Posts Tagged ‘Archaeology’
“To-day I think / Only with scents”*…
We’ve considered before smell, the unsung hero of the senses. Today, Kaja Šeruga explains how scientists using chemistry, archival records, and AI are reviving the aromas of old libraries, mummies and battlefields…
We often learn about the past visually — through oil paintings and sepia photographs, books and buildings, artifacts displayed behind glass. And sometimes we get to touch historical objects or listen to recordings. But rarely do we use our sense of smell — our oldest, most primal way of learning about the environment — to experience the distant past.
Without access to odor, “you lose that intimacy that smell brings to the interaction between us and objects,” saysanalytical chemist Matija Strlič. As lead scientist of the Heritage Science Laboratory at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia and previously deputy director of the Institute for Sustainable Heritage at University College London, Strlič has devoted his career to interdisciplinary research in the field of heritage science. Much of his work focused on the preservation and reconstruction of culturally significant scents.
Reconstructed scents can enhance museum and gallery exhibits, says Inger Leemans, a cultural historian at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Smell can provide a more inviting entry point, especially for uninitiated visitors, because there’s far less formalized language for describing smell than for interpreting visual art or displays. Since there’s no “right way” of talking about scent, she says, “your own knowledge is as good as the others’.”
Despite their potential to enrich our understanding of history and art, smells are rarely conserved with the same care as buildings or archaeological artifacts. But a small group of researchers, including Strlič and Leemans, is trying to change that — combining chemistry, ethnography, history and other disciplines to document and preserve olfactory heritage…
Read on for the fascinating details: “Recreating the smells of history,” from @knowablemag.bsky.social.
* Edward Thomas, “Digging“
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As we take a whiff, we might recall that it was on this date in 1924 that Coco Chanel agreed with the Wertheimer brothers Pierre and Paul, directors of the perfume house Bourjois, to create a new corporate entity, Parfums Chanel, Its signature product was Chanel No. 5. She had been selling small quanitites of the scent in her boutique since 1921.
Traditionally, fragrances worn by women had fallen into two basic categories. Respectable women favored the essence of a single garden flower while sexually provocative indolic perfumes heavy with animal musk or jasmine were associated with women of the demi-monde. Chanel sought a new scent that would appeal to the flapper and celebrate the seemingly liberated feminine spirit of the 1920s. Her scent was formulated by chemist and perfumer Ernest Beaux, who designed an unprecedented olfactory architecture, a bouquet of 80 scents whose precious notes were blended with high proportions of aldehydes, organic compounds that carry a crisp, soapy, and floral citrusy scent. In late 1920, when presented with small glass vials containing sample scents numbered 1 to 5 and 20 to 24 for her assessment, she chose the fifth vial. Chanel told Beaux, “I present my dress collections on the fifth of May, the fifth month of the year and so we will let this sample number five keep the name it has already, it will bring good luck.”
The first promotion for Chanel No. 5 appeared in The New York Times on December 16, 1924– a small ad for Parfums Chanel announcing the Chanel line of fragrances available at Bonwit Teller, an upscale department store. The fragrance, of course, become a fave. An Andy Warhol subject and worn by everyone from Marilyn Monroe and Catherine Deneuve to Mad Men’s Peggy Olson, the perfume, is a foundational part of fragrance history… and still sells a bottle every 30 seconds.
“Each of our bodies may occupy only one cemetery plot when we’re done with this world, but a single person’s 102-ton trash legacy will require the equivalent of 1,100 graves.”*…
Madeleine Adams on John Scanlan‘s new book The Idea of Waste- On the Limits of Human Life… and on the place of trash in our culture…
… Trash is the hidden foundation of modern civilization. The ancient Trojans waded “ankle deep” in pottery shards and animal bones and whatever else they threw on the floor until they got so fed up with the mess that they paved it over. Rome’s first underground sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, which used the city’s rivers to sweep away waste, was constructed in the third century BC. Writing over two centuries after its construction, Livy praised the Cloaca as a monument without match, and Pliny, writing about a hundred years after him in AD 77, called it the “most noteworthy achievement” of the Roman Empire, beating out the Colosseum and the Parthenon. At the time of its construction the Cloaca was an engineering spectacle, and it also became a symbol of Roman civic virtue. Sturdy infrastructures that served the people endured; flashy monuments to emperors did not. During floods, Pliny noted, “the street above, massive blocks of stone are dragged along, and yet the tunnels do not cave in.” Humbly concealed by walls and by continued elevations of the surface of the city through centuries of accumulated matter, its invisibility ensured its durability.
