Evening Prayer: Bach's Bleib bei uns Premieres on Easter Monday
The tablets sat buried for 3,400 years before Arthur Evans unearthed them at Knossos, but nobody could read a single word. Linear B looked nothing like Greek—its angular symbols seemed utterly alien. For half a century, scholars assumed it recorded some lost Minoan language. Then in 1952, a young architect named Michael Ventris cracked it during his lunch breaks and discovered something nobody expected: it was Greek after all. The Mycenaeans had been writing in Greek centuries before Homer, keeping meticulous records of chariot wheels and sheep. Turns out the oldest European writing wasn't poetry or laws—it was accounting.
March 30, 1900
126 years ago
What Else Happened on March 30
Chinese astronomers spotted it first—a "broom star" sweeping across their sky in 240 BC. They didn't know they were tracking the same cosmic visitor that would …
The plague did what Byzantine walls couldn't. Bayan I's Avaro-Slavic army surrounded Tomis on the Black Sea coast, ready to crack open another imperial strongho…
The church bells rang for evening prayer, and the slaughter began. A French soldier harassed a Sicilian woman outside the Church of the Holy Spirit in Palermo, …
Edward I unleashed his army on Berwick-upon-Tweed, slaughtering thousands of residents and erasing the town’s status as a thriving international trading port. T…
Guru Gobind Singh transformed the Sikh community by establishing the Khalsa at Anandpur Sahib, initiating followers into a disciplined order committed to defend…
Joachim Murat issued the Rimini Declaration, calling on all Italians to unite and cast off foreign domination to secure their independence. While his immediate …
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