know the Black Death killed 60% of Europe in three years — and the survivors, now scarce and valuable, demanded higher wages, feudalism collapsed, the Church lost its authority, and the Renaissance emerged from the ashes? Drop a ☠️ in the comments

06/12/2026

He believed in Troy since childhood, taught himself 15 languages, made a fortune to fund the dig, and found it. Then he destroyed most of the evidence in his excitement. He smuggled the treasure out in his wife's shawl. Troy was real. The man who proved it ruined most of what he found.
The story of Heinrich Schliemann and the discovery of Troy is one of the most extraordinary in the history of archaeology — and one of the most cautionary.
It is the story of a man who was completely right about the most important thing and catastrophically wrong about almost every detail.
Johann Ludwig Heinrich Julius Schliemann was born on January 6 1822 in Neubukow, a small town in the Duchy of Mecklenburg in northern Germany — the son of a Protestant minister.
His father gave him, for Christmas in 1829, a copy of Ludwig Jerrer's "Illustrated History of the World" — a children's history book that contained an illustration of Troy burning, with Aeneas carrying his father from the flames.
The seven-year-old Schliemann looked at the picture and asked his father if the city had really looked like that.
His father said it had probably been exaggerated — it was a legend.
Schliemann said: "If such walls once existed, they cannot have disappeared entirely."
He was seven years old.
He spent the next 50 years making that observation true.
His path to Troy was not direct.
Poverty forced him into commerce rather than scholarship.
He worked as a grocer's apprentice, as a cabin boy, as a bookkeeper.
He showed extraordinary gifts for languages — reportedly learning new ones by reading novels aloud in them for hours at a time.
By his own account he had learned 15 languages by middle age — including ancient Greek, which he taught himself from Homer specifically.
He moved to Russia, established a business importing indigo, and made himself wealthy through a combination of commercial intelligence, hard work, and fortunate timing during the Crimean War, when his dealings in military supplies generated substantial profits.
By the 1860s he was rich enough to retire.
He retired to archaeology.
Specifically, to finding Troy.
The scholarly consensus of his era was that Troy — the city besieged for ten years by the Greeks in Homer's Iliad, the city of King Priam and Prince Hector and the beautiful Helen — was a literary invention.
Homer's poems were acknowledged as the foundational texts of Western literature.
The city they described was considered to be as historical as Camelot or El Dorado.
Schliemann disagreed.
He read the ancient texts — not just Homer but Strabo, Pliny, and other classical geographers who described the location of Troy with some precision.
He travelled to the region.
He focused on a modest hill called Hissarlik in northwestern Turkey, approximately 5 kilometres from the Aegean coast — close to where Homer's Iliad placed the city, near where a town called Novum Ilium (New Ilium, or New Troy) had existed in the Roman period.
He obtained permission from the Ottoman authorities and began excavating in 1870.
What he found vindicated him completely.
Hissarlik was not one ancient city.
It was nine — nine distinct layers of settlement, each built on the ruins of the previous one, stretching from approximately 3000 BC to 500 AD.
Human beings had been living on that spot, continuously, for 3,500 years.
Somewhere in those nine layers was almost certainly the city that Homer described — a Bronze Age settlement at the apex of the Aegean world's trade networks, destroyed in the late Bronze Age by forces that left archaeological traces of burning and violence.
Schliemann was right.
Troy was real.
Then his impatience destroyed most of the evidence.
In his excitement to reach what he believed was Homer's Troy — which he assumed must be one of the lower, older layers — he dug fast and deep, removing and discarding the upper layers that modern archaeology would have meticulously documented.
He removed hundreds of tonnes of soil and archaeological material without proper recording.
He found, in May 1873, a cache of golden objects — cups, jewellery, a diadem — which he immediately identified as "Priam's Treasure": the royal treasure of Homer's Troy.
He and his Greek wife Sophia excavated it secretly — possibly overnight — and smuggled it out of Turkey in Sophia's shawl.
The Ottomans, from whom he had permission to excavate, sued him.
He paid a settlement.
Modern analysis has since established that "Priam's Treasure" is approximately 1,000 years older than the Troy of Homer's Iliad — predating the Trojan War by a millennium.
The layer that most archaeologists now identify as Homer's Troy — a late Bronze Age city destroyed approximately 1180 BC in circumstances consistent with the Iliad — was Layer VIIa.
Schliemann had dug through it in his rush to reach what he thought was Troy.
He found Troy.
He destroyed most of the evidence of it.
He smuggled the wrong treasure.
He was completely right about the most important question in ancient history.
He was wrong about almost everything else.
The treasure he smuggled out of Turkey in his wife's shawl eventually ended up in Berlin, was taken by Soviet forces at the end of World War Two, and is currently in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow — disputed between Russia, Germany, Turkey, and Greece, and belonging, arguably, to none of them.
Troy is real.
The man who proved it did it the wrong way.
And the wrong way was the only way he knew how to do anything.

Did you know Schliemann found Troy — which scholars said was fictional — but destroyed most of the evidence in his excitement, smuggled the treasure out in his wife's shawl, and the treasure turned out to be from the wrong layer? Drop a 🏛️ in the comments.