No Roman subject could have predicted just how enduring an achievement the Cloaca Maxima was: SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus, or the Senate and People of Rome—the emblem of ancient Rome) decorates manhole covers and trash cans throughout Rome. European sewer systems of the nineteenth century drew many comparisons to the Cloaca. “And as would be the case much later with the underground tunnels and drains of Paris and London, its concealment had the effect of making it an object of curiosity,” Scanlan notes, “providing it with the allure of a place that held truth or secrets about the life of the city.” The sewers drew admiration from many quarters—photographer Félix Nadar explored Paris’s extensively in the 1860s, and London’s caused a Manchester Guardian reporter to muse three-quarters of a century later: “These tremendous undertakings may very easily be the most lasting memorials of our cities.” “Out of sight out of mind”—yet also: “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” The sense that waste was a thing to be conquered became a transhistorical justification for increasing waste technocracy, but the mysterious underworld of waste has always beckoned to the chthonically inclined.
With the rapid industrialization of the Victorian city came the explicitly progressive urge to submerge its grime. Mudlarks, ragpickers, and sewermen populated London’s new underworld. The sewermen, with their “long greasy velveteen coats, furnished with pockets of vast capacity” for holding money, jewelry, and other cleanable trinkets, were a cut above the mudlarks. Mudlarks, mainly women and children who scavenged on the banks of the Thames, wore “torn garments stiffened up like boards with dirt of every possible description.” But this grime, inspiring contemporary works like Dickens’s Bleak House, covered everything: “Fog everywhere” opens the second paragraph of the novel. For Scanlan, Dickens’s fog is not only the grimy remnant of industrial production; the Lord High Chancellor presiding over the decades-old case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce sits “at the very heart of the fog.” For Scanlan, Dickens’ fog obscured the social apparatus—London’s bureaucracy and class system—thereby keeping the lower stratum from rising out of the perceived muck. Progressive urban projects further ensured class segregation as a matter of aesthetics. Ebenezer Howard’s 1902 Garden Cities of To-Morrow allotted spaces for the healthy and happy middle class, as well as for inebriates and the insane. His “slumless and smokeless” urban plans designed a future city with less (visible) waste.
But interred beneath the gardens of modern progress was mass culture’s growing pile of discarded commodities. Responding to the fragmentation of Europe in the 1930s, Walter Benjamin posited history as an endless accumulation of debris in his Arcades Project, which Scanlan calls a “strange literary waste-book.”…
… All waste goes through cycles of decomposition, buying and selling, or displacement. It was not until the 1970s that the idea of “recycling” appeared in opposition to “disposal.” England’s rag-and-bone collectors formed the economy of recycling before 1970. Rag collectors only appeared after the fourteenth-century popularization of the spinning wheel, which enabled the production of a surplus of rags for the first time in history. Bones were ground into fertilizer, while linen rags were sometimes reused to make linen again, or else they too were returned to the earth (flax makes great fertilizer). But industrialized clothing production in the mid-nineteenth century meant that there were now many different kinds of rags, some with trimmings and linings, some in blended materials. By 1949 these Mr. Krooks had to sort through some seven hundred and fifty grades of rags. “I can tell them in the dark,” Scanlan quotes a collector saying, “but you can still lose out on a deal if you aren’t awake.” By 1970, rag-and-bone collectors had disappeared as recycling became centralized by city haulers and municipal tracking codes. Secondhand stores and eBay keep decentralized recycling—albeit as an economy of trends and “vintage” styles—alive. Despite the “hunter-gatherer impulse” that thrills William Gibson when he clicks eBay’s Seller’s Other Auctions, browsing eBay, antiquing, and thrifting are, for the middle class, a pastime, albeit an eco-friendly one.
