In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg Folgen

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most famous museum objects in the world, shown in the image above in replica, and dating from around 196 BC. It is a damaged, dark granite block on which you can faintly see three scripts engraved: Greek at the bottom, Demotic in the middle and Hieroglyphs at the top. Napoleon’s soldiers found it in a Mamluk fort at Rosetta on the Egyptian coast, and soon realised the Greek words could be used to unlock the hieroglyphs. It was another 20 years before Champollion deciphered them, becoming the first to understand the hieroglyphs since they fell out of use 1500 years before and so opening up the written culture of ancient Egypt to the modern age.With Penelope Wilson Associate Professor of Egyptian Archaeology at Durham UniversityCampbell Price Curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester MuseumAndRichard Bruce Parkinson Professor of Egyptology and Fellow of The Queen’s College, University of OxfordProducer: Simon Tillotson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the outstanding French mathematicians and natural philosophers of the 18th Century, celebrated across Europe. Emilie du Châtelet, 1706-49, created a translation of Newton’s Principia from Latin into French that helped spread the light of mathematics on the emerging science, and her own book Institutions de Physique, with its lessons on physics, was welcomed as profound. She had the privileges of wealth and aristocracy, yet had to fight to be taken seriously as an intellectual in a world of ideas that was almost exclusively male. WithPatricia Fara Emeritus Fellow of Clare College, CambridgeDavid Wootton Anniversary Professor of History at the University of YorkAndJudith Zinsser Professor Emerita of History at Miami University of Ohio and biographer of Emilie du Châtelet.Producer: Simon Tillotson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Northumbrian man who, for 500 years, was the pre-eminent English saint, to be matched only by Thomas Becket after his martyrdom in 1170. Now at Durham, Cuthbert was buried first on Lindisfarne in 687AD, where monks shared vivid stories of his sanctifying miracles, his healing, and his power over nature, and his final tomb became a major site of pilgrimage. In his lifetime he was both hermit and kingmaker, bishop and travelling priest, and the many accounts we have of him, including two by Bede, tell us much of the values of those who venerated him so soon after his death.The image above is from a stained glass window in the south aisle of the nave in Durham Cathedral: 'St Cuthbert praying before his cell in the Farne Island'With Jane Hawkes Professor of Medieval Art History at the University of YorkSarah Foot The Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Oxford and Canon of Christ Church CathedralAnd John Hines Professor of Archaeology at Cardiff UniversityProducer: Simon Tillotson