06/12/2026

A language had been silent for 1,400 years. One man decoded it in a single afternoon in 1822. He ran to his brother's apartment shouting "I've got it" and collapsed for five days. When he woke up he could read the entire written history of ancient Egypt. 3,500 years of silence ended in one afternoon in Paris.
The Rosetta Stone was not recognised as extraordinary when it was found.
It was a piece of dark granodiorite — a granite-like rock — measuring approximately 112 centimetres high and 76 centimetres wide, inscribed with what appeared to be official text in three scripts.
It was found in July 1799 by soldiers from Napoleon Bonaparte's Egyptian expedition, during the construction of fortifications near the town of Rosetta (modern Rashid) in the Nile Delta.
The soldiers recognised that it bore writing in multiple scripts and understood that it might be significant.
They were right.
The three scripts were: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics (at the top, partially damaged), Demotic script (the common Egyptian script of the period, in the middle), and Ancient Greek (at the bottom, largely intact).
The Greek text could be read immediately — classical Greek scholarship was well established in Europe.
It described a decree issued by priests in 196 BC honouring the Egyptian King Ptolemy V — a relatively routine administrative document.
But the decree was, as scholars immediately recognised, almost certainly the same text in all three scripts.
If the Greek text could be read, and if the Egyptian scripts said the same thing, then — in principle — the stone was a key that could unlock the meaning of the Egyptian scripts.
Including hieroglyphics.
Hieroglyphics had been unreadable for over 1,400 years.
The last person who could read them had died in the 5th century AD, when the final pagan Egyptian temples were closed by the Christian Roman Empire and the priestly tradition that had maintained knowledge of the script had been extinguished.
For 1,400 years the walls of the temples, the papyrus scrolls of the tombs, the inscriptions on obelisks scattered across Europe as Roman trophies — all of it was silent.
A civilisation's entire written record — 3,500 years of history, religion, science, poetry, law, and daily life — locked behind a script that nobody alive could read.
The race to decode it lasted two decades and involved two men whose rivalry became the most famous academic competition in the history of linguistics.
Thomas Young — an English polymath of extraordinary range, already famous for demonstrating the wave nature of light — made the first crucial breakthrough.
He identified, by 1819, that some of the cartouches — the oval loops surrounding certain hieroglyphic groups — contained the phonetic spelling of royal names, including Ptolemy.
He was right.
But he then made an error — concluding that the phonetic system applied only to foreign names, and that the bulk of hieroglyphic writing was ideographic — each symbol representing an idea rather than a sound.
He was wrong.
Jean-François Champollion was a French scholar who had been obsessed with hieroglyphics since childhood — reportedly telling Napoleon as a small boy that he intended to decode them.
He had been building toward the decipherment for his entire adult life — learning Coptic (the latest form of the Egyptian language, still used in the Coptic Christian church) because he understood that it might provide a phonetic bridge to the ancient language.
He had been studying the Rosetta Stone and related inscriptions for years.
On the morning of September 14 1822 something fell into place.
He was working in his study in Paris, comparing hieroglyphic inscriptions with Greek texts, when he suddenly understood the full phonetic structure of the hieroglyphic system.
It was not partly phonetic.
It was systematically phonetic — the entire script operated on a phonetic basis with additional logographic elements.
He ran.
He ran from his study on the Rue Mazarine to his brother Jacques-Joseph's nearby office — apparently bursting through the door shouting:
"Je tiens l'affaire!" — "I've got it!" — or variations thereof.
He then collapsed.
He did not wake for five days.
Whether this was from exhaustion, emotional shock, or the physical consequence of years of obsessive overwork is not recorded.
When he woke up he could read hieroglyphics.
He presented his findings to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris on September 27 1822 — in a paper that effectively cracked the code that had been locked for 1,400 years.
The implications took time to absorb.
In the decades and centuries that followed the decipherment of hieroglyphics, Egyptologists were able to read:
The Pyramid Texts — religious writings from approximately 2400-2300 BC, among the oldest written documents in human history.
The Book of the Dead — the collection of spells and prayers intended to guide the deceased through the afterlife.
The medical papyri — detailing surgical procedures, pharmaceutical preparations, and anatomical knowledge from 3,500 years ago.
The love poetry of the New Kingdom.
The administrative records of temples and estates.
The autobiographies of officials and priests.
The diplomatic correspondence of pharaohs with the kings of Babylon, Assyria, and the Hittite Empire.
3,500 years of one of the world's great civilisations — a civilisation whose physical remains had been visible and astonishing for centuries — finally had its voice back.
In one afternoon.
In Paris.
Because a young man who had been obsessed with a dead language since childhood ran to his brother's office and collapsed for five days.

Did you know Champollion decoded hieroglyphics in a single afternoon in 1822 — ran to his brother shouting "I've got it" — collapsed for five days — and when he woke up 3,500 years of Ancient Egyptian history was readable for the first time in 1,400 years? Drop a 𓂀 in the comments.
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