The “throwaway society” invented the idea that any commodity could be briefly desired, barely used, and tossed out of sight with impunity. The many tech gadgets you’re supposed to give dad this Father’s Day come with a gift receipt but no reminder that their lithium-ion batteries form centuries of toxic landfill. Dads—well, all people—form a bond with their phones and laptops. Sherry Turkle compares the oneness of tech device and human to “the diabetic [who] feels at one with his glucometer.” “The user who is engaged with their device is probably not given to contemplating the future waste that it creates,” writes Scanlan, “given that they are rather caught up in a permanently unfolding present that arrives on demand, through [our devices’] potentially limitless experiences.” But this constant media stream produces not only dead phones and laptops—it also generates media waste…
Looking for the future in the dustbins of history: “W.A.S.T.E. Not,” from @thebaffler.com. Read on…
* Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash
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As we grapple with garbage, we might send antique birthday greetings to David George Hogarth; he was born on this date in 1862. An archaeologist, he explored and excavated (1887–1907) in Cyprus, Crete, Egypt, Syria, and Melos… uncovering both the ruins of buidlings and the buried detrius of those civilations. From 1908 until his death in 1927, he was Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford.
Hogarth employed T.E. Lawrence on some of his digs, and worked with him during WWI to plan the Arab Revolt— when Lawrence bacame “Lawrence of Arabia.”
“The sentiment of justice is so natural, and so universally acquired by all mankind, that it seems to be independent of all law, all party, all religion”*…
Yunsuh Nike Wee, Daniel Sznycer, and Jaimie Arona Krems on an example of human values that seems due more to shared intuitions than local customs or social practices…
The Bible’s lex talionis – “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot” (Exodus 21:24-27) – has captured the human imagination for millennia. This idea of fairness has been a model for ensuring justice when bodily harm is inflicted.
Thanks to the work of linguists, historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, researchers know a lot about how different body parts are appraised in societies both small and large, from ancient times to the present day.
But where did such laws originate?
According to one school of thought, laws are cultural constructions – meaning they vary across cultures and historical periods, adapting to local customs and social practices. By this logic, laws about bodily damage would differ substantially between cultures.
Our new study explored a different possibility – that laws about bodily damage are rooted in something universal about human nature: shared intuitions about the value of body parts.
Do people across cultures and throughout history agree on which body parts are more or less valuable? Until now, no one had systematically tested whether body parts are valued similarly across space, time and levels of legal expertise – that is, among laypeople versus lawmakers.
We are psychologists who study evaluative processes and social interactions. In previous research, we have identified regularities in how people evaluate different wrongful actions, personal characteristics, friends, and foods. The body is perhaps a person’s most valuable asset, and in this study we analyzed how people value its different parts. We investigated links between intuitions about the value of body parts and laws about bodily damage…
… If people have intuitive knowledge of the values of different body parts, might this knowledge underpin laws about bodily damage across cultures and historical eras?
To test this hypothesis, we conducted a study involving 614 people from the United States and India. The participants read descriptions of various body parts, such as “one arm,” “one foot,” “the nose,” “one eye” and “one molar tooth.” We chose these body parts because they were featured in legal codes from five different cultures and historical periods that we studied: the Law of Æthelberht from Kent, England, in 600 C.E., the Guta lag from Gotland, Sweden, in 1220 C.E., and modern workers’ compensation laws from the United States, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates…
… Our findings were striking. The values placed on body parts by both laypeople and lawmakers were largely consistent. The more highly American laypeople tended to value a given body part, the more valuable this body part seemed also to Indian laypeople, to American, Korean and Emirati lawmakers, to King Æthelberht and to the authors of the Guta lag. For example, laypeople and lawmakers across cultures and over centuries generally agree that the index finger is more valuable than the ring finger, and that one eye is more valuable than one ear.
But do people value body parts accurately, in a way that corresponds with their actual functionality? There are some hints that, yes, they do. For example, laypeople and lawmakers regard the loss of a single part as less severe than the loss of multiples of that part. In addition, laypeople and lawmakers regard the loss of a part as less severe than the loss of the whole; the loss of a thumb is less severe than the loss of a hand, and the loss of a hand is less severe than the loss of an arm…
… Much of what counts as moral or immoral, legal or illegal, varies from place to place. Drinking alcohol, eating meat and cousin marriage, for example, have been variously condemned or favored in different times and places.
But recent research has also shown that, in some domains, there is much more moral and legal consensus about what is wrong, across cultures and even throughout the millennia. Wrongdoing – arson, theft, fraud, trespassing and disorderly conduct – appears to engender a morality and related laws that are similar across times and places. Laws about bodily damage also seem to fit into this category of moral or legal universals…
“An eye for an eye: People agree about the values of body parts across cultures and eras,” from @us.theconversation.com.
* Voltaire
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As we contemplate corporeal consensus, we might recall that on this date in 1974 (after the 1973 airing of a series of made-for-TV movies that established the character), The Six Million Dollar Man debuted as a weekly hour-long series.
Unlike superhero movies today, The Six Million Dollar Man TV series was not based on a comic book title. Instead, the science fiction, fantasy, adventure series was based Martin Caidin’s 1972 novel Cyborg and its three sequels. The series starred Lee Majors as an astronaut whose life is forever changed after a NASA test flight accident. Colonel Steve Austin awoke after the accident to find that his body had been rebuilt with bionic parts including two legs, one arm and one eye. The cost of the operation ran roughly $6 million. Now a super-human, Austin could run over 60 mph and had incredible strength. He found work as a secret agent for the Office of Scientific Intelligence. Before the show debuted on this day in 1974, three movie pilots had already been shown on ABC the year before. In 1975, a two-part episode featured Jaime Sommers (Lindsay Wagner), a professional tennis player who experienced a parachuting accident and was given bionic parts as well. However, her body rejected these parts and died. Then again, he character was so popular, Sommers’ character came back to life to star in her own series, The Bionic Woman. Both series were hugely popular and ran through 1978. Then, three new made-for-TV movies starring the couple aired in 1987, 1989 and 1994 and all three also starred Lee Majors’ son (Lee Majors II) as OSI agent Jim Castillian… – source
“All cannot be lost when there is still so much being found”*…
We may be close to rediscovering thousands of texts that had been lost for millennia. As Justin Germain explains, their contents may reshape how we understand the ancient world…
We used to play this game in graduate school: find one, lose one. Find one referred to finding a lost ancient text, something that we know existed at one time because other ancient sources talk about it, but which has been lost to the ages. What if someone was digging somewhere in Egypt and found an ancient Greco-Roman trash dump with a complete copy of a precious text – which one would we wish into survival? Lose one referred to some ancient text we have, but we would give up in some Faustian bargain to resurrect the former text from the dead. Of course there is a bit of the butterfly effect; that’s what made it fun. As budding classicists, we grew up in an academic world where we didn’t have A, but did have B. How different would classical scholarship be if that switched? If we had had A all along, but never had B? For me, the text I always chose to find was a little-known pamphlet circulated in the late fourth century by a deposed Spartan king named Pausanias. It’s one of the few texts about Sparta written by a Spartan while Sparta was still hegemonic. I always lost the Gospel of Matthew. It’s basically a copy of Mark, right down to the grammar and syntax. Do we really need two?
What would you choose? Consider that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are only two of the poems that make up the eight-part Epic Cycle. Or that Aristotle wrote a lost treatise on comedy, not to mention his own Socratic dialogues that Cicero described as a ‘river of gold’. Or that only eight of Aeschylus’s estimated 70 plays survive. Even the Hebrew Old Testament refers to 20 ancient texts that no longer exist. There are literally lost texts that, if we had them, would in all likelihood have made it into the biblical canon.
The problem is more complex than the fact that many texts were lost to the annals of history. Most people just see the most recent translation of the Iliad or works of Cicero on the shelf at a bookstore, and assume that these texts have been handed down in a fairly predictable way generation after generation: scribes faithfully made copies from ancient Greece through the Middle Ages and eventually, with the advent of the printing press, reliable versions of these texts were made available in the vernacular of the time and place to everyone who wanted them. Onward and upward goes the intellectual arc of history! That’s what I thought, too.
But the fact is, many of even the most famous works we have from antiquity have a long and complicated history. Almost no text is decoded easily; the process of bringing readable translations of ancient texts into the hands of modern readers requires the cooperation of scholars across numerous disciplines. This means hours of hard work by those who find the texts, those who preserve the texts, and those who translate them, to name a few. Even with this commitment, many texts were lost – the usual estimate is 99 percent – so we have no copies of most of the works from antiquity. Despite this sobering statistic, every once in a while, something new is discovered. That promise, that some prominent text from the ancient world might be just under the next sand dune, is what has preserved scholars’ passion to keep searching in the hope of finding new sources that solve mysteries of the past.
And scholars’ suffering paid off! Consider the Villa of the Papyri, where in the eighteenth century hundreds, if not thousands, of scrolls were discovered carbonized in the wreckage of the Mount Vesuvius eruption (79 AD), in a town called Herculaneum near Pompeii. For over a century, scholars have hoped that future science might help them read these scrolls. Just in the last few months – through advances in computer imaging and digital unwrapping – we have read the first lines. This was due, in large part, to the hard work of Dr. Brent Seales, the support of the Vesuvius Challenge, and scholars who answered the call. We are now poised to read thousands of new ancient texts over the coming years.
But first, a bit of background on the provenance of ancient texts. We don’t have original copies of anything, not of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or Herodotus, or the Bible. Instead of originals, we find ourselves dealing with copies. These were first written on scrolls but later in books – the Romans called books codexes – starting in the first century AD.
Did I say copies? That’s actually not correct either. We don’t have first copies of anything. What we do have is copies of copies, most of which date hundreds of years after the original was penned. Even many of our copies are not complete copies. Take, for example, the earliest surviving piece of the New Testament: a fragment from the Gospel of John known as P52. Far from a complete copy of the book, this fragment is about the size of a credit card and dates to, in the earliest estimation, 125 AD. That is over 100 years after Christ was crucified. The fragment is without a doubt at least a copy of a copy because its dating is too late to be either an original or a first copy. It was also found in Egypt, far from both Judea or Syria, where John is thought to have originated. Finding a complete copy of a text – let alone an early Christian Bible – is a home run. We have only found two such Bibles, the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, both dating to the mid-fourth century.
More often than finding such complete copies, scholars instead compile the various fragments of copies and try to reconstruct the original work. Once scholars agree on what the original text should be, and in some cases they never reach agreement, the text is ready for publication in the original language. Where there are still variants in the text, scholars will include an apparatus criticus citing the manuscript from which the text is published and listing manuscripts with variant readings. The last step is to add a translation in the vernacular, and there are bilingual and even polyglot editions. These could range from the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, a magnificent, six-volume work printed in Madrid in 1519 giving the scriptural text in no less than four languages – Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Aramaic – to the popular Loeb editions printed with both the ancient text and an English translation, for those with some limited knowledge of the ancient languages.
To most fully acclimate the reader to how tenuous this process is, this essay will focus on three different texts. The first will be a very well-known work that was never lost. Nevertheless, almost no one read it in earnest until the nineteenth century. I will then focus on a text that was lost to history, but that we were able to recover from the annals of time. Such examples are fortuitous. Our third example will be a text that we know existed, but of which we have no copies, and consider what important ramifications its discovery could hold. Finally, we’ll turn our attention again to the Villa of the Papyri and the gold mine of texts discovered there that new technologies are currently making available to classicists. By examining the history of the first three texts, I hope to sketch out a picture of how new discoveries from the villa might change our understanding of the ancient world…
[Germain considers Aristotle’s Poetics (“While it’s not accurate to say, as one of Aristotle’s unpublished works, the Politics was ever lost, it was certainly rediscovered”), the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia (a group of fragments that cover Greek history in same period– from the closing years of the Peloponnesian War into the middle of the fourth century BCE– covered by Xenophon, but that tell a different story), and the Constitution of the Spartans, also by Aristotle– a work often cited in other extant texts, but never found (“Imagine an alternate universe where all sources about America were written by Soviets at the height of the Cold War. The historians of the future might get a warped sense of reality. That’s exactly the case with ancient Sparta [e.g., Thucydides]… Although still an outsider and Athenian, Aristotle wrote about the Spartan state in the Politics, and he did not have good things to say. It is safe to assume that whatever Aristotle’s Constitution said, its testimony was not influenced by the Spartan mirage, giving us perhaps a more accurate picture of life inside the city-state.”)]…
… Resurrecting the dead is difficult; Jesus knew that. And the only reason we know that he knew that is because the church saw the preservation of scripture as a core duty. Not one scrap of text from the ancient world has come to us without untold numbers of heroes quietly working to hand down, from generation to generation, the texts that have primarily shaped the modern world. We are thankful for documents like the Politics, documents whose life cycle we can narrate from conception to the present moment. Even then, such texts can fall in and out of fashion, and their knowledge can be lost to entire generations. Texts such as the Hellenic Oxyrhynchia are windfalls of good fortune, ones that are completely forgotten in their own day, then lost a second time to history, buried in some ancient Egyptian trash heap. All the work necessary to make texts like the Politics accessible need also be done for texts like the Hellenica Oxyrhinchia.
Yet there is still another monumental step: the texts must first be discovered. Dwarfed in comparison to the first two groups are texts – such as Aristotle’s Constitution of the Spartans – that were attested to by ancient sources but have been completely lost to the annals of time, like the vast majority of Greek and Latin texts. These sources, while now completely unavailable to us, might yet be discovered at any time, on any dig. On any given day the earth might bestow its blessing, uncovering wonders from the past, as was the case with many of the works of Epicurus, which would have fallen into this latter category of lost works, until we discovered the Villa of the Papyri. Yet even such a fortuitous discovery could not be taken advantage of were new techniques not developed for reading scrolls whose survival depends on not opening them. I always tell my Greek and Latin students that there is a point where the science of translating becomes pure art. Likewise, there is a point at which the recovery, translation, restoration, and, finally, the study of ancient texts becomes treasure seeking. You never know what treasure might be hiding in the next ancient Egyptian trash heap…
Filling in the blanks in ancient history: “Doom Scrolling” in @WorksInProgMag.
For more on the Vesuvius Challenge– its process and progress– see here (source of the image above).
* Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler)
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As we revise, we might send carefully excavated birthday greeting to Karl Alfred von Zittel; he was born on this date in 1839. A geologist and paleontologist, he was a pioneer of evolutionary paleontology and was widely recognized as the leading teacher of paleontology in the 19th century. His five-volume Handbuch der Paläonologie (1876-93) was arguably his greatest service to science, and it remains one of the most comprehensive and trustworthy paleontological reference books.
But he also noteworthily proved that the Sahara had not been under water during the Pleistocene Ice Age.
“The braid is always stronger than the strand”*…
From Grace Ebert, a novel look at the world’s densest “city”…
At its height in the 1990s, Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong housed about 50,000 people. Its population is unremarkable for small cities, but what set Kowloon apart from others of its size was its density. Spanning only 2.6 hectares, the tiny enclave contained [the equivalent of] 1,255,000 people per square kilometer, making it the densest city in the world. For context, New York City boasts about 11,300 per square kilometer, while Manila, the most highly concentrated municipality today, tops out at about 42,000.
Kowloon was built as a small military fort around the turn of the 20th century. When the Chinese and English governments abandoned it after World War II, the area attracted refugees and people in search of affordable housing. With no single architect, the urban center continued to grow as people stacked buildings on top of one another and tucked new structures in between existing ones to accommodate the growing population without expanding beyond the original fort’s border.
With only a small pocket of community space at the center, Kowloon quickly morphed into a labyrinth of shops, services, and apartments connected by narrow stairs and passageways through the buildings. Rather than navigate the city through alleys and streets, residents traversed the structures using slim corridors that always seemed to morph, an experience that caused many to refer to Kowloon as “a living organism.”
The city devolved into a slum with crime and poor living conditions and was razed in 1994. Before demolition, though, a team of Japanese researchers meticulously documented the architectural marvel, which had become a sort of cyberpunk icon that even inspired a gritty arcade as tribute.
For a now out-of-print book titled Kowloon City: An Illustrated Guide, artist Hitomi Terasawa drew a meticulous cross-sectioned rendering of the urban phenomenon to preserve its memory. The massive panorama peers into the compact neighborhood, glimpsing narrow dance halls, laundry dangling from balconies, and entire factories tucked inside cramped quarters.
Thanks to psychologist Greg Jensen, we now have a stunning high-resolution scan of Terasawa’s illustration complete with annotations and diagramming. It’s worth viewing the full panorama in its entirety to zoom in on all the details of this infamous city [and here, animated]. And, for photos of Kowloon and its inhabitants, check out this incredibly informative video detailing its history…
A real-life human hive: “A Rare Cross-Section Illustration Reveals the Infamous Happenings of Kowloon Walled City,” from @Colossal.
* Ryan Graudin, The Walled City
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As we pack it in, we might we might send the simplest of birthday greetings to a writer, philosopher, and naturalist who might not have gravitated naturally to Kowloon City, Henry David Thoreau; he was born on this date in 1817. From 1845 to 1847, Thoreau lived in a small cabin on the banks of Walden Pond, a small lake near Concord, Massachusetts. Striving to “simplify, simplify,” he strictly limited his expenditures, his possessions, and his contact with others, intending “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.”
Thoreau became a pillar of New England Transcendentalism, embracing and exemplifying the movement’s belief in the universality of creation and the primacy of personal insight and experience. Perhaps best remembered for his advocacy of simple, principled living, his writings on the relationship between humans and the environment also helped define the nature essay.
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